Is the world of theatre experiencing a crisis of originality?

From Network to The Twilight Zone, theatre directors are taking inspiration from TV and film as never before. Does this represent a crisis of originality — or a fresh way of bringing great works to the stage?
Johanna Thomas-Corr15 December 2017

Once upon a time, it was all so simple: you’d go to the theatre to watch plays and to the cinema to watch films.

Now, you can watch National Theatre shows beamed live into your local multiplex, and if you head to the National itself, the hot ticket is a movie: the cult media satire Network, adapted for the stage by Lee Hall, starring Bryan Cranston and Michelle Dockery.

In the West End you can see The Exorcist, Strictly Ballroom, School of Rock and Young Frankenstein rebooted with greasepaint and jazz hands (or, in the case of The Exorcist, 360-degree head spinning). And though there’s nothing new about films being converted into bankable stage musicals, more surprising is the number of cult celluloid classics being reignited for London’s off-West End theatres. There’s the Almeida’s transformation of the spooky 1960s TV show, The Twilight Zone, while waiting in the wings are adaptations of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny & Alexander at The Old Vic and Derek Jarman’s Jubilee at the Lyric Hammersmith. That weird TV series that gave you nightmares as a kid, that beloved art-house classic: beady theatre producers are working out how to give them three acts and sell ice cream in the intervals.

‘The theatre is omnivorous and it’s always taken stories from outside and dramatised them,’ says Lee Hall. ‘Is there anything really that different from translating a Molière from 400 years ago and taking a film and doing the same?’ Hall made his name writing Billy Elliot, later translating it into a hit musical in collaboration with Sir Elton John and director Stephen Daldry. ‘I’ve done three adaptations in a row, which have come from really different sources. It’s not that I don’t have any ideas for original plays — I’ve got loads of ideas — but each adaptation was a passion project for me because they were a vehicle for saying what I wanted to say about the world.’

Facetime: Network on stage

He was drawn to Network, Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 script about a TV anchorman who becomes an angry populist prophet, because of how it anticipated reality TV, Twitter spats and fake news. ‘I wanted to write a play about the internet but feared it would date quickly. It was better to explore that idea indirectly through Network.’

For the production, director Ivo Van Hove has constructed a dazzling on-stage TV studio, complete with a restaurant where a handful of ticket-holders experience the show while they’re served dinner. Cameras swarm over audience members, who watch themselves watching. ‘Network is a film I love but on stage it does loads of things that film can’t do,’ says Hall. ‘Theatre is not pretending to be real, it’s theatre. It’s a unique place to question the stories you’re telling.’

Theatre has been cannibalising the plots of existing stories for centuries — Shakespeare plundered Plutarch and Ovid, among others — yet many critics still treat these reworkings with suspicion, assuming they are merely money-making ventures and holding them up as evidence that theatre is stagnating and risk-averse. ‘Adaptations used to be a way of trying to guarantee an audience,’ says Rupert Goold, artistic director of the Almeida. ‘But when you look at plays like Network or The Twilight Zone, these are not necessarily obvious adaptations.’

Dan Chiswall and Kimberley Walsh in Shrek the Musical
Dan Wooller/REX/Shutterstock

What has changed is not only the work being chosen but the way writers and directors are approaching them. The attitude is less linear and dutiful to the original source and more freewheeling. As Henry Hitchings, the Evening Standard’s chief theatre critic, puts it: ‘Fidelity to the spirit of a work matters more to theatre-makers than fidelity to its structures.’

Goold believes that a collective approach to scriptwriting chimes with the current political mood. ‘The rise of populism and scepticism towards leadership means it’s inevitable that theatre-makers might want to break down the “fascism” of the single-author playwright.’ His own productions have included musical versions of Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair and the film Made in Dagenham. ‘This means there are more voices in the mix so a composer or filmmaker or sound designer might be as involved as a writer or director.’ Tom Morris, director of War Horse and new play, The Grinning Man (a musical adaptation of a Victor Hugo novel using puppets), believes we have technology to thank. ‘Even if you were only considering the development of lighting, sound and set design since the 1970s, the number of ways in which a play can set out to tell its story is infinitely more varied.’

These changes aren’t welcome in all quarters. Playwright David Hare has complained of a wave of European ‘theatre-makers’ coming over and ‘infecting’ British theatre with a dangerous disrespect towards texts. The Guardian’s theatre critic, Michael Billington, who has consistently expressed his dismay at adaptations, has damned Rufus Norris’s National Theatre for its ‘staggering dereliction of duty’ in abandoning the classic canon.

Below, Diana Rigg as Huma Rojo in All About My Mother
Geraint Lewis/REX/Shutterstock

Goold agrees that ‘the bottom has fallen off the canon of plays’ in the past 10 or 15 years. ‘When I started out in theatre, there was an understanding that if you ran into trouble, you could do Alan Ayckbourn or Oscar Wilde or Noël Coward or Alan Bennett. Now revivals are a lot harder. Instead of artistic directors thinking, “Oh it’s 20 years since we’ve done this Rattigan play”, it’s more likely that they’ll say, “Let’s dig out this Krzysztof Kieślowski film.”’

Goold programmed The Twilight Zone because the original tapped into America’s Cold War nightmares in ways that are likely to resonate again. He reveals that he is planning a curated season — possibly lasting up to a year — of adaptations for the Almeida (slated for 2020). He has already secretly picked a piece of European cinema that he wants to stage, and intends to adapt a poem and a piece of art, too. ‘What we won’t be doing is Dickens and Brontë and Forster because you see it all over the TV and we don’t need to at the Almeida.’

Backstage moments at the 63rd London ESTA

1/26

Caro Newling, producer and co-founder of Neal Street Productions, has worked on adaptations as diverse as Shrek The Musical and Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother. She says that a truly great adaptation will ‘start from the beginning and make something in its own pool of light, which you hope you might capture the imagination of an audience.

‘You can’t copy and paste what an audience wants to see,’ she says, singling out Harry Potter and the Cursed Child for praise. ‘An audience will spot fake a mile off. If you’re going in with a cynical attitude about making money, you can’t really get a show on.’

Stephen Beresford, who has adapted Fanny & Alexander for The Old Vic, sees the appetite for celluloid classics on stage as a sign of confidence on the part of the theatre world, which is providing a home for the film-length drama. ‘At a time when cinema is really struggling, and there’s a crisis with TV taking all the interesting, wild and creative stories, it’s fascinating to see people turning up for the theatre. Theatre is like that character Lady Bertram, in Mansfield Park, who is always lying on a sofa saying, “I’m so terribly ill, I’m going to die,” but never actually expires of anything.’

While passionate about the potential for unusual adaptations, Goold believes we must never abandon the idea of the playwright as the lead artist. ‘My position is that writers are the most important thing and we cannot risk losing great new writing as a theatre culture. But after that, anything’s game.’ He disputes the idea that the playwright’s days are numbered. ‘There are up to 10 new plays this year you could make a case for getting an award. It’s an extraordinary time for new writers.’

Hall is also untroubled. ‘I’m the very opposite of those people who worry about what adaptations mean for theatre because theatre has been around longer than most forms and will continue to be. It will see off all other ways of telling stories.’

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in