"The End of the Affair is almost like a play"
About this Quote
Calling The End of the Affair "almost like a play" is Neil Jordan staking out a method as much as an opinion. A director who came up through a tradition of literary adaptation, Jordan is signaling that Graham Greene's story doesn’t primarily live in set pieces or plot mechanics; it lives in rooms, glances, confessions, and reversals - the stuff that plays run on. The intent is practical: a warning and a lure. If you treat this material like conventional cinema, you risk smothering it with atmosphere. If you treat it like theater, you foreground the pressure of dialogue, timing, and moral confrontation.
The subtext is that the real action in The End of the Affair is internal but staged. Greene’s characters perform versions of themselves: the lover as martyr, the betrayed man as detective, the believer as rationalist, the woman as both penitent and strategist. Jordan’s phrasing quietly honors that architecture. A play is built around entrances and exits, withheld information, and the electric charge of what can’t be said outright. That’s Greene’s engine: desire translating into theology, jealousy masquerading as principle, and faith arriving not as comfort but as a humiliating fact.
Context matters because Jordan is also defending a kind of adult melodrama that late-20th-century film often treats as old-fashioned. By invoking theater, he legitimizes intensity. He’s telling you to watch for performance - not as fakery, but as the way people survive impossible emotions in public.
The subtext is that the real action in The End of the Affair is internal but staged. Greene’s characters perform versions of themselves: the lover as martyr, the betrayed man as detective, the believer as rationalist, the woman as both penitent and strategist. Jordan’s phrasing quietly honors that architecture. A play is built around entrances and exits, withheld information, and the electric charge of what can’t be said outright. That’s Greene’s engine: desire translating into theology, jealousy masquerading as principle, and faith arriving not as comfort but as a humiliating fact.
Context matters because Jordan is also defending a kind of adult melodrama that late-20th-century film often treats as old-fashioned. By invoking theater, he legitimizes intensity. He’s telling you to watch for performance - not as fakery, but as the way people survive impossible emotions in public.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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