Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando starred in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951): film used to look to theatre for inspiration, now the reverse is true ©WMCommons
It’s famous, it’s got retro-chic and it’s coming to a theatre near you: book now for the all-star stage version of The Towering Inferno. OK, that’s a joke. Not a very good one since turning a 1970s disaster movie into a theatre piece would be beyond preposterous. Wouldn’t it?
Public liability insurance and fire regulations might halt that particular project, but screen-to-stage adaptations are clogging up London theatres. Just under a quarter of the 39 shows in the West End are movie-retreads, and the horizon is darkening with more. May sees the arrival of Chariots of Fire and the Kevin Costner/Whitney Houston vehicle The Bodyguard touches down in November.
Anyone wishing to understand why producers want to flog secondhand goods should follow the money. The Ladykillers has broken house records at the Gielgud Theatre, and The Lion King took over £289m in its first decade in London and is now in its twelfth year. So what’s wrong with this?
In theory, nothing. In practice, however, the trend is depressing for its sheer laziness. Instead of encouraging new writing, producers opt for the shabby opportunism of hitching a ride on a classic title. As if in tacit admission of that, a now-routine defence is often wheeled out: “It’s not an adaptation of the film, we’re returning to the original novel.” That was certainly the argument behind Terry Johnson’s 2000 revamp of The Graduate, which may have drawn on Charles Webb’s novel. But no one remembered or cared, since the only reason it sold tickets—lots of them—was because audiences either recalled Mike Nichols’s vastly superior film or because they wanted the full 40 seconds of Kathleen Turner naked.
Producers, meanwhile, envious of box-office figures and money-spinning cloned productions worldwide, began rifling through their DVD collections. This, surely, is the only explanation for the London sightings of Luke Perry and Alyson Hannigan, who turned up (and little more) in 2004 in When Harry Met Sally. Or Val Kilmer at the Playhouse Theatre in 2005 in The Postman Always Rings Twice—he didn’t deliver. Josh Hartnett attempted to be Tom Cruise in Rain Man in 2008 and for barely two months last Autumn Marc Warren gave us his Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke. I saw them so that you didn’t have to.
Traffic used to flow in the opposite direction. Hollywood regularly fed upon Broadway’s finest. Elia Kazan’s 1951 movie version of A Streetcar Named Desire allowed audiences worldwide to thrill to Marlon Brando’s performance which had electrified New York theatregoers. Edward Albee swears he only granted Warner Bros the rights to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? because he was promised Bette Davis and James Mason in the leads, but he and everyone else were pretty happy watching a career-best Elizabeth Taylor battling with Richard Burton.
Putting plays on screen produced significant gains. You didn’t have to change sets to persuade audiences they were in different locations, you just cut. And at moments of high tension, no one has a bad seat: everyone can move in for the kill via close-ups. The latter were significantly missing from Dirty Dancing—“The classic story on stage,” as the poster claimed. The dancing looked anything but dirty, since at that distance from the stage no one could see what thrilled them on screen: close-ups of bodies with artful applications of lust-inducing sweat.
Outstanding exceptions like Stephen Sondheim’s reworking of Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles Of A Summer Night as A Little Night Music, and Kneehigh Theatre’s Brief Encounter, embody the rule of screen-to-stage adaptation: be imaginative. Both disobeyed the letter of the original to reinvigorate its spirit, adding music, vivid theatricality and, crucially, surprise.
It’s the last of those which is so dangerously absent from the rest of the field. Producers lure audiences into expensive theatre seats with the promise of delivering what they already know. Creativity is stifled because they’re terrified of presenting anything different, imaginative or distinctive. It’s short-term thinking. Once audiences have sat through a faded copy of their memories, they won’t come back. Offered yet another version of a famous film, they’re likely to stay home and download the infinitely less expensive original. Who could blame them?
