Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, the Victorian Bar in Glasgow's Tron Theatre is more atmospheric than most. Which should lend itself perfectly for its forthcoming transformation into Rick's Bar for post-show drinks following performances of Morag Fullarton's stage adaptation of Casablanca in the main house. Even before the bar's forthcoming make-over, sitting alone at a table on a wet Wednesday afternoon waiting for a woman you've never met before, and without so much as a piano player to set an extra layer of melancholy, one can't help but feel like you're already part of the movie.
When Fullarton arrives straight from rehearsals, however, we're returned in an instant to the Glasgow where this most singular of writer/directors cut her theatrical teeth before moving into television, working on dramas such as This Life, Taggart and Rebus. At the moment, however, it is her three actor version of one of the most iconic films ever made that concerns her.
“I love it!” Fullarton gushes from the off about the movie that paired
Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in wartime Morocco for one of the
greatest unfulfilled onscreen romances in celluloid history. “It's got
tremendous heart, and there's fascinating combination of a huge moral
dilemma and a great love story.”
Casablanca also has some of the most familiar lines ever misquoted, from Bergman's 'Play it, Sam' line that leads to the club pianist playing As Time Goes By, to Bogart's final 'This could be the start of
a beautiful friendship'.
“I knew the first time I saw it that I'd seen something special,” says Fullarton. “Films like that aren't made anymore today, where it's all about action films and so forth, but there's nothing quite like Casablanca.”
The idea for putting Fullarton's favourite film onstage came from Classic Cuts, Oran Mor's A Play, A Pie and A Pint offshoot of slimmed-down Shakespeares and other more epically realised works from the canon. Fullarton suggested to producer David MacLennan that a treatment of a classic film was equally as valid, and duly set to work.
The result when it first appeared as what Fullarton styles as the lunchtime cut of the show was a rip-roaring success, duly being lauded with a five star review on these pages. More homage than pastiche, Fullarton's new gin joint cut of her play now comes with her script pretty much untouched, but with a real life B movie shown before the main feature.
“We're not trying to stage the movie,” she is quick to point out. “We're doing a piece of theatre, so the way I approached it was to try and make a great theatrical event. So part of what happened was that I took
what I thought were the best bits of the film and cut out quite a lot. You have to be careful that you don't fillet it too much or throw the baby out with the bathwater, but part of the fun of the staging for the audience is seeing the actors play all the parts, and it seems to work. But you have to be careful when you're dealing with something that's so cinematic, because you're working in a different medium.”
For a piece of work that necessitates the appearance of the mass army of the Third Reich, this is probably just as well. Fullarton's first-hand experience of one medium being transferred to another without adapting to its new form is in fact responsible for her own leap from stage to screen.
“My first experience of putting something onscreen was a televised version of my stage production of Mistero Buffo for BBC 2,” she recalls of her production of Dario Fo's play starring Robbie Coltrane, “and I was so deeply disappointed with how they televised it I decided to learn how to do it myself. You can't just point a camera at a stage and hope for the best. So by the same token I'm very aware that I'm not putting a film onstage. I'm turning this into a theatre show, with all the craft and the magic that will work for an audience. That's what we have fun with, the things you can do onstage that you can't do on film.”
While the publicity material for Casablanca describes it as 'disrespectful', Fullarton is at pains to point out that her take on it is not a spoof or a pastiche.
“It's affectionate,” she says, “but it's respectful in that I've gone for the best lines. I think sometimes there's a snobbery with some people who say that movie scripts can't possibly compare with theatre scripts, which is something I don't entirely agree with. I think there's some great writing in film, and I think there's some terrific moments in the writing to be enjoyed in Casablanca. So from that point of view, yes, it's respectful to the script. The disrespectful thing comes in other ways, and I think you'd have to have a very, very thin skin to get upset by some of the devices we've used to make it work with three actors playing all the parts. So it's more we're taking license with it than being disrespectful per se.”
This isn't the first time Casablanca will have been seen onstage. Long before Fullarton's lunchtime and gin joint versions, the 1942 film itself was based on Everybody Comes To Rick's, by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, who sold their script to Warner Brothers in 1942 for 20,000 dollars after failing to find a Broadway producer. While much of the play remained intact in the script for Casablanca, including the use of the song As Time Goes By, Everybody Comes To Rick's has only seen one high profile production. That was in 1991, when former East Enders bad boy Leslie Grantham, aka Dirty Den, played Rick.
“Apparently the original play was dreadful,” says Fullerton, only knowing it by reputation.
The film itself features several writers credits, and, while a slow burner on its initial release, has since acquired an iconic status that might well cause Casablanca's acolytes to be protective.
“People were coming up to me and saying, 'That's my favourite film, I hope you're not going to fuck it up'”, Fullarton lets slip. “But then they'd come and see it, and I don't think anyone thought we'd done something terrible to the film. I can say that because we've already done it, and one of the reasons we're doing it again is because people were fighting to get in to see it.
But I also think we're reinventing it for a different kind of audience. One of the reasons I wanted to do this as well was because it's one of my favourite films, but the only time I ever have to see it on a big screen is occasionally once every five years or so at the GFT or something. Now wouldn't it be a great to have the opportunity for all the people who feel the same as me to see this irresistible cocktail of a film done in a different way.”
Here's looking at you, kid.
Casablanca: The Gin Joint Cut, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, July 7th-23rd;
Pleasance, Edinburgh, August 3rd-29th
www.tron.co.uk
www.pleasance.co.uk
The Herald, July 5th 2011
ends
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