There is a malaise settling over our great theatres, a sickness of the imagination that finds its cure only in the familiar. It’s the trend of the stage-bound movie rerun, and frankly, it’s becoming profoundly disappointing.
Walk past any major venue and you’ll find titles that feel less like new plays and more like well-capitalized resurrections of familiar cinematic narratives. We’re seeing the world premiere of a stage version of the iconic Western High Noon, playing out its famous countdown live. At the Old Vic, a new staging of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest asks us to forget Jack Nicholson and accept a new McMurphy. These titles, immortalized by cinema, are now being sold back to us, stitched together for the stage.
Now, I confess: I’ve only witnessed one such example, the revival of A Man for All Seasons. It was a well-executed production of a classic play, certainly, but its continuous commercial pull relies heavily on the long, famous shadow of its Oscar-winning film adaptation. And that is the point: the stage is increasingly becoming a museum for what the screen perfected. This is not a sustainable artistic model; it’s an alarming trend built on creative indolence.
A Crucial Distinction: Where Adaptation Works
It is important to acknowledge that not all adaptation is inherently flawed. The stage can, and sometimes should, look to other media for inspiration, particularly when the adaptation transforms the source material into something distinctly theatrical.
Musicals, for example, often succeed in this transfer because they inherently demand a different medium. When a film like Mel Brooks’ The Producers is translated to the stage, it isn’t a mere reenactment; it is fundamentally reimagined as a spectacle with dance, original music, and exaggerated theatricality. The stage’s limitations—the lack of quick cuts, the absence of cinematic close-ups—are embraced and transcended by the heightened reality of the musical form. The result is a new, valid artistic creation.
The same cannot be said for dramas like the proposed stage version of High Noon or a potential straight play adaptation of a film like Dr. Strangelove. These are narratives rooted in specific cinematic techniques—the tension of real-time editing, the satire achieved through visual contrast, or the vast psychological landscape of a character—which simply cannot be replicated in a dramatic format without significant loss of power. They are simply not in the same league as successful musical adaptations when it comes to medium transformation.
Smothering of New Voices
The issue isn’t simply aesthetic—it’s systemic, starting with the young playwrights who are being strategically silenced. Every major venue slot dedicated to a known cinematic commodity is a slot stolen from an emerging writer. We are freezing out the voices who could be speaking to our specific, messy present, choosing instead to rehash the canon of 1950s-70s cinema. We trade the necessary risk of supporting new, vital art for the guaranteed return of nostalgia, effectively stalling the evolution of our dramatic literature and limiting the stage’s ability to act as a vital forum for contemporary dialogue.
Inevitability of Inferiority
The cold, hard truth is that these stage reenactments are never as good as the original movie. Cinema has a language of intimacy and scale that the stage simply cannot match. The camera can capture the isolation of the lone sheriff in High Noon with a single, sweeping shot that no stage set can truly replicate, or observe the psychological torment of McMurphy with a revealing close-up. The stage version inevitably becomes a shadow of the visual masterpiece it seeks to recall, a competent but shallow echo of the medium that defined the story, lacking the original’s specific grammar.
Stultification of Audiences
The very function of the theater is being warped, turning us into passive consumers rather than active participants. Theatre is meant to be ephemeral—a unique, unrepeatable event built on shared, volatile presence. When we go to see a stage version of a beloved movie, we are often going to tick a box, seeking a bad reproduction of an experience that has already been captured and fixed by film. We are teaching audiences to seek comfort and familiarity over discovery, rendering the live art form inert and compromising its unique ability to demand immediate, imaginative engagement.
Robert Bresson on the Medium’s Integrity
This cultural compromise becomes clearer when viewed through the lens of Robert Bresson. Bresson, who famously sought to strip cinema of all theatrical artifice, insisted that the two art forms are fundamentally distinct, arguing that each must exploit its unique capabilities for creation, not just reproduction. Bresson saw “filmed theatre” as an artistic failure, a failure to understand cinema’s true, profound language of fragmented moments and sound. The same critique applies reciprocally to the stage: when the theatre attempts to embody a narrative perfected by the camera—relying on plot points and visual beats established by the screen—it sacrifices its own powerful vocabulary. The stage must use its strengths: the reliance on raw presence, shared imaginative space, and unmediated, continuous time. When it abandons these to chase the ghosts of the screen, it betrays the integrity of the medium.
Theatre’s Power to Change Society
We must remember what the stage is truly capable of when it stops replicating and starts challenging. Theatre’s highest calling is not to entertain, but to provoke, to dissect, and to drive social change.
The historical record is clear: when theatre is utilized as a weapon of cultural reckoning, its power is immense and immediate. Consider the explosive impact of Henrik Ibsen. When his play A Doll’s House premiered in 1879, it caused a moral panic across Europe. Nora Helmer’s final decision to slam the door on her marriage and abandon her children to find herself was a seismic event that shook the foundations of 19th-century patriarchy, directly contributing to the discourse on women’s rights and individual liberty. It was a theatrical moment that translated into a societal shift.
Similarly, the raw power of plays like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in the 1950s—a direct, searing allegory of McCarthyism—proved that live drama could bypass censorship and political anxiety to speak truth to power. In South Africa, the protest plays of Athol Fugard, such as The Island, used the immediacy of the stage to expose the brutality of apartheid, creating a profound communal experience of resistance and empathy that no film could capture.
These plays weren’t reproductions; they were social earthquakes. They succeeded precisely because they were immediate, they were controversial, and they could only exist in that specific time and place. They were, in the truest sense, ephemeral catalysts.
The stage should be creating moments that demand our entire, undivided attention, not offering us comfort food warmed up from Hollywood’s fridge. It is time for theater to reclaim its mantle as the vanguard of cultural conversation and get back to the work of shaking society, not just serenely echoing the past.