'A great work of art': Almodóvar's 1999 film All About My Mother. Photograph: The Kobal Collection.
Like the correspondents in Saturday's letters page, I too was taken back by Marcel Berlins' comments in his Guardian column about screen to stage adaptations. Berlins will not be going to see Samuel Adamson's stage version of Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother, saying: "How dare they take a great work of art and mangle it into some other format, for which it was not designed and envisaged - even if Almodóvar has given the production his blessing?" Berlins then went on to suggest that stage musicals based on films are OK, and plays made into films are fine too (although anyone who has seen Closer and The History Boys on stage and also on film may disagree), arguing that our stages should be "dedicated to developing and performing original works by playwrights with their own ideas rather than resort to material from the movies".
Yes, there has been a growing trend for movies to make the leap from screen to stage of which All About My Mother is the latest and although there have been some turkeys there's an honourable roll call including David Eldridge's superb Festen, Simon Bent's delightful version of Elling currently at Trafalgar Studios and of course Emma Rice's brilliant, freewheeling adaptation of A Matter of Life and Death - which Berlins mentions as an example of what the National should not be doing but appears not to have actually seen. I'd be interested to know where Berlins stands on page to stage adaptations.
Like Berlins, I want to see plenty of new work on our stages (but not just traditionally written plays, I want devised shows as well). But to suggest that dramatists shouldn't be influenced by what is arguably the major artistic medium of the last 100 years is like saying that As You Like It is of no value because it is a blatant rip-off of Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde, or that Troilus and Cressida is of little worth because it was inspired by Chaucer, Homer and Caxton. Andrew Field makes the point very succinctly that "no work of art is wholly original, no work of art is created in a vacuum. Artists must be given the freedom (afforded to everyone from Shakespeare to Bob Dylan) to beg, borrow and steal stories, melodies, memories, one-liners - in short anything they can get their grubby, underpaid hands on in their pursuit of greatness."
I'm not yet convinced by theatre's attempts to ape film in shows such as The Psychic Detective, and there is nothing duller on stage than shows such as Dirty Dancing that attempt - and always fail - to create a facsimile of a movie. I see no reason why the Wizard of Oz couldn't work on stage, but it never does because of the slavish (maybe for copyright reasons) devotion to the movie. Why would anyone want to see an actor impersonating Judy Garland when you can see the real Judy Garland on celluloid? Andrew Haydon has a fascinating spin off from Berlins' piece, talking about cinema's fixity versus theatre's de facto fluidity and pointing out that "theatre's increasing use of technology - wonderful though it can be - is forever chipping away at the idea of liveness, and introducing fixed elements".
My concern with Berlins' argument is that it tries to keep art forms in their separate pigeonholes and treats individual pieces of art as exhibits in some dusty cultural museum where we can forever look but never touch. In fact what appears to be cultural vandalism to one person can often turn out to be a cultural rebirth as artists take a work from one medium or decade and transform it into something similar but different. It is fine to love a movie or a piece of music for what it is, but to embalm it with your affection and deny access to it to be used by other artists and upcoming generations in what ever way they desire not only has a petrifying effect on art and artists, but on audiences too.
My 16-year-old daughter had no previous knowledge of the movie - or what it represents for a particular generation - and was completely bowled over by A Matter of Life and Death at the National - returning to see it more than once. So I bought her the DVD of Powell and Pressburger's original movie. "So did you like it?" I asked after she had watched it. "It was very interesting," came the reply. "But it's not a patch on the theatre show."
