3 - From Stage to Screen: Ventura Pons’s Adaptations of the Plays

Summary

Belbel has written for the small screen, in particular the TV soap Secrets de família (Family Secrets), which he co-authored with the novelist Maria Mercè Roca. He has also been tempted to write for the cinema. His first incursion (which remains something of a mystery) ended with his withdrawing from the project during the filming. His second was a collaborative venture with Antonio Chavarrías entitled Dictado (Dictation), which had to be put on hold when Belbel became Director of the TNC. His third – and apparently most important – venture into the cinema is entitled Eva, an ambitious science fiction project that has still to be filmed. Belbel is an avid film spectator, and, as was observed in Chapter 2, had his cast of Les Fausses confidences view fourteen Hollywood films in preparation for his production of the play. However, what he said in a 1998 interview about theatre being ‘a living thing, where no two performances are the same’ seems to suggest that his priorities lie on the stage rather than on the screen. The following extract from a joint interview between Belbel and film-maker Ventura Pons, on the occasion of the premiere of the latter’s version of Forasters, underlines the point that Belbel’s plays are perceived to have a cinematic quality about them, while at the same time he stresses that he is essentially a playwright not a film scriptwriter:

[V.P.] Sergi Belbel’s plays are very cinematographic, playing with narrative discontinuity, and in some cases with narrative deconstruction. I’ve done this in many films, I’ve broken conventional narrative rules.

Do you agree, Sergi Belbel, that your theatre is cinematographic?

S.B. Many people tell me that. In truth, I watch more cinema than I do theatre, and its influence is very tangible in structures, in games, in breaking the plot–link–ending formula. I do it because I like to, I enjoy playing with that, and the theatre has a very important ludic element that offers challenges to the spectator. That said, I write theatre not film scripts.

Whereas the previous two chapters have been concerned with Belbel’s work as a theatrical writer and director, the current one concentrates on how his plays have been adapted to the screen.