Acts Of Godfrey review

Earlier this year, a Ralph Fiennes-directed adaption of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus was released into UK cinemas accompanied by a LWLies review that courted much ire on the comments slate. We wrote of a “dull drone of a dead language… Blank verse. Blank faces.”

In turn, we now see the release of Acts of Godfrey, an atypical British indie written entirely in verse. The publicity team are proclaiming this as a ‘modern twist on Shakespeare’, but is aping Shakespeare on screen really a wise move, especially without old Bill’s knack for wordsmithery?

The scene is a motivational weekend seminar for failing salesman, the setting a dour hotel in the countryside and the context is austerity Britain. Each delegate in this dark satirical farce judges how much of their soul they can afford to sell, and among the shady faces are a pair of Cockney gangsters, a pop star, and a devilish fraudster who preys on moneyed widows (performed with slimy aplomb by Harry Enfield).

Overseeing all of this is Godfrey a grey-haired Greek chorus played with perpetual archness by Simon Callow. “Now you’re probably wondering ‘Who am I?’ And is this a message beamed down from on high? I am above you, I’m below you, I’m what makes you think. I’m a thousand-yard stare and the tiniest blink,” booms Callow in the film’s opening scene. But, alas, the prose isn’t always as clean and lilting as that.

The actors toil to pare the material down, peel it back and give it the bite and heart it needs. But, however well delivered, the good lines begin to sink amongst the mediocre and the bad: “Say it again, without boring me rigid, I’m named after a whore and I’m fucking frigid.”

“Foul is fair, the plot does thicken,” Godfrey tells us when two of the congregation show a liking for each other. And therein lies the riddle of the film; rhyme gets in the way of reason. Working alone in a Glasgow coffee shop, debut director Johnny Daukes started this as a poem before opting to broaden it out into a play. Only then was the decision made to strain this through the pitiless eye of celluloid.

And without meaning to sound disingenuous, that’s maybe where he went wrong. There’s no doubt this could work on stage – any stage. It could be garrulous and unkempt and brilliant with a live crowd. But, ultimately and unavoidably, it’s something that revels in the telling and not the showing. Film is a visual medium, and here we’re left, again, with blank verse and blank faces.