Pedro Almodóvar: Mixed Company

In All About My Mother, Pedro Almodóvar's Oscar-winning film of 1999, identity is not a stable character trait. A nurse becomes a prostitute, a nun becomes pregnant, a prostitute becomes a saint and several men become women. The much-anticipated stage adaptation of the film, now playing at the Old Vic Theatre in London until Nov. 24, doesn't settle on a single form either. Containing a film sequence and several plays-within-the-play, it is, like its transgender characters, a type of crossover — a trans-genre. What it wants to say through its densely layered metadrama is that art, like humanity, may be fickle and confusing, but it is fundamentally good, and worth admiring. The play almost succeeds in this ambitious task.

All About My Mother follows Manuela, a middle-aged nurse who is compelled by the sudden death of her teenage son to travel to Barcelona in search of his drug-addled, HIV-positive transvestite father, who now goes by the name Lola. He is elusive, but she finds Agrado, a transvestite prostitute he robbed and abandoned, and Sister Rosa, a local nun he impregnated and infected. Manuela begins mothering them both, and also befriends Huma, an aging lesbian stage diva performing in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. The quartet form a bizarre postmodern family that shares pain and solace alike.

The theatrical adaptation, the first Almodóvar has approved in 20 years, introduces a narrative voice absent from the film — Manuela's dead son Esteban, whose periodic, ghostly appearances both nag and reassure the characters, in much the same contradictory way that Manuela's grief haunts and comforts her. When Agrado delivers the great Almodóvarian declaration that "a woman is more authentic the more she looks like what she has dreamed for herself," the cruel subtext is that Manuela's vision of herself as a mother — like her son's ghost — remains forever out of reach.

Any adaptation of a masterpiece will draw criticism from those who believe great art should never be tampered with, such as one character in the play who scolds a painter for copying Picassos. But some elements of the Almodóvar original have been enhanced by the adaptation. The theme of fertility — of pregnancies and menopausal women — resonates in the dramatic space of the theater, which as the curtain rises is pregnant with possibility, but by the end is filled with emptiness, as the seats are vacated and the actors slip off-stage. It is also a joy to watch so many women on stage obviously relishing an ensemble work. Diana Rigg's stately performance as Huma — and her excerpts as Blanche DuBois — anchors one of the largest casts at the Old Vic since Kevin Spacey took over as artistic director in 2003. "The play is an experiment, and I'm very lucky to be in it," Rigg told TIME.

But the stage also poses challenges to the material. Lesley Manville as Manuela, unlike her counterpart in the film, never displays the intimacy of her grief, in part because of the declamatory demands a large space places on an actor. Fortunately, one character who feels at home is the hammy transvestite Agrado, played by Mark Gatiss.

Agrado is one of Almodóvar's great creations, and the avatar for his artistic message. Her name means pleasure, and she is a sort of Falstaffian clown — colorful, pleasure-seeking and lovable. She sees life as a bagatelle, not a soap opera. If there is a complaint to be made about this adaptation it is that Australian-born writer Samuel Adamson ultimately ignores the Agrado spirit by deciding in the final scenes to take himself and the play too seriously.

The adaptation ends at a funeral — itself a ritualistic form of theater. But instead of an affirmation ("Let's turn this funeral into a fiesta," Agrado pleads) we get a dirge. Unlike the film, which offers an uplifting coda, the play closes with Rigg's melodramatic reading of a mother's threnody for a dead son from Federico García Lorca's Blood Wedding, which features only briefly in the film. It recounts the moment she finds his carcass: "I licked the blood because it was my blood," she says.

Perhaps we can forgive Adamson for attempting to stake out his own artistic ground at play's end, and choosing a burial plot for that purpose. But in so doing he abandons the Almodóvarian spirit, which always favors birth over death. In this adaptation's postmodern flux, Almodóvar's unique voice, upbeat even amid the direst human tragedies, ultimately goes missing. Which is a shame. After all, it's his voice, and the way from hurt to healing it describes, that we most want to hear.