Why read/ watch plays? (P.3): Plays vs films

Before we begin, I’m going to say that I’m talking about plays in the broad sense: not only live performances but also texts and filmed plays and audio recordings (“Let’s hear a play”); I however exclude musicals.

If we compare cinema and theatre (in the sense of live performance), we can all name the advantages of theatre: the nearness of the audience to the actors, the interaction and immediacy, the fact that no two performances are the same. But if we compare cinema and drama (in the broad sense), I’m afraid most people would only talk about the advantages of cinematic language: the language of image, large scenes, visual effects, and above all, editing and the close-up. It is derogatory when a film or TV series is described as “stagey”; what’s the equivalent for the other way around? 

I myself have loved literature and cinema all my life—my interest in drama is relatively new—but I love Shakespeare. That’s why I want to examine these questions: are films actually superior to plays, or is cinematic language superior to the language of drama, as the derogatory use of “stagey” seems to suggest? What do plays do better than films?

Now you may argue that the word “stagey” only suggests that a film should use cinematic language, but let’s look at the word when it’s used for TV. In the past, TV series, especially TV adaptations of classic novels, were modelled after theatre; now they’re modelled after films, meaning that they’re now meant and expected to be cinematic. Look at the 1972 War and Peace or 1977 Anna Karenina for example. Some people disparage them as stagey, and in some ways these TV series are closer to plays—lots of dialogue and minimal camerawork—but this also means that the screenwriters and directors pay more attention to dialogue and let the scenes unfold. Both series are excellent adaptations that take Tolstoy’s novels seriously and convey the complexity of the characters. Now if you look at the 2013 TV adaptation of Anna Karenina, you can see that it’s modelled after cinema and dialogue is devalued. And I can’t help asking, why do they keep moving the camera? Why do they cut every 4 seconds? (I counted) Why do they not let the scene unfold? I couldn’t even watch beyond 5-10 minutes of the 2018 King Lear for the same reasons, despite my admiration for Anthony Hopkins and Florence Pugh as actors. 

I’m not saying that screen adaptations of classic novels should be closer to plays, nor that they shouldn’t employ cinematic language. I’m also not saying that I’m mainly interested in drama driven by dialogue, driven by words (as my friend Himadri would probably say, who loves plays more than films). But dialogue is increasingly devalued in our mainly visual world—the word “stagey” reflects that—and that I find very sad. 

Films and plays do different things and have different strengths—I love both. In a film, the story and conflict are driven by many things, including dialogue (which some filmmakers unfortunately seem to forget). In a play, drama is driven by dialogue: what we say and what we don’t say and how we say it and how we hide or deceive with words. 

Persona or Cries and Whispers for instance has to be a film—it would not work as a novel or a play or an audio performance. Conversely, Rosmersholm has to be a play—you could of course turn it into a film, but its ambiguity and intricacies cannot be communicated by image or cinematic language. 

And when I watch Shakespeare, which I can’t watch live all the time (I’m just a poor girl, from a poor family), the choice would more often be a recording of a live performance, or a filmed play (like the BBC Television Shakespeare from the 1970s-80s), than a film adaptation. Sometimes a Shakespeare film respects the text, such as the 1993 and 2012 Much Ado About Nothing. Very often, Shakespeare’s words are heavily cut. Chimes at Midnight on its own is probably a passable film, but Orson Welles condenses into two hours the two Henry IV plays, with some bits from Richard II, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. The result is a Falstaff—Welles—film with lots of supporting characters: all the others are underdeveloped, but even Falstaff is sentimentalised and simplified. 

Some Shakespeare films also indicate something like a fear of words. The 2015 Macbeth—perhaps I’m being unfair as I didn’t watch all of it—breaks into pieces the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech, mixing in flashbacks and battle scenes and special effects and drowning music. The main actors, Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, also don’t know how to speak the words. 

Even when we look at Kurosawa’s adaptations of Shakespeare, Ran is a masterpiece, a work of art on its own separate from King Lear, but Throne of Blood is shallow compared to Macbeth: stripped of much dialogue, it is an exciting film, but doesn’t have the complexity of Macbeth; the main characters are reduced to a weak man urged on by an evil wife. Now you might say Throne of Blood uses cinematic language and I should judge it as a film, so I would say that it is not a profound, thought-provoking film. 

Now I have seen many film adaptations of plays, it would be interesting to watch play adaptations of films.