But this concert version, filmed at Leicester’s Curve just before Christmas, unfolds on a spartan circular stage without so much as a gilded divan. The 1993 London production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical based on the film had an elaborately atmospheric mansion design by John Napier.
It is key to representing how the sun has set on her career. The residence, which ensnares Gillis as he is employed as script doctor for Desmond’s comeback, is both museum and mausoleum for her stardom. In Billy Wilder’s 1950 film, the house itself is compared to Dickens’s Miss Havisham rather than its once illustrious inhabitant, Norma Desmond, the silent screen queen jilted by an industry in thrall to the talkies. W hen screenwriter Joe Gillis swerves into the driveway of 10086 Sunset Boulevard, he discovers a forgotten mansion with a ghost of a tennis court and an empty pool “where Clara Bow and Fatty Arbuckle must have swum 10,000 midnights ago”.