Almodóvar's 'All About My Mother' is staged in London

After years of nixing adaptations of his films, Pedro Almodóvar has allowed a stage version of 'All About My Mother'. Time Out talks exclusively to the acclaimed director, and those transplanting his work to the Old Vic

'All About my Mother' is a story about transplantation. Opening in the organ donation clinic in Madrid where its heroine, Manuela, works, Pedro Almodóvar’s 1999 film subjects her to a devastating trauma that leaves her former life unviable, then brings her to Barcelona. There’s a danger that the new host will reject her but, as so often in Almodóvar’s work, a group of women offers a collective masterclass in how to adapt, transform and flourish under challenging circumstances. There’s Agrado, the no-nonsense transsexual hooker who barks but never bites, and with whom Manuela has history; Huma Roja, the grand stage actress who’s hooked on a junkie girlfriend, for whom Manuela starts to work; Sister Rosa, the saintly young nun who looks out for society’s rejects but not for herself, for whom Manuela starts to care. One way or another, each must learn to graft if they’re to survive.

‘All About My Mother’ is also an exercise in transplantation; the blood of other stories runs in its veins. As well as copious nods to Almodóvar’s own previous work (including the transplantation motif itself), it took direct inspiration from backstage movies such as Cassavetes’ ‘Opening Night’ and Mankiewicz’s ‘All About Eve’, the brilliant bitchfest on which Almodóvar’s title riffs. The story’s theatrical setting also provided the perfect basis for making explicit, extended use of certain plays: Tennessee Williams’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ and Spanish playwright Lorca’s ‘Blood Wedding’.

And now ‘All About My Mother’ is to be transplanted itself: a stage adaptation opens at the Old Vic this week, with a formidable cast including Lesley Manville as Manuela, Diana Rigg as Huma and Eleanor Bron as Sister Rosa’s mother. Throw a stone in the West End at the moment and you’ll hit a play adapted from a film, from ‘Mary Poppins’ and ‘Billy Elliot’ to the deadpan comedy ‘Elling’, based on a recent Norwegian movie; at least half a dozen more are opening over the next year, from ‘Brief Encounter’ to ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’. With a few honourable exceptions, such adaptations rarely offer much imaginative interrogation of their inspirations; in the interests of exploitable nostalgia, some actively seek to clone the movie in question as closely as possible. As a film, ‘All About My Mother’ was fuelled by its sources but not beholden to them; rather than making a carbon copy, it began a conversation. It’s encouraging, then, that the creators of the Old Vic production – first-time producer Daniel Sparrow, playwright Samuel Adamson and director Tom Cairns – aim to continue that conversation. It was also, of course, essential that Almodóvar encouraged it.

‘In our first meeting, flipping through the first draft,’ Adamson recalls, ‘Pedro was very suspicious of anything that was too close to the film and very intrigued by things that diverged. That was very heartening. I’ve sent him drafts and he’s had the odd comment – aspects he’s said he’s not quite sure about – but he hasn’t been putting his oar in. He’s essentially left me to do what I needed to do.’

It was something of a coup to get Almodóvar even to consider the initial proposal: since being disappointed by adaptations of ‘Dark Habits’ and ‘Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’, the director has imposed a moratorium on stage versions of his work for almost two decades. This will be the first story of his ever performed in English. Initially rebuffed by Almodóvar’s production company, El Deseo S.A. (or ‘Desire, Ltd’), Sparrow – who saw the film on its release and ‘immediately thought there was great potential for it to have a different life on stage’ – persevered and was eventually allowed to begin development work, on a tight leash from El Deseo.

At the time, Sparrow recalls, the West End was not yet awash with film adaptations and he saw pros and cons to the approach. Although on the one hand nervous that ‘the movie is such a masterpiece that tampering with that will subject us to a certain amount of criticism’, he also acknowledged – as plenty of others have since – that ‘the recognition factor helps’. Sparrow secured experienced partners in Neal Street Productions, under Caro Newling, and the Old Vic, under Kevin Spacey’s artistic directorship, and turned to Adamson (‘Southwark Fair’, ‘Clocks and Whistles’) to work on a script.

‘Of course I was daunted,’ Adamson recalls, ‘but I went back and had a look at the film and was convinced that it could and should be on stage. It’s a fairly simple story at heart, a strong, classical structure about a mother who goes on a journey, around which various subplots are elegantly wrapped. I also thought there are lots of areas the film doesn’t go into that would be interesting to explore: the untold stories, the sort of things the film tells in a close-up that would be interesting to put on stage. A filmmaker can hold on a face and the audience pieces everything together. In the theatre you don’t have that luxury – it has to be done in other ways.’

And so, just as Manuela reads into a character’s life by examining a notebook, Adamson read into the film’s text and expanded it in new directions. ‘It’s very different and it’s the same,’ he says of his play. ‘I hope I’ve been faithful to the film by being completely unfaithful to it. I’ve been loyal to the characters and the journey they go on but the way I tell the story is completely new and in that telling, new stories have come up.’

The process proved to be something of a revelation to Almodóvar himself. When I spoke to him at El Deseo’s Madrid offices last year, he had just attended an early Old Vic workshop of the project and was hugely stimulated. ‘It was the first time that I could see with distance my work,’ he said. ‘I never see my movies again after making them, so it was the first time that I could analyse one of my stories. I couldn’t do it if I saw the movie on screen in Spanish, but in this case everything was different except the characters. And then I felt very proud because I discovered how I did it, and that it worked very well.’

The experience had, he said, opened his eyes to the fact that ‘when I write, I’m writing in a way that’s more natural to the theatre. I was amazed to discover that, even in English, with actors who didn’t know the parts off by heart, the characters worked just as well and the text adapted itself very effectively to the stage, without locations.’

Indeed, in many ways transferring ‘All About My Mother’ from screen to stage is a conceptual no-brainer. It is, after all, a story largely set in and around a theatre that takes substantial inspiration from theatrical texts. In that context, Adamson notes, ‘we have the benefit of some things that the film doesn’t have. The people who will be participating in the story – the audience – will be sitting in a theatre. We essentially see three productions: “All About My Mother”, “Streetcar” and the Lorca.’

Cairns, who is also a designer and whose productions include 2005’s ‘Aristocrats’ at the National and 1999’s ‘Aunt Dan and Lemon’ at the Almeida, agrees. ‘It also brings all sorts of opportunities to open the piece up visually. You can get into a more expressionist mode at times. When we get into a couple of the bigger “Streetcar” scenes, we do them much as you’d expect to see them in a West End theatre – we go the whole way. With Lorca, on the other hand, it’s a much gentler progression. It grows more organically out of a real scene in the play.’

In one of the film’s stand-out moments, transsexual Agrado steps in front of the curtain to tell the audience the show is off and offers her own story as recompense. It is, Cairns notes, a scene made for the stage. ‘When Agrado is trying to save the audience’s night by talking directly to them about herself – which I gather Pedro took from a true story – we’re able to have direct contact. Our Agrado can actually speak to people in the audience.’ It will be interesting to see how the Old Vic’s Agrado – Mark Gatiss, who proved he could not just drag up but actually play female roles in ‘The League of Gentlemen’ – handles the moment, which highlights Almodóvar’s fascination with gender as another realm of performance. ‘Agrado is a chick with a dick,’ Cairns says, ‘but she sees herself very much as an authentic woman. At one point she says “I am my own project”.’

It’s a sentiment for which the creators of this project must have some sympathy. It remains to be seen whether audiences, and indeed Almodóvar, give their blessing to the production. (If they do, interest has already been expressed from Broadway, Mexico, Israel and Japan as well as across Europe.) The question is whether the transplant will take; whether the heart of the story can beat as strongly in its new, foreign body. So far, the signs look good.

‘All About My Mother’ is at the Old Vic from Saturday.

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