A Matter of Life and Death

A wartime bomber pilot bails out of his doomed aircraft without a parachute and survives because he gets lost in the fog. Then he falls in love and has to appear before a heavenly court to fight for his right to carry on living. Such is the plot of the great Powell and Pressburger film "A Matter of Life and Death", in a nutshell. Of course, it is far deeper and more complex than that, which is why I came up with the bright idea of adapting it for the stage a while ago. It's also probably why Emma Rice and Tom Morris beat me to it. Their adaptation is running at the National Theatre until the end of June, so I went to see it out of curiosity. It was a strange experience.

I think I responded to the play as I did because I feel such an emotional investment in the film, an intense affection for it that reacts badly to attempts to somehow erode its purity. Some aspects of the theatre production would have unsettled anybody, though. When a man started rapping and people started setting beds on fire at the beginning I couldn't quite believe it, but the jarring incongruity of it all was only momentary. The acting, the original music and the staging, with bicycles circling the stage, dance and lots of visual spectacle, was very impressive. Unfortunately the excessive narration kept detracting from all this. The writers should have trusted the audience to understand the plot and the Second World War more, showing us rather than telling us things. It was sad, too, that they felt the need to introduce an overt anti-war message, for example with a black-clad woman speaking out against the bombing of Dresden. In doing so they invented a motivation for adapting the film which didn't come from within the heart of the film itself.

My motivation would have been different. The moment in the film when I first thought that it would make a good stage play is quite near the end. The pilot, Peter Carter, lies on an operating table while his love, June, watches through a glass window. Three representatives from heaven arrive and freeze time. At other points in the film this time freezing and other odd things, such as visions, hallucinations or the arrival of heavenly visitors, are slickly realized. The screen is rendered motionless - nothing but nothing moves - and sometimes there is a shift between bright technicolor and black and white. In this scene, you can see that the actress Kim Hunter (playing June) has just been directed to hold still, but of course nobody can be totally motionless. The camera moves in close and you can see her obviously quivering. It makes her seem at once more human, more real, emphasizing that she is very much of the physical world in contrast to the metaphysical world that the heavenly characters inhabit. Meanwhile, on the operating table, Peter hovers somewhere between the two. It struck me that something very subtle like this would be realised to perfection in the theatre, perhaps in a small, intimate play. In an all-singing, all dancing spectacular like the current adaptation, little things like this are lost.

I do understand that writers want to be big and bold, making aesthetic and political statements through their adaptive processes. In this case, though, the film is so rich in ideas and visual beauty that I felt they could have taken more of their cues from the original text. Crucially, the film shows Peter as a very British war hero and June as an American servicewoman. The relationship between Britain and the United States during wartime is a constant subtext. Ultimately Peter pleads for his life before an American prosecutor and a jury of American people. The jury are Americans of diverse heritage, showing it to be a country of immigrants and thus profoundly caught up in world affairs by its very nature, not by any supposed greatness or abstract power that it perceives itself to possess. In our current political climate, surely we need look no further than this to provide a pertinent reason to explore aspects of "A Matter of Life and Death" on stage and elsewhere. For good or ill the United States of America continues to forcefully carve itself out a role in global politics based on what it thinks it is rather than what it is in fact, or on the needs of itself rather than other nations. Likewise the "special relationship" between that nation and Britain remains uncomfortable, seen as abhorent by some and politically necessary by others. In our time "A Matter of Life and Death" still makes profound sense. Yet in the National Theatre production, there was no American jury and June was English. An opportunity was sadly missed.

I am glad I went to see the play, but it didn't leave me feeling satisfied. Perhaps there may one day be a market for my as yet unwritten, smaller scale adaptation after all.