William Friedkin’s underrated Bug (2006 Google Play), meanwhile, used the spatial restrictions of Tracy Letts’s play to amp up the claustrophobic nature of its conspiracy-minded psychodrama.ġ2 Angry Men (1957 Amazon) began as a teleplay, and later made its way to stage, but found its perfect form in Sidney Lumet’s blazing, debate-driven court drama, which ensured that no one can ever do jury service again without at least briefly pondering a righteous, me-against-the-world speech. Hitchcock was a dab hand at single location cinema – also proved in Lifeboat and Rear Window – but in his 1948 film of the Patrick Hamilton play Rope (Chili), the illusion of being shot in one real-time take added a jittery urgency to its suspense mechanics. There has perhaps never been a better theatre-to-film transfer than Mike Nichols’s scorching, tonic-bitter take on Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966 Apple TV), which honoured the bilious text while riffing on the fascination of Hollywood’s most volatile celebrity couple, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Some of the best of them, of course, are taken directly from the boards. Kranz’s debut thus joins a fine subset of single location films that feel bigger and richer than the sum of their parts, or the square footage of their set. George Segal, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Photograph: Corbis/Getty Images Depending on your point of view, there’s either much to be said here or nothing at all: eventually, they opt for the former, talking through waves and counter-waves of grief, guilt and white-hot anger. The setup is simple and wrenching: the church hall has been chosen as a neutral space for peace talks of a kind, between two sets of parents who are at once strangers to each other and inextricably connected by the tragedy of a school shooting – that most increasingly, queasily familiar of American atrocities. Set entirely within a suburban Episcopal church, and mostly within the four walls of a bland function room, it is stagey in the tensest, tautest sense. American actor turned director Fran Kranz’s impressive debut feature, Mass (now streaming on Sky Cinema), is one such film. Some films use the restrictions of theatre – a small cast, a single location – to match on camera the intensity and intimacy of live performance, fused with the very screen-specific benefits of the closeup. “S tagey” is a term generally used as a slight against a film, evoking that stiff, musty sense of confinement so particular to a bad play.

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