Who needs reel theatre?
Turning films into stage plays is hardly worthwhile when the big screen does it so much better.
What have Les Enfants du Paradis, The Ladykillers, A Matter of Life and Death and All About My Mother got in common? Easy. All are movies that have been adapted for the stage. The process is gathering momentum. This autumn we are promised Swimming with Sharks and the musical of Desperately Seeking Susan. Even now, director Emma Rice is probably eyeing up the possibility of turning Citizen Kane into a Kneehigh spectacular.
Does it matter? Some argue that theatre should seek material where it can and that there is a constant, two-way media traffic. Plays have long been turned into films. So why not the other way round? I remain sceptical. The case for making movies out of plays is largely pragmatic. Film is a vast industry that can only be sustained by raiding other media. A filmed play also has one distinct asset: it makes the work available to more people.
All the purist arguments about whether or not to film Shakespeare were for me knocked into a cocked hat by an experience I once had in America. I was on a panel with Kenneth Branagh shortly after his film version of Henry V had opened in the States. Branagh was mobbed by young people who were simply grateful for the rare chance to see and hear some Shakespeare. But the argument works the other way when you make plays out of films. Why go to all the trouble of seeing a staged movie when you can nip down to the local DVD clubvideo-store and rent the original for three quid?
“Ah”, say the advocates of adaptation, “you’re getting a different experience in the theatre.” But is it necessarily a better one? Films make their impact through the fluidity of the camera, the use of close-up, the skills of editing and montage. Theatre can do many things that film can’t. Cinema also has its own unique properties. In her National Theatre production of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death Kneehigh’s Emma Rice, for all her ingenuity, couldn’t match the virtuosic moving-staircase scenes from the original film. And there’s a brilliant moment towards the end of Almódovar’s All About My Mother when the heroine moves from Barcelona back to Madrid and eventually makes the reverse journey. Two years of her life are compressed into a simple shot of a train going first one way and then another. It’s one of the wittiest examples of cinema’s ability to telescope time: one which Samuel Adamson’s Old Vic version of the movie wisely makes no attempt to imitate.
We live in an age of increasing convergence between art-forms. What I’m arguing is that each medium should play to its own particular strengths. I love theatre when it’s most theatrical and cinema when it’s most cinematic. I also love ballet when it’s most balletic, leading me to view the fashionable fusion of dance and drama with a certain wariness.
Obviously, in an age of adaptation, each medium feeds off its brethren. But I simply view the theatre’s tendency to loot the film and TV archives with a certain dismay. It’s lazy. It’s parasitic. It’s also all too often a chance for the director to display his or her individual talent at the expense of the actors. I readily admit that theatre has to use new technology when it comes to design. But plays are plays and movies are movies and I’d rather see The Bourne Ultimatum at my local Odeon than some misguided attempt to turn celluloid fictions into drama.
October 15th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
I am very disappointed and confused at your opinion expressed in your Blog: Who needs reel theatre?
Far from being ‘lazy’ and ‘parasitic’, surely all artists and those working in the arts are heavily influenced by their environment and surrounding culture. It makes no difference if inspiration comes from film, television, literature or paintings. What does matters is whether it is good art or not, whether it challenges, enlightens or entertains?
In recent years the acclaimed play Festen was a direct adaptation from the film The Celebration and countless musicals such as Billy Elliot, which received rapturous reviews have come either directly from films or have been heavily influenced by them.
Other great musicals adapted from or inspired by films are:
The Producers, The Lion king, The King and I, Little Shop of Horrors, Cabaret, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi, Forty-Second Street, Carnival, A Little Night Music, Sweet Charity and more recently Legally Blond, Hairspray, Young Frankenstein.
You could also look at successful Musicals inspired by great music such as Crazy for You or even maybe Mama Mia!
So surely we must judge any art, whether theatre, film, music or dance not on its inspirations but on the work itself.
Long may a good story, from wherever it may come, inspire creative people to want to tell it, in whatever form that takes.
February 17th, 2008 at 11:45 am
Catherine instictively took ignore of her britney spears flashing photographers at the magnum and pulled it up slowly, intimidating her sweet, little pussy!