REVIEW: Pressure simmers superbly on the big screen

We know exactly when D-Day happened and we know precisely what the result was. And that’s the remarkable thing about David Haig’s drama on the big screen. The tension – indeed the pressure – is intense, just as it was a dozen years ago when the original play opened in Chichester’s Minerva Theatre.

Back then, Haig himself played the still woefully-undersung Group Captain James Stagg, the meteorologist who changed the course of history when, thank goodness, he rightly cautioned Eisenhower to delay D-Day in the face of incoming storms.

In the film version, adapted by Haig with director Anthony Maras, Andrew Scott steps into the Stagg shoes – and he does so superbly, with the whole thing orchestrated masterfully to become almost unbearably taut.

There are 72 hours to go until D-Day, and Colonel Irving P Krick (Chris Messina), Eisenhower’s own meteorologist, is urging Eisenhower to go ahead with the Allied landing, basing his advice on detailed study of the weather on precisely that day across past decades.

Stagg is horrified. Krick has scored notable success in places where the weather has been predictably stable. Stagg’s point is that it absolutely isn’t in northern Europe – and that Krick’s advice will lead to certain disaster.

The stand-off between the two is spine-tinglingly done. You feel for Eisenhower, torn between his trusted compatriot and the local genius. Of course, we know which way he turns – but the drama of it all is no less thrilling.

And then having urged a delay of nearly two weeks, Stagg, against all expectation, spots an opening just a few hours later. The result, again for all we know the outcome, is utterly gripping.

Scott inhabits Stagg quite brilliantly, capturing a man under pressure on all fronts, his pregnant wife unaccounted for in a bombed London hospital at the very moment he is being asked to steer the course of history. Opposite him, Brendan Fraser is just as remarkable as Eisenhower, a huge presence bearing so much.

Pressure was a memorable moment in Chichester’s Minerva Theatre. Opened up, expanded and transferred to the big screen, the film version is no less special – a quite astonishing true story, breathtakingly relayed.