A DIFFERENT STAGE Film, Theatre and the Space Between
Film has, from its beginnings, leant on, stolen from and imitated the world of the theatre; the language of cinema itself is infused with theatrical techniques, structures and modes of representation. Increasingly, theatre has begun to adopt, emulate and cannibalise the language of cinema, so that it has sometimes become difficult to differentiate between the two disciplines. This cross-pollination has become a möbius strip of influence, not always comfortable or successful, but so comprehensive that it almost goes unnoticed.
Of course, when film was in its infancy, theatre was the dominant and supreme performative artform. While cinematic innovation came quickly – one need only study the in-camera special effects that are the raison d’être of Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902) to see how eager cinema was to break free of theatre’s constraints – it was commonplace in the early twentieth century to see films that relied entirely on established plays for their audience appeal. There is a 1909 film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Charles Kent & J Stuart Blackton); a 1908 adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, directed by DW Griffith; and a 1907 film of Hamlet, directed by none other than Méliès. While these silent-film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays can seem hopelessly misguided now, in the way they flatten the characterisations and strip the theatrical works of the very language that made them so profoundly appealing, they tell us something about the insecurity at the heart of the cinema, its willingness to doubt itself in public.
The silent era may have produced the most obviously incongruous examples of stage-to-screen adaptation, but the real damage was done in the postwar years, when the starchy notion of cultural superiority cemented itself in the cinematic mind, especially in England. Theatre was better than film because it was older, more established and therefore more respectable – so the thinking went. That mentality led to films like (Guy Hamilton, 1954) and Anthony Asquith’s (1951), which were by no means (1952) looks rather stitched-up these days, a staid and mechanical exercise despite its magnificent performances.
