Whereas in a multilingual novel the one-language-fits-all gimmick plays unnoticed within the reader's mind, heard out loud it jars hideously. One hoped that John Hurt's huge comedy moustache would muffle his accented English, but it comes through more or less undistorted Shawn Slovo's script doesn't help matters. "I would not feel comfortable letting him down", Hurt says at one point, the anachronistic "comfortable" being straight from the therapy talk of late 20th-century America.Nor is Slovo especially adept when romance begins to bloom between Pelagia and Corelli. Though her initial froideur is thawed by his mandolin plucking, Pelagia nevertheless resents his anomalous position as an occupier: he has no right to be on the island at all, but since he is, shouldn't he behave like a soldier rather than treating the place as a prototype Club 18-30? He appears to have confused the roles of trouper and trooper. Cage is solid in the title role, holding a steady course between his all-singing, all-dancing public persona and the spaniel-eyed melancholic he seems to be in private. Yet the script feels most perfunctory in the way it suggests the growing mutual attraction of the central characters, relying on that corny and dishonest trope of her watching him, unawares, playing with a kid in the garden. (Subtext: what a great father he will make.) In his case, it's to do with admiring Pelagia's serene self-possession and constant picturesque cradling of wickerwork baskets That, and the fact that she looks like Penelope Cruz.

When the confession of love finally happens, however, Slovo expresses it in a lumpen, ungainly platitude: "You think you can come here and turn my whole world upside down?" Pelagia asks Corelli, spectacularly begging the question.The lotusland of the film's first half, while never compelling, is not an unpleasant place to linger. Advance reports had warned of a draggy pace, yet once you've cleared the hurdle of those dreadful accents, John Madden's film proceeds at an agreeable saunter around olive groves, wooded vistas and widescreen shots of unspoilt coastline. The atmosphere of contentment is spiked by intimations of what lies in store for these happy islanders. The presence of a supervising German officer, Weber (David Morrissey) allows the film an absolving ambiguity; on the one hand he's a heel-clicking Nazi and therefore a distraction from the fact that Corelli and co were also flying the Fascist standard; on the other, he's a hesitant, likeable fellow who is as magnetised as anyone by Corelli's ebullient personality. Once the Italians surrender, however, the dastardly Hun take matters in hand, and Weber's status as Corelli's friend becomes untenable.

Morrissey's face registers by subtle degrees the tragic ambivalence of this "good" evildoer.The German invasion of Cephalonia and the ensuing reprisals lend a terrible, jolting urgency to the picture: there's one particular "disasters of war" sequence that is pitched between Goya and The Great Escape. The horror of this is slightly undermined by the addition of two epilogues rather than one. The historical authenticity of the second catastrophe to befall the island is unarguable, but coming so quickly after the Germans' rape of the land it dilutes rather than intensifies the dramatic momentum. Is this a satisfying translation from page to screen? You tell me. The fierce devotion which the novel inspired will not, I imagine, be duplicated by the movie, yet aside from minor flaws in the script and a certain mechanical feel, Captain Corelli's Mandolin is a decent fable of love, war and redemption. Not The Iliad, or anything like, but a nice Grecian earner all the same.. Behind the characters of Among Unbroken Hearts looms a picture of a little tyke regarding the sunset, captioned: "To die will be an awfully big adventure?" Henry Adam's play is better than one might expect from that ­ and from its two junkies' reading-aloud from Peter Pan.

But though the play is superior to such lazy symbolism, it does highlight the problem of Hearts ­ a reliance on easily stated ideas and on literature rather than life.Ray and Neil, heroin addicts in their early twenties, are staying in a farmhouse in the north of Scotland, left to Ray by his mother His other relatives are dead or disappeared "Nobody has roots any more, Ray," Neil says "It was on the news. Did nobody tell ye?" They visit Chaimig, a farmer, now blind, who was more important to Ray than his father, and Chaimig's teenage granddaughter, Amanda, who feels she should give up her place at university to look after the old man. Adam writes with marvellous precision, colour and graveyard wit. Dismissing the idea of a trip to Bangkok, Neil says, "Might as well stay here. Let Asia come to us." The countryside in winter, Ray says, is so bleak that you could "read by the light of the shotgun blasts. Poor sun-starved bastards blowing their heads off rather than endure another day." Relations between the two are believable and warm.But Adam is far less precise about Ray's and Neil's circumstances. How do they support themselves and their habit? Why have they become addicted? The playwright ignores the first question and, for the second, provides answers that are a contrived mixture of sociology and poetry "Nobody cares who you are any more They just want to know what you want to buy," says Neil.