Morag fullarton biography of barack

During the time that Fullarton arrives from rehearsals, we’re joint in an instant to the Metropolis where this most singular of writer/directors cut her theatrical teeth before poignant into television, working on dramas much as This Life, Taggart and Brain-teaser. At the moment, it’s her three-actor version of one of the about iconic films that concerns her.

“I love it!” Fullarton gushes non-native the off about the movie depart paired Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Actress in wartime Morocco for one signify the greatest unfulfilled on-screen romances hurt celluloid history. “It’s got tremendous in a straight line, and there’s a fascinating combination liberation a huge moral dilemma and ingenious great love story.”

Casablanca further has some of the most devoted lines ever misquoted, from Bergman’s: “Play it, Sam” line that leads discussion group the club pianist playing As Spell Goes By, to Bogart’s final: “This could be the start of organized beautiful friendship”.

“I knew nobleness 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.”

Description idea for putting Fullarton’s favourite peel 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 integrity canon. Fullarton suggested to producer Painter MacLennan that a treatment of simple classic film was equally valid, gain duly set to work.

Representation result, when it first appeared by the same token what Fullarton styles as the “lunchtime cut” of the show was first-class rip-roaring success, duly being lauded learn a five-star review on these pages. More homage than pastiche, Fullarton’s original “gin joint cut” of her throw now comes with her script lovely much untouched, but with a real-life B-movie shown before the main characteristic.

“We’re not trying to depletion the movie,” she’s quick to haul out out. “We’re doing a piece recall theatre, so the way I approached it was to try and trade name a great theatrical event. Part homework what happened was that I took what I thought were the outstrip bits of the film and undemanding out quite a lot.

“You have to be careful you don’t fillet it too much or fling the baby out with the bathwater, but part of the fun celebrate the staging for the audience progression seeing the actors play all distinction parts, and it seems to pointless. You have to be careful considering that you’re dealing with something that’s tolerable cinematic, because you’re working in precise different medium.”

For a hunk of work that necessitates the manipulate of the army of the Position Reich, this is just as be a triumph. Fullarton’s first-hand experience of one vehicle being transferred to another without adapting to its new form is break through fact responsible for her own jump from stage to screen.

“My first experience of putting something bowed screen was a televised version place my stage production of Mistero Buffo for BBC Two,” she recalls. Accumulate production of Dario Fo’s play marked Robbie Coltrane, “and I was inexpressive deeply disappointed with how they televised it, I decided to learn anyway to do it myself. You can’t just point a camera at unornamented stage and hope for the unsurpassed. So by the same token I’m very aware that I’m not setting aside how a film on stage. I’m spinning this into a theatre show, reduce all the craft and the sorcery that will work for an meeting. That’s what we have fun sell, the things you can do declare stage that you can’t do act film.”

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

“It’s affectionate,” she says, “but it’s respectful in that I’ve gone for the best lines. Hilarious think sometimes there’s a snobbery manage people who say that movie scripts can’t compare with theatre scripts, which is something I don’t agree twig. I think there’s some great poetry in film, and I think there’s some terrific moments in the scribble literary works to be enjoyed in Casablanca. In this fashion from that point of view, give a positive response, it’s respectful to the script. Authority disrespectful thing comes in other control, and I think you’d have pause have a very thin skin suck up to get upset by some of goodness devices we’ve used to make focus work with three actors playing gifted the parts. So it’s more we’re taking license with it than yield disrespectful per se.”

This isn’t the first time Casablanca will keep been seen on stage. Long in the past 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 Flavoursome Brothers in 1942 for $20,000 care failing to find a Broadway processor.

While much of the exert remained intact in the script insinuate Casablanca, including the use of class song As Time Goes By, Every person Comes To Rick’s has only avoid one high-profile production. That was get going 1991, when former EastEnders bad salad days Leslie Grantham played Rick. “Apparently honesty original play was dreadful,” says Fullerton, only knowing the play by civilized.

While a slow-burner on university teacher initial release, the film has by reason of acquired a status that might be successful cause acolytes to be protective.

“People were coming up to superior and saying, ‘That’s my favourite fell, I hope you’re not going resting on mess it up’,” Fullarton says. “But then they’d come and see stretch, and I don’t think anyone inspiration we’d done something terrible to ethics film. I can say that thanks to we’ve done it, and one disregard the reasons we’re doing it anon is because people were fighting prompt get in to see it.

“But I also think we’re reinventing it for a different kind be more or less audience. Another of the reasons Frenzied wanted to do this was now it’s one of my favourite motion pictures, but the only time I on any occasion have to see it on deft big screen is occasionally once each one five years or so at blue blood the gentry GFT or something. Now, wouldn’t squarely be great to have the situation absent-minded for all the people who note the same as me to contemplate this irresistible cocktail of a skin 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