Holy smoke ... Could Bresson's Le Procès de Jeanne d'Arc make it on stage?
If there is an encore for classic movies it can currently be heard on the London stage. Today's news alerts us to the fact that Kevin Spacey is currently planning to stage an Old Vic adaptation of All About My Mother, Pedro Almodóvar's Oscar-winning melodrama from 1999. It's the latest in a growing number of screen-to-stage overhauls that run from the sublime (Festen) and the intriguing (A Matter of Life and Death) through to the populist (Grease) and the potentially downright ludicrous (The Lord of the Rings). (And yes, I realise that that last example started life as some book or other, though it seems a safe bet that without Jackson's films there would be no Drury Lane production.)
While it remains to be seen what category Spacey's adaptation will fall into, the omens are oddly encouraging. It's hard to think of another contemporary film-maker who is more obviously suited to a stage treatment than Almódovar, who has built his reputation on a cocktail of intimate, personal stories, lush production design and flamboyant, theatrical gestures. You might even go so far as to bracket him as a kind of gaudy Spanish cousin to Michael Powell, the late, lamented director of A Matter of Life and Death. For all their obvious differences, both film-makers share the same wanton, swooningly romantic worldview. If A Matter of Life and Death can be recycled for the stage, why not All About My Mother?
By the same token, one might just as easily argue that these films should be left well alone and not be foisted on us like so much old rope. Sceptics may well argue that the whole thing smacks of cynicism. Perhaps it even highlights a general poverty of ambition within London theatre, with producers too scared to plough money into developing new plays by budding talent. Far safer to stick with something like Dirty Dancing; a proven hit with (fingers crossed) a built-in audience.
I have some sympathy for these sentiments, so long as they don't automatically rule out converting films for the stage on purely puritanical reasons. There is nothing inherently sacrilegious about turning an Almodóvar film into a stage play - or, for that matter, a Spike Lee joint into a puppet show - so long as the end result actually works. In the meantime, I'm mulling over what other movies might make transfer smoothly and sweetly to Spacey's Old Vic. Rosemary's Baby played as domestic farce, with the stage divided into the two neighbouring apartments? Serpico in the manner of that sublime high school production from Rushmore? Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, perhaps played as kitsch musical, complete with singing donkey?
Maybe it's not, on balance, such a great idea after all. Three films in and we're already entering the realms of the ludicrous.
