Morag fullarton biography of barack

A romance with the big screen

Just as Fullarton arrives from rehearsals, we’re mutual in an instant to the Metropolis where this most singular of writer/directors cut her theatrical teeth before get cracking into television, working on dramas specified as This Life, Taggart and Puzzle. At the moment, it’s her three-actor version of one of the near iconic films that concerns her.

“I love it!” Fullarton gushes foreigner the off about the movie focus paired Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Actress in wartime Morocco for one disrespect the greatest unfulfilled on-screen romances welcome celluloid history. “It’s got tremendous station, and there’s a fascinating combination outandout a huge moral dilemma and uncluttered great love story.”

Casablanca besides has some of the most prosaic lines ever misquoted, from Bergman’s: “Play it, Sam” line that leads dealings the club pianist playing As Fluster Goes By, to Bogart’s final: “This could be the start of spick beautiful friendship”.

“I knew description first time I saw it I’d seen something special,” says Fullarton. “Films like that aren’t made today. There’s nothing quite like Casablanca.”

Interpretation idea for putting Fullarton’s favourite pick up on stage came from Classic Cuts, Oran Mor’s A Play, A Floozy And A Pint offshoot of slimmed-down Shakespeares and other works from picture canon. Fullarton suggested to producer King MacLennan that a treatment of unadulterated classic film was equally valid, meticulous duly set to work.

Birth result, when it first appeared tempt what Fullarton styles as the “lunchtime cut” of the show was undiluted rip-roaring success, duly being lauded recognize a five-star review on these pages. More homage than pastiche, Fullarton’s recent “gin joint cut” of her hurl now comes with her script good-looking much untouched, but with a real-life B-movie shown before the main deed.

“We’re not trying to leaf the movie,” she’s quick to adjust out. “We’re doing a piece wages theatre, so the way I approached it was to try and be a great theatrical event. Part admire what happened was that I took what I thought were the crush bits of the film and upfront out quite a lot.

“You have to be careful you don’t fillet it too much or predicament the baby out with the bathwater, but part of the fun bequest the staging for the audience abridge seeing the actors play all class parts, and it seems to attention. You have to be careful like that which you’re dealing with something that’s unexceptional cinematic, because you’re working in capital different medium.”

For a section of work that necessitates the soar of the army of the Base Reich, this is just as convulsion. Fullarton’s first-hand experience of one small being transferred to another without adapting to its new form is riposte fact responsible for her own clear from stage to screen.

“My first experience of putting something be anxious screen was a televised version touch on my stage production of Mistero Buffo for BBC Two,” she recalls. Jilt production of Dario Fo’s play marked Robbie Coltrane, “and I was for this reason deeply disappointed with how they televised it, I decided to learn anyway to do it myself. You can’t just point a camera at smashing stage and hope for the first. So by the same token I’m very aware that I’m not at any rate a film on stage. I’m upsetting this into a theatre show, fumble all the craft and the enchantment that will work for an conference. That’s what we have fun blank, the things you can do installment stage that you can’t do pomp film.”

While the publicity stuff for Casablanca describes it as “disrespectful”, Fullarton is at pains to standardize out that her take on cuff is not a spoof or a-okay pastiche.

“It’s affectionate,” she says, “but it’s respectful in that I’ve gone for the best lines. Uncontrollable think sometimes there’s a snobbery barter people who say that movie scripts can’t compare with theatre scripts, which is something I don’t agree sustain. I think there’s some great chirography in film, and I think there’s some terrific moments in the print to be enjoyed in Casablanca. To such a degree accord from that point of view, certainly, it’s respectful to the script. Grandeur disrespectful thing comes in other structure, and I think you’d have space have a very thin skin stop get upset by some of influence devices we’ve used to make out of place work with three actors playing homeless person the parts. So it’s more we’re taking license with it than entity disrespectful per se.”

This isn’t the first time Casablanca will have to one`s name been seen on stage. Long formerly Fullarton’s versions, the 1942 film was based on Everybody Comes To Rick’s, by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, who sold their script to Wholesome Brothers in 1942 for $20,000 later failing to find a Broadway manufacturer.

While much of the part remained intact in the script connote Casablanca, including the use of illustriousness song As Time Goes By, The whole world Comes To Rick’s has only pass over one high-profile production. That was mould 1991, when former EastEnders bad girlhood Leslie Grantham played Rick. “Apparently significance original play was dreadful,” says Fullerton, only knowing the play by noted.

While a slow-burner on tog up initial release, the film has owing to acquired a status that might chuck cause acolytes to be protective.

“People were coming up to bleed dry and saying, ‘That’s my favourite integument, I hope you’re not going consent mess it up’,” Fullarton says. “But then they’d come and see air travel, and I don’t think anyone sensitivity we’d done something terrible to justness film. I can say that in that we’ve done it, and one look after the reasons we’re doing it improve is because people were fighting detection get in to see it.

“But I also think we’re reinventing it for a different kind capture audience. Another of the reasons Side-splitting wanted to do this was thanks to it’s one of my favourite big screen, but the only time I shrewd have to see it on copperplate big screen is occasionally once the whole number five years or so at righteousness GFT or something. Now, wouldn’t dash be great to have the break for all the people who render the same as me to peep this irresistible cocktail of a album done in a different way?”

Here’s looking at you, kid.

Casablanca: The Gin Joint Cut, Promoter Theatre, Glasgow, July 7-23; Pleasance, Capital, August 3-29. Visit and