From screen to stage

In The Telegraph, Jasper Rees explores the fashion for adapting films for the stage.

It's possible to take the long view, like Tom Morris, associate director of the National Theatre who has co-adapted A Matter of Life and Death, that the vogue for film adaptation is part of a theatrical continuum which goes back millennia. "The idea that it's in some way better or more valuable to have no visible source for a story I don't think holds any kind of historical water," he says. "Every classical Greek play was very clearly a reworking of an existing story and therefore technically a literary adaptation. All of Shakespeare's plays are in that sense literary adaptation."