Some were always films. Some are works that have become better known as films than the novels they once were. But ever since Kathleen Turner flashed her all in The Graduate, transposing movies to the stage has become a trend, a fashion, almost an industry. Right now the West End alone is offering adaptations of Dirty Dancing, Brief Encounter, Hairspray, Billy Elliot, The Lion King, The Sound of Music, Rain Man and a gentle parody of Alfred Hitchcock’s version of The 39 Steps. But, given the need somehow to replicate Charton Heston, his flashing blue eyes and trademark chariot, Ben Hur promises to be on a different level. Only two recent offerings can begin to match its ambition: Lord of the Rings, which somehow compressed 1,000 pages into three hours of musical drama, and Gone with the Wind, which came to the New London earlier this year and collapsed almost as quickly as burning Atlanta.

In some ways it is a troubling trend. It seems to suggest that there aren’t enough original plays to feed the market. What on earth was the point of Girl with a Pearl Earring, which recently closed at the Haymarket, having convinced many critics of nothing except that Peter Webber’s 2004 film was better? Is Rain Man really necessary when you can easily get Hoffman and Cruise on DVD?

Yet the opposite can be true. The Lion King was and is a much loved Disney film, but, thanks to the astonishing skills of the director-designer Julie Taymor, the stage version rises far above it. Everything from animals to birds to waterfalls is evoked with puppets, masks, ribbons and strange, suggestive sculptures, and the result is to liberate and exercise audiences’ imaginations in a way impossible in the cinema.

Similarly with Mary Poppins. Actually, the stage version relied as much on P.L. Travers’s original books as on the film and, though Disney’s songs remained intact, it had the great merit of coming without Dick van Dyke’s Cockney accent. Like The Lion King, it was a five-star triumph.

And it is arguable that Hairspray and Dirty Dancing, like The Producers and Spamalot before them, aren’t only fun but justify their presence onstage by the immediacy that the theatre uniquely provides. Yet still one worries. What next? A site-specific version of The Bourne Ultimatum in Waterloo Station? The Battleship Potemkin in a water-filled Wembley Stadium? Well, it could happen.

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