From the Hill and J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man – justify the excitement. […] What really makes The Ginger Man a vital work is the fact that it both reflects and comments dramatically on the absurdities of an age clinging to values in which it simply cannot believe and unable to summon up the courage to find out what its moral convictions really are". Writing in The Guardian in 2004, James Campbell judged that, "The Ginger Man still reads well today, once one becomes accustomed to its headlong rush of style, its frequent verbless sentences, the switch of tenses and the manic swing between first and third persons as it lunges to catch the protagonist's babbling thoughts […] In other places, the prose hops along alliteratively, with hints of Joyce and Dylan Thomas. Many chapters end with a snatch of verse, a habit that began in Donleavy's first book and became his signature tune". In the 2010 reissue of The Ginger Man, Jay McInerney noted in the introduction that the book "has undoubtedly launched thousands of benders, but it has also inspired scores of writers with its vivid and visceral narrative voice and the sheer poetry of its prose". Adaptations Donleavy wrote a stage adaptation of The Ginger Man, directed by Philip Wiseman, which opened in London in September 1959, with Richard Harris playing Dangerfield. In October, the play opened in Dublin, also starring Harris, and was closed after three performances, owing to the play's offensiveness (according to the Dublin critics), and following protests from the Catholic Church. All this is recorded by Donleavy in the 1961 Random House publication of the play with an essay by Donleavy, "What They Did in Dublin with The Ginger Man (a play)". The BBC produced a 90-minute made-for-television version of the play, directed by Peter Dews, and aired on 23 March 1962 in the United Kingdom. Ann Bell played Marion Dangerfield, Ronald Fraser as Kenneth O'Keefe, Ian Hendry as Sebastian Balfe Dangerfield, and Margaret Tyzack was Miss Frost. Donleavy asked director George Roy Hill to film the novel (the two of them, along with Gainor Crist, had been at Trinity together), but Hill felt that he would lose perspective because the project would be too close to his heart and his time as a young man at Trinity. In 2005 there was reportedly discussion with actor Johnny Depp about starring in a