Here’s to the movies’ mixed portrayals of theatrical life

Both films, and the copycats that followed, show dancers struggling in rehearsals for the big numbers. That trope understandably appears in almost every feature film about dancers, from Shirley MacLaine versus Anne Bancroft in The Turning Point to Robert Altman’s The Company. The latter, the long-nurtured brainchild of ex-dancer Neve Campbell, has a strong whiff of authenticity, which is more than can be said of a single frame of the ludicrously overpraised ballet-horror Black Swan.

The latter attempts, amid other nonsense, to present a supposedly groundbreaking interpretation of Swan Lake, but actually looks like a reject from the 1950s. Bizarre but true, you get a better sense of a ballet company stalked by murderous instincts in Caryl Brahms and SJ Simon’s almost forgotten 1937 novel A Bullet in the Ballet. The writing is so arch it’s almost a viaduct, but we can only bow low before something described by the Evening Standard as “pulling the leg of solemnity both in ‘detection’ and in ballet-mongering”.

Joking aside, Anthony Quinn’s captivating Curtain Call, set one year earlier but written in 2015, is the most convincing novel about backstage life I’ve read. It too features a murder plot in a theatrical world potentially rife with cliché, but Quinn’s sharp, evocative prose avoids every pitfall of the genre. He even pulls off the rare trick of creating a theatre critic who, although less than flattering, feels drawn from life rather than a caricature.

You’d think playwright Neil Simon would manage to put theatre on screen with something like truth, but his 1977 hit The Goodbye Girl is unwatchable now, at least to me. His crime is the Off-Broadway production at the centre of the plot in which our hero Richard Dreyfuss stars. He’s giving – hold my sides – Richard III as a limp-wristed queen. Of course, we’re meant to see that as being preposterous, but boy do Simon and director Herb Ross grind the ‘joke’ endlessly into the ground.

There are acres more truth and genuine humour in Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway, a comedy companion to his Crimes and Misdemeanors. But for a backstager blending both comedy and tragedy into a deceptively dark brew, watch Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman giving near career-finest performances in Mike Newell’s film of Beryl Bainbridge’s An Awfully Big Adventure. Set in a down-at-heel Liverpool theatre in 1947, the film reeks of theatrical passion, often sad and dangerously misplaced, but which is love, actually.