A Matter of Life and Death is a stage adaptation by Tom Morris and Emma Rice of Powell and Pressburger's 1946 film of the same name for the company Kneehigh Theatre.
In the play June, the radio operator, with whom Peter falls in love, was British rather than American, since the company "felt that it would distract attention from the central story and towards the different issues of Anglo-American relations today".
The production itself included many coups de theatre to represent things like the camera obscura, the table tennis game frozen in time and the Stairway to Heaven.
[citation needed] Though individual assessments varied from Nicholas de Jongh's wholly negative account in the Evening Standard to Susannah Clapp's enthusiastic review in The Observer, critical reaction to the play was generally poor.
This prompted an attack by National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner on the major London critics, whom he described as "dead white men".