From silver screen to theatre gold

So can theatre make the movie greats greater? Or is this just a marketing exercise to lure audiences away from their popcorn and towards the nearest proscenium arch?

Commercial concerns are certainly key. “I’m sure the recognition factor will have a bearing on sales,” says Daniel Buckroyd, the director of Saturday Night — all the more so since the biggest new band in Britain, the Arctic Monkeys, used a phrase from Sillitoe’s novel — “whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not” — as their album title.

Jonathan Holloway is the director of Red Shift theatre company, which has undertaken a three-year project called The Picturehouse that brings famous films to the stage. “The trick I have been after for years,” he says, “is to find titles and stories that will flick a switch in the audience’s sensibilities and make them think, ‘I’d like to see that’. ” That’s the effect of popular film titles. “A lot of people have come to see (his current show) Get Carter who don’t normally go to the theatre. You do get that holy grail of the crossover audience.”

But it can’t all be about bums on seats, says Buckroyd, because “audiences can smell the desperation, can’t they?” There is an initial scepticism to overcome, Holloway agrees, citing “the proprietorial sense of some audiences, who start from the position that it’s going to be a failure because it couldn’t possibly be as good as the film”. The solution is to distance your production as far as possible from its film forebear.

Red Shift based its production on Ted Lewis’s original novel — no Michael Caine impressions here. Holloway’s staging of The Third Man, meanwhile, was based on the original Graham Greene novella, and so had to omit the “cuckoo clocks” speech, which Orson Welles improvised for the film. “Side-stepping Welles’s famous lines,” Holloway says, “helped to make the piece its own thing and feel less derivative.”

According to Holloway, “because a movie is made for a broad sensibility and commercial purposes, it often loses some of the edge of the original story”. When Sillitoe’s stark novel of working-class life was filmed, for example, the censors vetoed a scene in which a woman had a successful abortion — a moral no-no in 1960. “Adapting the novel for the cinema meant cutting out and slimming down storylines, which sacrificed some of its complexity,” Buckroyd says. “And we’ve been able to add that back again.”

But this “added complexity” argument seems tenuous. Theatre is not inherently more complex than film; surely its real distinction lies elsewhere? “I think theatre is attractive to audiences only in one way,” Sillitoe says, “which is that there are live people. And that must be quite an advantage.” Particularly in the case of a novel such as Saturday Night, which is full of rage and love and claustrophobia: “The visceral quality of theatre undoubtedly makes it a fresh experience,” Buckroyd says.

Film-to-stage shows must exploit this distinction and not ape their celluloid sources. “Movies and TV are about actuality — they can actually take you there and show you the real thing,” Holloway says. “But in theatre you have very quickly to strike that deal with the audience that they will populate the stage with their imaginations.”

Sometimes, the imaginative leap required is comically large — witness BAC’s tinpot version of the swords-and-sandals epic Ben-Hur. Sometimes, theatre’s freedom from the strictures of naturalism can lead to more profound storytelling. “In Sillitoe’s novel,” Buckroyd says, “there are swooping poetic tracts spoken from the guts of the central character, and we can get into those more effectively (than the film). We can establish a relationship directly between character and audience, outside the action of the play — which theatre is supremely good at.”

As Shakespeare would no doubt have agreed, theatre can flourish by reusing stories popularised in other media. “What you want to do,” Holloway says, “is make audiences think they’re coming to see what they want to see, then present them with something that will take them by surprise.”

And if adapted films also happen to make sound commercial sense? Well, that’s the kind of a tangled knot of profit and principle that wouldn’t be out of place in Mel Brooks’s The Producers, itself a film about a stage musical turned into a stage musical and recently recast as another film.

Expect movie, stage and other versions to endure as long as the story retains its capacity to inspire artists and make money. As Sillitoe says: “About the only thing that hasn’t happened to my novel is that it hasn’t yet been put on ice.”

A stage they’re going through

Films turned into plays:

Festen The Danish Dogme film about a bourgeois dinner party gone horribly wrong, brilliantly recast by David Eldridge as a 21st-century Hamlet.

Billy Elliot The smash-hit movie of a boy with ballet-dancing dreams, reinvented as a musical with added ballet and lashings of Elton John.

When Harry Met Sally Luke Perry and Alyson Hannigan took over from Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan in this 2003 staging. A nation yawned.

Theatre of Blood At the National Theatre last year, Improbable revived the camp 1973 comedy-horror classic about a murderous ham actor.

Brief Encounter A West End pick’n’mix of David Lean’s film and Noël Coward’s play that gave us the worst of both worlds in 2000.

All Quiet on the Western Front Opening next week at Nottingham Playhouse, a stage version of the legendary anti-war novel and celebrated 1930s film.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is at the Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham (0115-846 7777), from Thursday to Feb 18, then tours.

Get Carter is at the Byre Theatre, St Andrews (01334 475000), tonight and tours until April 1 (www.redshifttheatreco.co.uk)