Filmed Theater

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#26 Post by Person » Sun Jan 20, 2008 3:06 pm

Laurence Olivier and Stuart Burge's 1965 filming of Othello works very well as a cinematic play. It's not your standard, banal "filmed play", but a subtle hybrid of the two mediums. It helped having a brilliant cinematographer like Geoffrey Unsworth.

One of the best examples of a play not being "opened up" for cinema, would be Hitchcock's, Rope. And Rear Window would qualify, too, I suppose.

Wait Until Dark (1967) sticks close to its source.

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#27 Post by miless » Sun Jan 20, 2008 4:37 pm

Person wrote:One of the best examples of a play not being "opened up" for cinema, would be Hitchcock's, Rope. And Rear Window would qualify, too, I suppose.
but Rear Window is not very theatrical, however, because it's all about seeing the action and then seeing the reaction on Jimmy's face. You'd be hard pressed to translate it to the stage in an effective manner without changing the complete context of the material.

I totally agree about Rope, though.

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#28 Post by sidehacker » Sun Jan 20, 2008 5:24 pm

Kurosawa's The Lower Depths would fit this description. Not only is it based on a play but it also uses spotlights, fairly long static shots, and theatrical acting. Plus, it takes place in one setting. I think there's even an intermission.

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#29 Post by MichaelB » Sun Jan 20, 2008 5:42 pm

Jan Švankmajer's Faust is the most extreme example I can think of - it's sourced from multiple adaptations of the legend, including Goethe, Marlowe, old Czech puppet adaptations and even Gounod's operas, and is absolutely true to those roots in that the theatrical material is presented against painted flats, and the puppets are human-size so they can interact with the only human performer. But it's also purely cinematic in that it would be impossible to stage.

I was involved with the British premiere of this, and I vividly recall a lot of people just couldn't get their heads round what Švankmajer was doing. They might have been able to handle the theatricality, but the puppets was a medium too far. (Czech puppet theatre is a serious adult art form, so there's a significant cultural leap right there).

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#30 Post by Robotron » Mon Jan 21, 2008 3:24 am

Peter Greenaway experimented with the idea more than once, most successfully in The Cook, the Thief His Wife and Her Lover.

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domino harvey
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#31 Post by domino harvey » Sun Jun 01, 2008 11:28 pm

I recently watched Lumet's Equus adaptation for the 70s project. Though the play its based on isn't that great and despite the film's strong opening, I was still very disappointed in the movie. Lumet should have heeded Hitchcock's advice about not "opening up" the action of a stage play. He also seems to have shied away from all possible angles of interpretation to such a degree that the entire film is blank and essentially pointless.

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#32 Post by geoffcowgill » Mon Jun 02, 2008 1:23 am

Mr Sheldrake wrote:

PBS taped a Steppenwolf production of Sam Shepard's True West (1980 maybe?) starring Gary Sinise and John Malkovich - the best version I've seen of my favorite modern American play. Never been released to video as far as I can recall.
This was on VHS. I remember renting it in the early-mid 90s.

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#33 Post by GaryC » Mon Jun 02, 2008 3:01 am

I've always liked the 1993 film of Six Degrees of Separation. I've not seen John Guare's original play, but the film is very well directed by Fred Schepisi (in his customary Scope ratio) and very well acted.

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ando
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#34 Post by ando » Wed Jun 18, 2008 2:55 pm

You all have mentioned (probably) all of the more well known stage-to-film adaptations - though I dislike that word. The word adaptation suggests that the original stage production has been comprimisied in some way. I feel a film is an entirely different art form altogether. At any rate, there are naturally some notable omissions, even within the late fifties/early sixties time frame the original post referred to.

- off the top of my head:

The Balcony (1963), Joseph Strick, based on the Jean Genet play
Marat Sade (1967), Peter Brook, based on the Peter Weiss play
Wit (2001), Mike Nichols, based on the Margaret Edson play

more to come...

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#35 Post by nycmagus » Wed Jun 18, 2008 6:25 pm

Mankiewicz made two fantastic movies from plays: SLEUTH and SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER. Under his direction, each work became a Mankiewicz film while still bearing the traces of the original playwright.

With SLEUTH, he deepened what was a clever two-hander into an examination of class, power and privilege. Mankiewicz does something similar with SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER, stripping away the play's laquer of homo self-loathing, thereby revealing the class analysis secreted within Tennesee Williams' text.

He also did well with GUYS AND DOLLS and (less so) JULIUS CAESAR (MGM's Rome and a canyon substituting for the plains of Phillipi just do not cut it). GUYS AND DOLLS is a fascinating adaptation in which he creates a dialectic between the theatrical and the cinematic as well method versus non-method acting styles.

As for EQUUS: I believe it is one of Lumet's greatest films. He had strong disagreement with the play and filmed it in such a way that the movie critiques and undercuts the play at every turn. In Lumet's hands, Dysart is not a hero of any sort, but a madman, the exact opposite of how he comes across on stage. What was amazing was how Lumet was able to take Burton's stage performance and turn it on its head. (In high school I was a bit of an EQUUS groupie and saw Anthony Hopkins; Anthony Perkins; Richard Burton; Alec McCowen; and Leonard Nimoy all play Dysart. Later in college I discovered the rotten heart of Shaffer's vision which Lumet exposed so elegantly).

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#36 Post by tryavna » Wed Jun 18, 2008 7:26 pm

nycmagus wrote:and (less so) JULIUS CAESAR (MGM's Rome and a canyon substituting for the plains of Phillipi just do not cut it)
Mank's Julius Caesar is actually one of my favorite Shakespeare adaptations, even though I'm willing to admit that it doesn't quite accomplish what it sets out to do. But I think that the flatness of the MGM house style works in the play's favor -- since it's probably Shakespeare's most austere work. Thus the un-lived-in atmosphere of the film gives it a sort of stylized theatricality that I feel confident Mank was exploiting (or at least trying to). It also has one of the most interesting casts of the decade, with a variety of acting styles (Gielgud's classically trained traditional reading, Brando's method-acting, the various character actors like Calhern and O'Brien, etc.) that adds to the sense of conflicting ambitions and aims in the play. Plus, I also think that Rozsa's score is one of his most intelligent.
As for EQUUS: I believe it is one of Lumet's greatest films. He had strong disagreement with the play and filmed it in such a way that the movie critiques and undercuts the play at every turn. In Lumet's hands, Dysart is not a hero of any sort, but a madman, the exact opposite of how he comes across on stage. What was amazing was how Lumet was able to take Burton's stage performance and turn it on its head. (In high school I was a bit of an EQUUS groupie and saw Anthony Hopkins; Anthony Perkins; Richard Burton; Alec McCowen; and Leonard Nimoy all play Dysart. Later in college I discovered the rotten heart of Shaffer's vision which Lumet exposed so elegantly).
Wow! Those are some really interesting points. I think you've totally changed my opinion about this film. (I saw it for the first time a couple of months ago and was left rather cold, despite knowing that something quite interesting but that I just couldn't put my finger on was going on.)

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#37 Post by Polybius » Wed Jun 18, 2008 11:45 pm

tryavna wrote: It also has one of the most interesting casts of the decade, with a variety of acting styles (Gielgud's classically trained traditional reading, Brando's method-acting, the various character actors like Calhern and O'Brien, etc.) that adds to the sense of conflicting ambitions and aims in the play.

Agreed. I don't think there is any anecdote about that which compares to the one about Olivier and Hoffman, but it's still kind of the same rub.
As for EQUUS: I believe it is one of Lumet's greatest films. He had strong disagreement with the play and filmed it in such a way that the movie critiques and undercuts the play at every turn. In Lumet's hands, Dysart is not a hero of any sort, but a madman, the exact opposite of how he comes across on stage. What was amazing was how Lumet was able to take Burton's stage performance and turn it on its head. (In high school I was a bit of an EQUUS groupie and saw Anthony Hopkins; Anthony Perkins; Richard Burton; Alec McCowen; and Leonard Nimoy all play Dysart. Later in college I discovered the rotten heart of Shaffer's vision which Lumet exposed so elegantly).
tryavna wrote:Wow! Those are some really interesting points.
For me, too. I think I may have to look into this further. He wouldn't be the first guy to try this, but it's not always successful, at least not completely (Robert Aldrich's take on Kiss me Deadly is liked by many who enjoy Hammer's actions, for example, as well as those who see the critique that Aldrich weaved into it.)

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#38 Post by nycmagus » Thu Jun 19, 2008 9:50 am

I will give JULIUS CAESAR another look keeping in mind what you have written (as a Mankiewicz champion, re-watching his films is never a chore).

There is one story JLM liked to tell about Brando doing Antony's funeral oration. He was behind Brando, hidden, and Brando could not get the extras' attention. JLM said "Marlon, get mad," and Brando did. Mank said it was the most sublime moment he ever experienced on a movie set.

As for EQUUS: I think it is one of the rare cases where a director subverting a text a) was intention al and b) works. I think many claims are made that this is occuring in a film, but I do not think it actually happens all that often.

What is interesting is that Milos Forman with AMADEUS did something akin to what Lumet did -- he radically altered the thrust of Shaffer's original play. Forman accomplished his goal through major surgery on the text and an alteration of emphasis. In each case, the director gutted the marshmallow core of Shaffer's play and sharpened the work's outlook.

On stage, Shaffer's plays were dazzling and theatrical (the direction of John Dexter [EQUUS] and Peter Hall [AMADEUS] may have had a great deal to do with this) so the banal nature of Shaffer's worldview was easily missed. To become films, however, the plays needed major revision.

Shaffer hated EQUUS (I think he realized what Lumet had done), and it is the one film that Lumet does not write about in MAKING MOVIES and rarely speaks of in interviews. Shaffer went on to revise AMADEUS yet again (there are four versions: original London; Broadway revision; film re-write; final revision) that retreats from the Forman version and re-inscribes to some extent Shaffer's original version.

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#39 Post by tryavna » Thu Jun 19, 2008 11:45 am

nycmagus wrote:it is the one film that Lumet does not write about in MAKING MOVIES and rarely speaks of in interviews. Shaffer went on to revise AMADEUS yet again (there are four versions: original London; Broadway revision; film re-write; final revision) that retreats from the Forman version and re-inscribes to some extent Shaffer's original version.
I seem to recall that Lumet does talk about Equus in the hour-long interview with Robert Osborne that TCM produced. (I believe it's on either the Network or the Dog Day Afternoon DVD.) Lumet mainly talks about his relationship with Burton -- and briefly at that. But it's interesting. I may need to revisit that segment in light of your comments about the film.

By the way, I entirely agree with you about how rarely in reality directors actually intend or accomplish a true subversion of the material -- despite the fact that lots of people (and sometimes directors themselves) say they do. It's quite a difficult feat, if you think about it, since the director has to do it through "tone" more than anything else. And of course, it requires a director with a more forceful personality than the author(s) of the original material.

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#40 Post by nycmagus » Thu Jun 19, 2008 1:37 pm

With regard to subversion of material, I think often the culture shifts and with it the possible viewing positions from which a film can be watched. Suddenly, what was sincere two or three decades ago needs to be re-understood as ironic. I think that directors and critics often claim the tactic of subversion to rescue a film that taken at face value is now dated. The work's formal elements still provide pleasure, but its content may have become problematic as culture evolved.

The key line in EQUUS for me is when Dysart states (approx.): "A doctor can only destroy passion. He cannot create it." Shaffer clearly intends this revelation to be Dysart's epiphany, the moment when all becomes clear. It is also apparent that the notion is a complete misunderstanding and distortion of what a psychologist/psychiatrist does. But Shaffer needs Dysart to turn his back on his profession and admit its failure. Shaffer endorses some vague idea of a "life force" that is corrupted by both religion and psychiatry, never realizing that therapy very often releases and restores a vitality that has been beaten down in people (Lumet has stated that he strongly disagrees with Shaffer's take on psychiatry). But Shaffer's notion of the need for humans to return to a more "natural" state requires him to bash psychiatry as another societal obstacle.

Lumet portraying Dysart as mad undercuts Shaffer's vision. When Burton speaks this line in the film, it is no longer an epiphany, but a revelation of just how unhinged Dysart has become. Burton's theatrical performance is at odds with Lumet's dry, clinical images (I detect a holdover of the style Lumet used in NETWORK). The (intentional) mismatch between performance and visuals gives the impression (at least to me) that there is something not quite right about Dysart -- that he has become unmoored from his surroundings. The final shot of Burton's face half in shadow could be a variation on representations of the Joker -- Lumet's most severe image of Dysart's insanity (the play concludes with a forlorn Dysart sitting on a bench as a spotlight slowly fades on him -- a softer, genteely tragic vision).

The biggest fly in the ointment to my reading is a narrative one: Hesther Saloman brings the boy Alang Strang to Dysart believing that only Dysart can save him. The audience must accept that Hesther either does not see Dysart's madness or willfully ignores it, possibly remembering a time when he was sane. Or it may be that the case of Alan Strang is the one that pushes Dysart over the edge. Lumet doesn't make Hesther mad as well, but is forced by script and plot demands to keep her scenes.

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#41 Post by King Prendergast » Thu Jun 19, 2008 4:41 pm

Death Trap is a fairly decent play to film adaptation by Lumet. Entertaining little thriller with great turns by the always reliable Michael Cain and a very tall and skinny Christopher Reeve.

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#42 Post by lacritfan » Fri Jun 20, 2008 5:14 am

Does cable count? If so Angels in America...

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#43 Post by John Cope » Sun Jun 22, 2008 9:56 pm

FWIW I agree whole heartedly with the praise for Equus. Beyond that, I want to recommend one of my own personal favorites, Beth B's adaptation of Neal Bell's Two Small Bodies. It was made with German money but the source text, cast and director all provide American cred. Still, I'm not so sure that any country could lay unique claim to Bell's particular means of divining truth; it is his alone. This is an interesting picture, too, for the fact that its conversion to film is apparently considered compromised in the most dire of ways by many and yet I love it regardless and probably for reasons that have a lot to do with why others hate it.

For those who don't know the play, it's a two character piece (as per the title I suppose) which deals ostensibly with the investigation of a kidnapping. Fred Ward plays Lt. Brann and Suzy Amis plays Eileen Mahoney. The original play is by Bell who did the adapted screenplay here. Beth B is probably best known as an underground experimental filmmaker and this, barring Salvation!, is then likely her most mainstream film (which says a tremendous amount about her other work!).

The basic set up is just a way to establish the fluid parameters of a more amorphous investigation into the nature of identity as conceived of through the social roles we play and all their hierarchical implications; the way roles define presumptive power positions which may be either embraced or actively rejected. What we get then is a series of scenes, all set within the bounds of Eileen's home, in which the detective engages her in a prolonged inquiry about the disappearance of her two children; however, this is pretext, of course, for what quickly emerges as the more substantial, though abstract, inquiry on the significance of normatized notions of identity and the ultimate meaning of personal agency.

It's an exhausting consideration of the malleability of identity and the irony of social roles as resolutely transformative and mercurial; all portrayed through a relentless dual dialogue between characters who eventually lose all sense of balance and proportion, to each other and themselves.

My memory of its poor reception has a lot to do with an experience I had screening it for a friend who taught theater. I was excited to share it with him and hoped he would see similar worth in it. Unfortunately, he sat through the entire film stony faced and had very little to say afterward. The most I could get from him was the sense that he had absolutely not appreciated the way in which the piece had been "opened out". I can guess the specifics of why this was but basically it comes back to that notion of what it is we allow ourselves to receive from a text. In this particular case I think I was the better audience for what Beth B was doing because fidelity to the internal dynamics of the piece as originating from a particular theatrical source were of much less consequence to me. I was more interested in the mercurial nature of the role playing and, in fact, valued the film set as it was just "real" enough to convince but never enough to diminish the prominence of the disruptive text itself. I found and find the confluence of these elements perpetually fascinating.

The artificiality of the performances and the nature of what is being performed sits in resolute uneasiness within the naturalistic set but that heightens the psycho-drama at the heart of it and emphasizes the performance nature of the experience itself--that an understanding of it can only be arrived at through the acceptance of this prismatic structure; it aids it in other words. And this is because there is never any fixed point of sense versus nonsense, comprehension versus misinformation. The final suggestion is that to comprehend one must, to some degree, submit to the confluence of any and all other possibilities. Only in this seeming chaos can a genuine complete understanding be culled. The film is simultaneously enervating and deeply challenging, frustrating but always seductive.

And the score by Swans was amazing.

Anyway, here's the trailer via Youtube. Not entirely an accurate representation but I don't really know what would be.

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filmed theatre

#44 Post by exte » Wed Jan 07, 2009 12:51 am

I just saw the Charlie Rose tribute to Harold Pinter and saw the opportunity to purchase one of his filmed plays on amazon.com. They have several assorted boxsets. I was wondering if there's any filmed theatre that must be seen that anyone here can recommend. Thanks.

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Re: Filmed Theater

#45 Post by Matango » Wed Jan 07, 2009 3:02 am

More of an adaptation than filmed theatre, but it takes place in one room, so it might still count: Pinter's The Birthday Party. One of my favourite films. Patrick Magee, Robert Shaw, Dandy Nichols, Sidney Tafler...all at their best. Wonderful stuff. Amazon UK has a watchable Region 2 for about five quid or so.

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Re: Filmed Theater

#46 Post by MichaelB » Wed Jan 07, 2009 11:11 am

Ironically (or possibly not), I've always thought that the single most successful screen Macbeth regardless of screen size was the 1979 Thames TV version - which essentially restaged Trevor Nunn's groundbreaking 1976 Royal Shakespeare Company studio production for the TV cameras. I'm too young to have seen the original, but I suspect the TV version is even more claustrophobic, thanks to the use of close-ups - though Nunn amped this to the max anyway by staging the piece in a tiny studio, with the actors surrounded by the audience.

I wrote a more detailed piece for BFI Screenonline, and it's out on DVD on both sides of the Atlantic - but since the source would have been 1970s analogue PAL videotape, the British edition is probably the best bet.

Which reminds me - did anyone catch the TV broadcast of the Trevor Nunn/Ian McKellen King Lear? It's out on Blu-ray, and I'm very tempted.

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Re: Filmed Theater

#47 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Jan 07, 2009 7:14 pm

MichaelB wrote:Which reminds me - did anyone catch the TV broadcast of the Trevor Nunn/Ian McKellen King Lear? It's out on Blu-ray, and I'm very tempted.
Sadly I couldn't see it (it would have been too much to tell the family I was going to hog the television all Christmas Day evening to watch and/or record it, especially when they wanted to watch WALL-E!) and didn't manage to get Macbeth either, though I did finally get the chance to see the 30s-set Richard III film and the Trevor Nunn version of Othello (which I'm glad I stayed up late to record since it overran the Radio Times scheduling by an hour and a quarter!)

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Re: Filmed Theater

#48 Post by Sloper » Thu Jan 08, 2009 11:19 am

I always found Ian McKellen’s snot a bit off-putting in that production – he seems to make a special effort to gozz some out, if that’s the right phrase, during (I think) the ghost scene. Like his turn as Iago in the Othello Colin mentions, his performance is just too self-regarding to really convince, especially in close-up. I can sort of imagine it working in The Other Place, which is brilliant for that kind of all-out fire and brimstone stuff, but the TV production came across as over-egged, and even a little camp.

It reminds me of another TV play, of Ibsen’s Ghosts, done in the late ‘80s. It starred Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench, Michael Gambon (surprisingly bad) and Freddie Jones, so it was another of these high-powered-cast affairs. The whole production was bathed in a dull blue light, so it looked like everyone was dying of venereal disease, and all the dialogue – even the more light-hearted bits, of which there are many in that play – was spoken in a tone of intense, funereal, Scandinavian gloom. This meant that, by the time things started getting really tragic, you were so anaesthetised by all the moaning that you just didn’t care.

I remember Nunn’s Macbeth being infused with a similar kind of greenish light; it tries so hard, and in such obvious ways, to be terrifying, that it ends up looking like a particularly low-budget Hammer horror film. I’ve seen several productions of Macbeth, all bad except one – Polanski’s. Jon Finch succeeded in that film where Orson Welles, Ian McKellan, Antony Sher, and Patrick Stewart have all failed, by playing the role without grandeur and without pomposity, as an ordinary man. I think that’s the only way this most problematic of Shakespeare’s tragedies can work; it’s basically the same story as Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, and cinematic equivalents would be things like Double Indemnity or A Simple Plan, where an ‘everyman’ figure is reduced, by stages, from being basically good to being utterly evil.

These are morality tales about how easy it is to slide into murder and sin, so the hero, and his wife, have to be normal, even a little dull, for us to identify with them. If Macbeth is lurching around the stage, curling his lips and narrowing his eyes, hacking up phlegm all over the place, while bathed in green light, and being egged on by a wife who looks like butter would turn to ice cream in her mouth, it’s all too alienating to hold the audience’s attention. (I should say my attention; it was a very successful production…)

Speaking of Ibsen, if you ever have the chance to see the TV version of Hedda Gabler with Fiona Shaw, Donal McCann and Stephen Rea, do – it’s overwrought in all the right ways, an exhaustingly brilliant production.

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Re: Filmed Theater

#49 Post by HarryLong » Thu Jan 08, 2009 12:16 pm

In Lumet's hands, Dysart is not a hero of any sort, but a madman, the exact opposite of how he comes across on stage.
Interesting that Dysart was played as a "hero" in the original production.
I've played the role twice in regional productions (never saw it on B'way) and I found Dysart to be more than a bit burnt out both personally & professionally & ultimately sad that the "cure" he's going to effect on Alan will make him societally acceptable while lessening him in every way. (This is very clear in Dysart's final monologue - at least the full length monologue in the mass-market publication, as opposed to the shortened version in the Samuel French acting edition.) Dysart is more than a bit conflicted about this, I think - though on reflection I can see that the words would lend themselves to a boasting "This is what I'm going to do" approach (particularly with the eliminated passages ...er ... eliminated) rather than the lament that I got from it.
My big problems with Lumet's film are that Richard Burton send me straight to sleep with his droning monologues and the more realistic representation that film adapts (much like the observation above about the film of WEST SIDE STORY). The play is a celebration of theatricality (horses represented by dancers in brown running suits wearing fantasticated "masks", etc.) and that is a good part of what makes it special as a production. It also ties it intrinsically to Dysart's monologue about being a masked priest with masked acolytes sacrificing an endless procession of youngsters to his gods.
I also feel that seeing Alan blind what are very well made fake horses effectively eliminates sympathy for him; the obviously stylized representations of a stage production don't pose that problem.

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Re: Filmed Theater

#50 Post by HarryLong » Thu Jan 08, 2009 12:42 pm

The key line in EQUUS for me is when Dysart states (approx.): "A doctor can only destroy passion. He cannot create it." Shaffer clearly intends this revelation to be Dysart's epiphany, the moment when all becomes clear. It is also apparent that the notion is a complete misunderstanding and distortion of what a psychologist/psychiatrist does. But Shaffer needs Dysart to turn his back on his profession and admit its failure. Shaffer endorses some vague idea of a "life force" that is corrupted by both religion and psychiatry, never realizing that therapy very often releases and restores a vitality that has been beaten down in people (Lumet has stated that he strongly disagrees with Shaffer's take on psychiatry). But Shaffer's notion of the need for humans to return to a more "natural" state requires him to bash psychiatry as another societal obstacle.
Only found your post after I'd posted. I think that's a very good reading of the play. But if Lumet really disagreed with Shaffer's take on psychiatry, he wasn't going to be sympathetic with Dysart's realization that it has its limits. (And one wonders if he shouldn't have found another script if he so strongly disagreed with EQUUS' core.)

The half in shadow shot of Dysart might also be influenced by a simuilar shot of Pter Lorre in Karl Freund's MAD LOVE ...

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