Is this trend of taking a movie and putting it on stage to be applauded or derided?

In the cons corner – and the place where I might normally set my own stall – is the argument that these shows are merely a cynical way of producers cashing in on audiences' familiarity with a story. Clearly this sort of safe bet makes financial sense, but where's the originality, where is the encouragement for the new story makers, where, for goodness sake, is the wit?

If the imaginations of producers can only stretch as far as scouring the movies for ideas, have we reached the end of creativity?

In the pro corner, we have a chance to see a show on stage that hitherto could only be experienced on the big screen. Is that a good enough reason to keep churning out these adaptations? After much Vicky Pollarding (yeah, but no but), the decision has to come down to, actually, it probably is – for all the right reasons.

A couple of years ago, I was in the audience at the Alhambra for a sell-out performance of Alan Bennett's The History Boys. I took a friend and a committed hater of theatre with me and experienced one of the greatest moments of my life when I turned to him and whispered, "This is my favourite bit coming up". He snapped his head sideways, looked like he was going to hit me, and he virtually throttled me during the interval, so apoplectic was he at my breaking "the spell". He was a convert.

When I leaned over and whispered, I dragged him back to reality when he was in the magical world of theatre. For anyone who has seen the play, it is the moment when Hector explains Hardy's Drummer Hodge to Posner.

Everything around my friend had disappeared and all that was in the auditorium was not the 1,000-plus sell-out crowd but just him, Posner and Hector.

Obviously, The History Boys was a stage play long before it was a movie, but alas there are people like my friend who would only have ever previously conceived of watching The History Boys in a cinema.

While the money men might be sitting in their offices leafing through a copy of Halliwell's Film Guide, closing their eyes and pointing to films at random ("How about, flick, point, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, the musical? – actually, knowing what some producers are like, I've now copyrighted that idea) to come up with their next money-spinner, there might actually be some benefits to this trend.

Just as the man from Dr Who, otherwise known as one of the leading lights of the stage David Tennant, is
pulling in the punters by playing Hamlet in London,
so these movie adaptations are getting bums on seats that would normally only be plonked in front of a
cinema screen.

And even if the owners of those derrieres are only there because this is from the film that starred Jack Nicholson, or the movie with the beautiful dancer, at least they are there. Experiencing the magic of theatre.