Good Night, and Good Luck will tread the boards with a stage adaptation

Movies and the stage have always had a freely inces­tu­ous rela­tion­ship, a robust mutu­al inter­change that’s yield­ed every­thing from Mike Nichols’ bril­liant take on Who’s Afraid of Vir­ginia Woolf? to the Hair­spray musi­cal. In recent years, this appears to have pro­lif­er­at­ed; stroll down Broad­way and it’s all Beetle­juice this and Mean Girls that, well-known prop­er­ties eas­i­ly trans­lat­ed to guar­an­teed tick­et sales on name recog­ni­tion alone.

That won’t be chang­ing any time soon, based on The Hol­ly­wood Reporter​’s announce­ment that yet anoth­er Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tion will soon get a sec­ond life before the foot­lights. A play based on George Clooney​’s peri­od piece Good Night, and Good Luck will open at Chicago’s leg­endary Step­pen­wolf The­atre Com­pa­ny lat­er this year, arriv­ing at a time with new­found polit­i­cal resonance.

The 2005 film tracked the dogged efforts of news­man and nation­al con­science Edward R Mur­row to pro­vide a check to the run­away pow­ers of Joseph McCarthy and his House Un-Amer­i­can Activ­i­ties Com­mit­tee dur­ing the 1950s. The HUAC ran slip­shod over Hol­ly­wood and many oth­er indus­tries in a hys­ter­i­cal cam­paign to fer­ret out sus­pect­ed Com­mu­nists hid­ing among the ranks of Amer­i­can soci­ety, and along the way, abused this author­i­ty to neu­tral­ize who­ev­er they decid­ed was their enemy.

It’s a new­ly stir­ring sto­ry, con­sid­er­ing that the Unit­ed States has recent­ly come under cyber­at­tack from Russ­ian influ­ences, and that because nobody has any idea to what extent they’ve infil­trat­ed the cul­tur­al main­stream, there’s been a lot of hot-tem­pered hearsay. Com­bine that with the recent Broad­way smash Net­work, anoth­er film about a news anchor tak­ing a stand against all of the injus­tices of his moder­ni­ty, and the out­rage in the air might just trans­late to a suc­cess­ful run.

In that event, a trans­fer to Broad­way is all but assured. Still, that’s far off – first, they’ll need to prove that the inher­ent­ly cin­e­mat­ic ele­ments of the film (for one, the metic­u­lous detail-ori­ent­ed pro­duc­tion design immers­ing the view­er in the era’s bustling news­rooms, an envelop­ing effect dif­fi­cult to repli­cate on stage) won’t be a stum­bling block.

They’ll also need to find a lead­ing man capa­ble of con­jur­ing the warm pater­nal­ism of Mur­row, a feat for which David Strathairn was nom­i­nat­ed for the Acad­e­my Award. It’s a long road ahead, but it’s got a promis­ing start­ing point.

Good Night and Good Luck will run from 22 Octo­ber to 20 December.