Should movies be adapted for the stage? What is the point, asks Michael Billington in his recent review of Rain Man, in the age of the DVD? He also takes a passing swipe at a stage version of The Graduate as another example of what he describes as a genre. Two false assumptions here: that using material from another art form is a "genre" - like Shakespeare's history plays, for instance? - and that a story is transferred from one medium to another simply to make it available to people who missed the film. You might as well ask what is the point of David Edgar's Nicholas Nickleby in the age of the printed book.
I can't speak for Terry Johnson (The Graduate) or Dan Gordon (Rain Man) or David Eldridge (Festen) or Jonathan Holloway or Giles Croft who are also very active in this territory, but when I adapted Mark Herman's Brassed Off for the stage it was because I thought theatre does some things so differently from film that I could create a new experience from this terrific story.
What things? Well, for a start it's real people in the same room as you. It surely can't be immaterial that in The Graduate an older woman takes her clothes off for a young man a few feet away from you as opposed to up on an inhumanly large and paper-thin screen. The vulnerability is palpable.
Obviously this is more potent away from the picture-frame theatre which was the cinema's immediate predecessor. But even behind a proscenium arch, having a brass band on stage is as palpable a physical presence. Having a band play Danny Boy by night outside the hospital where their conductor (called Danny) is dying of pneumoconiosis might be "corn" - part of Billington's charge against both the film and play of Rain Man - but when the band, the actor playing Danny and a few hundred people in the audience are in a real-time three-way relationship, these can be a very intense few moments. In ex-mining communities you sometimes hear the sobs because theatre is always site-specific and audience-specific in a way a film can never be. The final music (in Wales we used the Welsh national anthem rather than Land of Hope and Glory) led to a standing ovation every night - a trick I'd pull off again and again if I could think of a way.
Let's face it, the cinema teaches theatre a lesson here. Films are full of plot and big emotion. Modern theatre too often fails to make you laugh or cry and in a huge auditorium like the National's Olivier, there is often simply not enough emotional volume to fill the space. Shakespeare doesn't make that mistake. Nor does he insist on happy endings as Hollywood does. Theatre can change that too.
In adaptation you will always have fewer characters. Oddly enough, this means you can give a voice to those you have, sharpen tensions between individuals, develop themes, like the complexity of father-son relationships in a community that doesn't talk seriously about feelings.
Brassed Off has been in more or less constant production for almost 10 years, from Norway to Tasmania and currently Oldham. It has probably boosted the sales of the DVD, but whereas the DVD takes this wonderful film to you, the stage version aims to bring you into the story. I think it's worth it.
