10 great films set in the theatre

There are few art forms as closely intertwined as film and theatre. Both revolve around an audience relying on a group of strangers – either on a screen or live in front of them – to provide an escape hatch from their regular lives for a couple of hours. Many successful actors, writers and directors have both stage and screen credits to their name. Popular plays are regularly adapted into popular movies and (not quite as regularly) vice versa. 

While ‘staginess’ is always a potential pitfall in the process of adapting a play into a feature film, movie directors have long been drawn to the stages themselves and the storytelling potential they hold: the grand old buildings with all their hidden nooks and crannies, the labyrinthine backstage corridors full of secrets and scandal; the gossamer veil between the public and private spaces, and how often the turmoil from the latter risks spilling over into the former. 

The demands of acting directly in front of a paying audience and being subject to their instant, unfiltered reaction provide these films with many a dramatic engine. Yet that high-pressure environment also leaves plenty of scope for on-stage misadventures that can just as easily lead to hilarity. If the audience leaves entertained, even if the production hasn’t gone quite as the actors had expected, then everyone’s happy. 

The sheer unpredictability of it all makes the theatre a potent setting for all kinds of filmic stories: dramatic, tragic and comic. Here are 10 of the most interesting examples.

Director: Marcel Carné

Shot during the Second World War Nazi occupation of France, Marcel Carné’s 19th-century historical epic tells the story of the beautiful Garance (Arletty) and the four very different men who love her. The action is set in and around the legendary Funambules theatre, with two of Garance’s four suitors based on the real people who performed there. 

Despite the intensely trying conditions of its production and the many workarounds required for filmmaking under Nazi rule, the lavishness of Carné’s majestic vision remains striking today; at the time, the studio set recreating the Parisian theatre district was the largest in French cinema history. Staggering in its artistry, and sweepingly romantic in its vision, Les Enfants du paradis is a deeply felt ode to the life-sustaining power of performance in the face of daunting odds.

Director: Ralph Smart

Curtain Up follows the exploits of a small British repertory company in the brilliantly named fictional town of Drossmouth as they try to stage their latest production: the inept playwright (Margaret Rutherford) who insists on making a continual stream of ‘helpful’ suggestions, the increasingly irate director (Robert Morley) whom she’s driving to distraction, and a cast beset with varying levels of talent and interest in the play at hand.

Many films about the theatre revel in the architectural splendour of the building and/or the artistic gravity of the material being performed. Curtain Up revels in the glorious disasters that occur when a mismatched group of differing ability do their best with material that never really needed to see the light of day: a filmic tribute to theatrical mediocrity. The glorious sniping between real life stage legends Rutherford and Morley is the highlight of the movie’s numerous pleasures.

Director: Mel Brooks

As he is doing his books one day, accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) idly mentions to theatre producer Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) that a producer could make far more money with a flop than a big hit. This sets into motion a zany scheme that finds the two collaborating on a production that – they hope – is doomed to fail. The production? ‘Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden.’

Using the ‘putting on a show’ narrative so popular in classic Hollywood, Mel Brooks’ ground-breaking, blackly comic satire aims its barbs straight at Hitler; released just a little over two decades after the end of the Second World War, the film glories in its bad taste. While there are certain elements of The Producers that haven’t aged well, the gleefully defiant mockery of Nazism is not one of them. Its showpiece musical number, which takes inspiration from Busby Berkeley in the most unexpected and amusing of ways, still feels bracingly risqué.

Director: Douglas Hickox

Although classically trained, years of association with horror movies had pigeonholed Vincent Price as too lightweight an actor for Shakespeare. Theatre of Blood gave him the chance to prove his doubters wrong, albeit from within familiarly gory territory. He plays delusional thespian Edward Lionheart, whose conviction that a group of critics sabotaged his chance of winning a coveted theatre award leads him to murder them in a series of extravagant and gruesome manners, all inspired by the works of the Bard.

Theatre of Blood is wildly theatrical in both content and style, with Price’s maniacal central turn the greatest of its many joys. Clad in an array of ridiculous costumes, reciting Shakespeare with the energy of an actor trying to reach an audience on the moon, his performance is so delightfully grand that the theatre where he conducts most of his grisly killings – the defunct Putney Hippodrome, which the movie’s climax shows being burned down – is barely big enough to contain it. 

Director: John Cassavetes

Renowned actress Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) is profoundly unsettled to witness the death of one of her fans outside the theatre where she’s been preparing for her latest play. The incident – which Pedro Almodóvar would borrow for All About My Mother (1999) – destabilises her already fragile psyche, leaving her colleagues worried as to whether she’s going to be ready to lead the cast on opening night.

By placing us in the audience for many of the stage sequences, director John Cassavetes conjures up the high-wire thrill of witnessing live performance; Myrtle is such an erratic presence, we can’t help but hold our breath and desperately hope she doesn’t embarrass herself. Opening Night is finely tuned to the intense emotional toll on stage actors of baring their soul to a roomful of strangers, night after night, no matter what is going on in their personal lives. 

Director: François Truffaut

Paris during the occupation. Everyone assumes that the disappearance of successful Jewish stage director Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennent) means he managed to leave the country before the Nazis took over, but in actuality he is hiding out in the cellar of the Theatre Montmartre, now being run by his actress wife Marion (Catherine Deneuve). The Last Metro follows Marion as she does her best to keep Lucas safe, while also trying to keep the Montmartre running smoothly. 

François Truffaut’s lush historical drama makes great use of the layout of the theatre: the stage and the unnerving visibility it represents, the long narrow corridors connecting the dressing rooms, and the deepest bowels of the building where Lucas is secreted. Between his determination to stay involved in the production despite his circumstances, and the packed audiences Marion’s troupe play to throughout the occupation, The Last Metro – much like Les Enfants du paradis, which was made during the era Truffaut’s film depicts – is a paean to the value of art in times of great unrest. 

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Produced during the final portion of Ingmar Bergman’s celebrated film career, when he’d retired from making movies for theatrical distribution and was directing them only for TV, After the Rehearsal follows a long and difficult conversation between seasoned theatre director Henrik (Erland Josephson) and his young leading lady Anna (Lena Olin).

Featuring just three speaking parts (Ingrid Thulin appears later as Henrik’s former lover and Anna’s mother), the film is a near-plotless meditation on the confluence of life and art for those who consider the stage their home; how hard it can be to tell the difference between real life and performance for those who perform for a living. Though Bergman is most remembered for his movies, he actually directed many more plays than films, and After the Rehearsal – which is set entirely on a stage – thrums with his complicated love of the theatre.

Director: Peter Bogdanovich

Peter Bogdanovich’s screwball comedy tracks the American cast of a dated English farce through three different performances over their theatrical run. Each is beset with technical issues and interpersonal troubles, leading to a host of disasters that become increasingly frenzied as the film progresses.

Noises Off… started life as a stage production by British playwright Michael Frayn, but Bogdanovich and his winning cast (led by Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve, who headlined a similarly fun theatrical adaptation, Deathtrap, a decade earlier) do an excellent job of translating the mounting chaotic hilarity to the big screen. The film is particularly successful at mining the distinction between on and off-stage space for comedic value – in one example, the behind-the-scenes action of the second performance is enacted largely in mime, for fear of disrupting the play happening on stage at the same time. 

Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu

Eager to shake off his reputation as an ex-superhero movie star, Riggan Thompson (Michael Keaton) mounts an intimate Broadway production of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film follows that production through the week of previews leading up to opening night, with each performance more dramatic than the last… but not for the reasons Riggan was hoping. 

Birdman or (The Unexpected Value of Ignorance) treats the theatre as a last bastion of artistic integrity in a world besieged by social media virality and superhero movies, smartly using the real-life reputations of his impressive cast – it’s no coincidence that Keaton as Birdman looks very much like Keaton as Batman – for extra resonance. The film is constructed to play like a single two-hour take (though in fact there are a number of well-concealed cuts), which adds further intensity and claustrophobia to the heady backstage action.

Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Feeling adrift after the death of his wife, Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is hired to direct a multi-language performance of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. During the course of preparing for the complex production he becomes close friends with Misaki (Toko Miura), the young woman hired to drive him between his hotel and the theatre. 

While there is a physical theatre building in Drive My Car, director Ryusuke Hamaguchi is more interested in what the theatre represents than the space itself: the difficulty and importance of art in facilitating communication across various divides. The performers speak different languages (Japanese, Mandarin, Korean Sign Language), but when they’re on stage together, they still manage to create a work of profound beauty. The process of witnessing his actors connect on a level beyond the words on the page, in addition to his growing friendship with Misaki, helps Yusuke find his way back into the world. Hamaguchi’s delicate, engrossing portrayal of his journey makes the film’s three hours fly by.