Rant Rant Rant

I was watching Hurly Burly last week, for the 5th time maybe, and I'm still awed by the genius screenplay. Is it David Rabe or David Mamet? I never can remember. The characters say nothing, or the most inane things, or purely insane things - "I have taken thought to the point where it is no more use to me than a head fulla car horns", for example, but this god-like David layers this so cleverly that their world makes sense, their crazy dialogue sounds swell, and you care, plenty. You even love Eddie - Eddie who fails to intervene when Phil head butts their care package, and later throws the excellent Meg Ryan out of the car; Eddie with a Cuban pimp's moustache, who excuses this and all other of Phil's horrible form, and blames the women. Genius.
It started as a play, Hurly Burly.
I HATE plays. I've seen three, or five, at least, and hated them all. All I can think at plays is how embarrassing it is for the actors to be yelling and poncing around only feet from people who feel sorry for them. Theatre is a wretched experience, uniformly wretched.
I was thinking about that Sigourney Weaver/Ben Kingsley film, set on a cliff top, where the torturer appears out of the howling rain and rekindles Sigourney's traumatic memories. That's also a play adapted for the screen, and most recently there was Closer, which is claustrophobic, stagey as fuck, and borderline unwatchable.
It must be hard to make a play work on film, especially if you're terrified to fuck it up. Hurly Burly is a stand-out. Its extraordinary. Never, not even for an instant was I mortified. That goddamn Sigourney one (WHAT is it called) caused me to cringe, frankly, and become flushed with that particular kind of embarrassment-by-proxy reserved for audiences at small and terrible plays acted by overly-confident amateurs.
So my ambition this weekend, with the forecast for 16 and sleeting chills, is to get a stack of films that started as plays, and pose myself and the Captain this question: Apart from Hurly Burly, do plays always blow on screen?

posted by Annie B @ 3:51 PM