The expansive project has hype and money behind it – but how do you avoid it falling into the disappointment trap so many films end up stumbling into?

If the history of failed Hollywood fantasy projects over the past 20 years has taught us anything, it is that transporting audiences to another world is only half the battle: you also have to give them a reason to spend several hours there. The Golden Compass diluted Philip Pullman’s theological bite, Warcraft thought that just explaining its world would make us care about it, and The Dark Tower compressed Stephen King’s sprawling mythology so ruthlessly that it scarcely left room for a story. All these films at one point had fans of the original source material quivering with anticipation at the prospect of seeing their beloved worlds on the big screen; all ended up disappointing.

Which brings us to the forthcoming Alex Garland adaptation of the hugely popular high fantasy video game, Elden Ring. If there was ever a cinematic test of the phrase “too big to fail”, it is surely this. Elden Ring has sold more than 30m copies and is widely regarded as one of the greatest video games ever made. George RR Martin himself wrote the foundational mythology of warring demigods that underpins its gorgeous fantasy hellscape. And Garland as writer-director seems almost impossibly perfect: as the creative behind Dredd, Ex Machina and Annihilation, he has both the taste for beautiful nightmares and the geek credentials to deliver something extraordinary.

The Mad King may bring more dynastic disputes and dotty despots to the RSC – but a ‘mayhap’ or a riddling aphorism does not a Shakespeare play make

As a latecomer to Game of Thrones, I am struck by how many people tell me it is “very Shakespearean”. It is as if they need to justify its heady escapism and heavy reliance on bonking and brutality. But its debt to the Bard – apart from the rivalry between the houses of Lannister and Stark – rests mainly on the casting. Watching the first 11 episodes, I noticed four Lears past and to come (Julian Glover, David Bradley, Oliver Ford-Davies and Roger Allam), a Macbeth (Sean Bean), a Hamlet and Henry V (Iain Glen) and a Cassius (Michelle Fairley) among many others.

Because it is presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company and staged by Dominic Cooke, who memorably directed The Hollow Crown on television, we shall doubtless hear the same arguments about Game of Thrones: The Mad King at Stratford. But, although there are frequent nods to Shakespeare, they totally lack the resonance of the original. Our first sight of Michael Shaeffer’s King Aerys with a white beard, a leafy crown and no shoes almost screams “Lear on the heath”. But where Lear gradually declines into insanity (“O fool I shall go mad”) and comes out the other side, Shaeffer’s Aerys is a dotty despot from start to finish. The use of tournaments to settle dynastic disputes also reminds us of the opening of Richard II – but where that event is aborted and ultimately causes the king’s downfall, here the image of embattled jousters is endlessly repeated.

‘Spectacular’ or ‘stolid’? The reviews are in for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s prequel to George RR Martin’s fantasy blockbuster

You don’t need to read the entrails of a raven to guess the target of the subtitle The Mad King: the various Brutuses plotting his fall conclude that the “paranoid and delusional” monarch will destroy their civilisation. The focus, though, is not just Trumpian. Macmillan references two wider international crises – the instability of heads of state and the weather – and a UK national concern: the endurance of a royal bloodline. The RSC’s patron, King Charles III, might skip this one.

Mark Lawson, the Guardian

The main auditorium has been reconfigured so that the audience presses in on all sides with the action predominantly confined to a cruciform stage with mighty gates at the far end and a coronet-style arch at its centre. The opening wordless sequence, featuring an inordinate procession of arrivals (there’s a cast of 36), conjures a due aura of wonder and clanging foreboding. Most strikingly, a number of characters enter on horseback; these magnificent metallic steeds are operated, as in War Horse, by an obliging trio of handlers.

The great achievement of this reimagining of George RR Martin’s universe by writer Duncan Macmillan and director Dominic Cooke is that it ties up plot points from the Song of Ice and Fire franchise in ways likely to satisfy avid fans of the novels and the subsequent TV series but simultaneously creates a narrative clear and engaging enough to entrance the only partially affiliated or the complete newbie.

Designer Chloe Lamford creates a visionary space, where dragon puppets and vast stomping horses stalk in shadowy slo mo like they’re embedded deep in this world’s collective memory. Silk-skirted courtly dances and unwieldy but spectacular joust scenes show how these dynasties enjoy themselves, before the noble blood starts to fall.

This prequel to a blood-soaked dynastic saga wanders on for so long that it makes Christopher Nolan’s journey into Greek mythology seem a model of understatement. There’s no reason why the RSC shouldn’t bring Martin’s epic books to the stage in Game of Thrones: The Mad King, but if this stolid production gives hardcore GoT fans a chance to hunt for “Easter eggs”, it seldom comes close to matching the grim aura of the TV series.

The first half of Cooke’s superbly staged, spectacular production has the feel of a dynamic Bayeux Tapestry: a stunning pageant of medieval stop-motion animation. But after the interval, the plot takes off. Sparks fly romantically and dramatically, which is just as well because, at three hours 45 minutes, it’s almost as long as Hamlet.

Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
This prequel to the TV series has one joust after another, spectacular stagecraft and plenty of modern resonance

During the RSC’s 65 years, numerous Lears have lost their minds and frequent Caesars been slaughtered by their courts. Now, though, a tyrant new to its stages faces both fates. He is King Aerys II Targaryen, ancestor of one warring bloodline in Game of Thrones, the dramatisation of George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels that helped TV streamers’ rise to global domination during eight HBO seasons from 2011 to 2019.

Some may balk at an institution named for England’s greatest dramatist staging an American drama franchise. There is, though, a compelling economic imperative: rising costs due to current wars (a frequent problem for Martin’s ancient oligarchs too) and Covid-era debts now exacerbated by paying back government loans means that the RSC could use another big commercial transfer – as its musical Matilda may not be immortal.

New play, which has been a decade in the works, opens at the Royal Shakespeare theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon after five previews were cancelled

A winter of discontent is anticipated by the embattled characters in Game of Thrones, but the Royal Shakespeare Company is banking on a glorious summer with its world premiere of a prequel to the hit TV series based on George RR Martin’s fantasy novels.

The new play, The Mad King, arrives 30 years to the month after the original publication of A Game of Thrones, the first novel in Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire. It has a gala performance in Stratford-upon-Avon on Saturday evening in a reconfigured Royal Shakespeare theatre with a capacity of 870. Tickets for the entire run, priced from £10 to £95, have already sold out.

A new blog post by the fantasy writer has outlined his recent difficulties, as fans continue to speculate on the elusive sixth book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series

George RR Martin has opened up about experiencing depression during a “stressful” and “overwhelming” year, as readers continue to await the long-delayed sixth instalment of his A Song of Ice and Fire series.

The 77-year-old American author, whose fantasy novels shaped and inspired the hit HBO television series Game of Thrones, wrote candidly about his recent difficulties in his first personal blog post for almost six months.

The early intel from George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels paints the Targaryens as tyrants – so making them the heroes is going to require some hefty literary PR

There must be a few Game of Thrones fans out there who have rather mixed feelings about the news that Warner Bros is to bring George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire “universe” to the big screen. On the one hand, the prospect of a properly enormous fantasy epic featuring dragons the size of commuter trains is undeniably appealing; on the other, have they really thought this thing through?

Reports suggest that the feature film will take as its source material Aegon Targaryen’s conquest, which brought the purple-eyed, dragon-riding clan to continental Westeros (and united six of its seven kingdoms) about 300 years before the events of HBO’s Game of Thrones itself. There’s also a TV series happening, which will presumably cover much of the same ground in greater detail. At first glance, this ought to make even the most reluctant fantasy acolyte want to punch the air. After all, Aegon’s conquest is the sort of story cinema was invented for: dragons blotting out the sky, castles melting like cheese toasties under a blowtorch; an entire continent being thrillingly upended by a bunch of platinum-haired dragonlords.

Blockbuster adaptation of George RR Martin’s fantasy world will focus on events 300 years before the HBO series’ pilot

A Game of Thrones film is set for the big screen, with Warner Bros officially developing a prequel set in the world of Westeros.

House of Cards showrunner and Andor writer Beau Willimon has been recruited to write the script based on George RR Martin’s fantasy series.

Novelist George RR Martin says RSC is ‘obvious choice’ to put on new play The Mad King, which will open after spring

A new prequel to George RR Martin’s blockbuster fantasy saga Game of Thrones is to be staged this summer by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon.

The bestselling author, whose novels have been turned into a juggernaut TV franchise, said the RSC was the “obvious choice” to put on the play, Game of Thrones: The Mad King, because Shakespeare had been a constant source of inspiration to him. “Not only that, he faced similar challenges in how to put a battle on stage,” added Martin. “So we are in good company.”

​In this week’s newsletter: Years of dragon fatigue and lore overload ​had me running from the Game of Thrones franchise, but this modest new chapter ​offers a reminder of how good simple storytelling can be

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Just when I thought I was out … just when I thought I would no longer have that sweeping, ever so slightly irritating theme tune ringing around my head for hours on end, or feel the need to remember the difference between House Tyrell, Tully or Arryn, I suddenly find myself pulled back in to the Game of Thrones extended universe. The blame for this goes to A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the likably low-key Game of Thrones spin-off series about a cloth-eared hedge knight and his shrewd child squire currently ambling through its first season on HBO/Sky Atlantic.

Before its arrival, I had departed Westeros for good. My faith had first been shaken by that rushed, badly plotted final season of Game of Thrones proper, which bashed to bits six previous seasons’ worth of finely tuned political intrigue and fascinating character dynamics in a succession of endless (often badly lit) CGI-laden battles, before flambéing them in dragon fire. Worse came with House of the Dragon, a dreary, po-faced, endlessly withholding slog of a prequel series, the enjoyment of which seemed to rest entirely on whether the viewer was familiar with deep lore buried within a Westeros history book that George RR Martin wrote instead of cracking on with that sixth novel. If, like me, you were not, the show proved to be little more than a confusing conveyor belt of platinum-haired poshos glowering at each other. Oh and dragons. So many dragons.

The real world is way worse than Westeros – so why not let this heartwarming underdog tale of a simple soul and his ethereal squire be your safe space

‘Bless their little cotton socks!” is not a response one expects to have to any of the inhabitants of Westeros, the land of the bloody, violent, incestuous and often depraved series of Game of Thrones. But the endearing protagonists of the latest spin-off of the franchise, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, invite it.

Their names, as in the George RR Martin novellas on which the series is based, are Dunk – short for Ser Duncan the Tall – and Egg. Dunk (Peter Claffey, a suitably tall former Irish rugby union player, last seen in Bad Sisters) was squire to a hedge – non-noble – knight, Ser Arlan of Pennytree (Danny Webb), who took the boy under his wing but never quite got round to knighting the man before dying. We first meet Dunk burying his mentor under an old elm tree and taking up his arms against the sea of troubles that are about to engulf him. Dunk is a simple soul (very simple, some might say – he may look like a medieval Jack Reacher, but inside he is more of an eager but baffled labrador) and sets out to find a lord he can himself serve as a hedge knight.

My jaw was left agape by this rich, moving spinoff. Its two lead characters have the making of a classic comic double act

The Game of Thrones franchise has fruited again, like an abundant oak. Where’s left to go? A startling opening, in which a lumbering oaf takes a dump behind a tree, gives us a clue. Chronologically, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (Monday 19 January, 9pm, Sky Atlantic) sits between the juggernaut original and its courtly prequel, House of the Dragon. Tonally, it’s in a world of its own.

That oaf eventually gets a name: Dunk. Contrary to expectation, Dunk is a knight. Specifically, a “hedge knight”, a lower-status category whose kind cannot afford their keep and must sleep under trees. “Any knight can make a knight” we are reminded, by simply dubbing them. This lack of gatekeeping has resulted in a class system in which highborn valiants scorn their ignoble brethren. They are knights in name only, and only just. Of course, there’s nothing just about this.