LONDON — Midway through the West End premiere of the laborious sound and light show “The Exorcist,” I kept returning to one question: What’s the point? Sure, plays have been fashioned from films many times before, and “The Exorcist” was a best-selling creep-out of a novel by William Peter Blatty before it ever became an era-defining shocker on screen in 1973.

But the movie remains so associated with Linda Blair’s head spinning around, as the possessed 12-year-old Regan she is playing battles a demon within, that it seems a fool’s errand to transcribe this particular title to the stage. The stage adaptation by John Pielmeier is at the Phoenix Theater through March 10 under the direction of Sean Mathias. Unbilled but very much aurally onboard is Mr. Mathias’s frequent colleague and onetime romantic partner Ian McKellen, the great actor-knight who can be heard voicing the infernal rumblings that course within forlorn, sweet-natured Regan (played by a game Clare Louise Connolly).

The story is more or less unchanged. As before, the film actress Chris MacNeil (a chic Jenny Seagrove) is in Washington, D.C., to shoot a movie and can’t immediately account for why it is that her daughter is suddenly urinating on the floor in public; she later adds projectile vomit to her list of unanticipated party tricks. Along come two priests, Fathers Karras (Adam Garcia) and Merrin (Peter Bowles), whose tussle with Satan results in the spiritual eviction promised by the title. One assumes that the illusion designer, Ben Hart, was kept busy, as the composer and sound designer Adam Cork has certainly been: The play begins with a clamorous bang but tails off to a whimper.

There’s nothing supernatural to explain away the climate of fear and anxiety in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” the David Mamet play in revival at the Playhouse Theater through Feb. 3. The dread here comes from the naturally cutthroat capacity of humankind, as borne out by a group of real estate employees whose livelihoods are on the line.

Mr. Mamet’s play won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize and is widely considered his masterpiece, due in no small measure to its singular command of language (no expletive is wasted or ill-timed). London has long flown its own flag for the play. “Glengarry” had its world premiere in 1983 at the National Theater, and it gets revived here roughly once a decade; the director Sam Yates’s current production marks the play’s fourth London airing and also, just possibly, its breeziest.

That’s not necessarily a good thing given the feral intensity of the text. The first act consists of three short, sharp duologues set in a Chinese restaurant followed after the intermission by a longer second act that brings all the men together amid the melee of the office where they are all busy chasing leads. You want to feel the pressure continually being applied, whether by that master huckster Richard Roma (Christian Slater, inheriting the role played in the 1992 film by Al Pacino) or by his older colleague Shelly “The Machine” Levene (Stanley Townsend), who will say anything if it allows him to close the deal on properties soon revealed to be worthless.

The presence these days of an American president who glories in deal-making guarantees the relevance of a play in which people exist solely as prey, and allegiances can turn on an informant’s dime. All the more reason therefore to wish for a greater sense of cunning and attack from a cast, the two principals in particular.

Mr. Slater, best known for his work onscreen, has appeared twice before on the West End and has an outsize gregariousness that suits the role. What’s missing is the chill that lies just beneath the charm, once Roma realizes that he is as much victim as perpetrator of the same hardscrabble ways in which he is so well schooled. Mr. Townsend, in turn, could amplify the desperation leading Levene toward a cash windfall, a set of steak knives — or complete oblivion. (At one point at the matinee attended, it looked as if the two men were trying to keep one another from laughing.)

Far more attuned to the bruising affect of the writing is Kris Marshall as an office manager, at once inscrutable and implacable, who won’t be swayed from the task at hand. Robert Glenister is especially good as the most bigoted of these con men, not to mention the one who looks forward late in the first act to the possibility of violence. For that fleeting moment, the sense of danger simmering within this play flares unforgettably to life.

Those wanting a bit of warmth and maybe even catharsis from their theater can beat a path to the Other Palace and the London premiere of “Big Fish,” the Broadway musical by Andrew Lippa (music and lyrics) and John August (book) that called it quits late in 2013 only to resurface here in a greatly scaled-down production that values heart over scenic razzmatazz and succeeds in jerking a tear or two.

“Big Fish,” like “The Exorcist,” also has a celluloid forebear — the 2003 Tim Burton film, starring Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney. But both the film and the stage musical share as their source a 1998 novel by Daniel Wallace about a son’s relationship with a his father, who is revealed to be far more than the extravagant teller of tall tales that his son has always taken his dad to be.

As on Broadway, this latest “Big Fish” devotes copious time (some may think too much) to the various products of the aging Edward Bloom’s fantastical mind — a mermaid, a witch and a hirsute giant included. The estimable director Nigel Harman, himself an Olivier Award-winning actor, is wise, though, to keep returning the focus to the gradual reckoning between the generations that makes for a tremulous finish, the structure in this case helped by splitting the elder Bloom into two parts: his bedridden, dying self (Kelsey Grammer) and his so-called Story Edward self (Jamie Muscato). In New York, the protean Norbert Leo Butz played the entirety of the character, an Alabama native from a town so small that its phone book is a singular “Yellow Page.”

The London production’s obvious big fish in casting terms is TV’s “Frasier” himself, the ever-winning Mr. Grammer, as a father whose love for his family becomes as apparent as his gift for elaboration. And even when the songs stoop to drearily pro forma paeans to daffodils, the score is exceptionally well served by Mr. Muscato, Clare Burt as Edward’s eternally devoted wife, and the clarion-voiced Matthew Seadon-Young as the son, Will, drawn to “bone-dry facts” who discovers not a moment too soon a welcome new world of feeling.

William Peter Blatty, the author whose best-selling book “The Exorcist” was both a milestone in horror fiction and a turning point in his own career, died on Thursday in Bethesda, Md. He was 89.

The cause was multiple myeloma, his wife, Julie Blatty, said.

“The Exorcist,” the story of a 12-year-old girl possessed by a demon, was published in 1971 and sold more than 13 million copies. The 1973 movie version, starring Linda Blair and directed by William Friedkin, was a runaway hit, breaking box-office records at many theaters and becoming the highest-grossing film to date for Warner Bros. studios. It earned Mr. Blatty, who wrote the screenplay, an Academy Award. (It was also the first horror movie nominated for the best-picture Oscar.)

“The Exorcist” marked a radical shift in Mr. Blatty’s career, which was already well established in another genre: He was one of Hollywood’s leading comedy writers.

Mr. Blatty collaborated with the director Blake Edwards on the screenplays for four films, beginning in 1964 with “A Shot in the Dark,” the second movie (after “The Pink Panther”) starring Peter Sellers as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau and, in some critics’ view, the best. His other Edwards films were the comedy “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” (1966); the musical comedy-drama “Darling Lili” (1970); and “Gunn” (1967), based on the television detective series “Peter Gunn.” He also wrote the scripts for comedies starring Danny Kaye, Warren Beatty and Zero Mostel.

In praising his 1963 novel, “John Goldfarb, Please Come Home!,” a Cold War spoof that Mr. Blatty later adapted for the screen, Martin Levin of The New York Times invoked the humorist S. J. Perelman, one of Mr. Blatty’s literary idols; Mr. Blatty, he said, “writes like Perelman run amuck.”

The phenomenal success of “The Exorcist” essentially signaled the end of Mr. Blatty’s comedy career, making him for all practical purposes the foremost writer in a new hybrid genre: theological horror. It was a mantle he was never entirely comfortable wearing.

When he declined his publisher’s entreaties for a sequel to “The Exorcist” and instead delivered an elegiac memoir about his mother, “I’ll Tell Them I Remember You,” published in 1973, Mr. Blatty felt the first cinch of the horror-writing straitjacket.

“My publisher took it because I wanted to do it,” he was quoted as saying in “Faces of Fear” (1985), a collection of interviews with horror writers by Douglas E. Winter. “But the bookstores were really hostile.”

“The sad truth is that nobody wants me to write comedy,” he said in another interview. “ ‘The Exorcist’ not only ended that career; it expunged all memory of its existence.”

Mr. Blatty gave various accounts of what led him to try his hand at horror. He sometimes said the market for his comedy had waned in the late 1960s, and he was ready to move on. At other times, he said that his mother’s sudden death in 1967 had led to a renewed commitment to his Roman Catholic faith, and to a soul searching about life’s ultimate questions, including the presence of evil in the world.

In every account, he said the idea for “The Exorcist” was planted in 1949, when he was a student at the Jesuit-affiliated Georgetown University in Washington and read an account in The Washington Post of an exorcism under the headline “Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil’s Grip.”

The incident, widely discussed at the time among Georgetown students and faculty members, came back to Mr. Blatty 20 years later as the basis for a book about something not getting much press in the fractured, murky landscape of late-1960s America: the battle between Good and Evil.

He began writing what he thought would be a modest-selling thriller about a girl, a demon and a pair of Catholic priests.

About halfway through, he later said, he sensed he had something more. “I knew it was going to be a success,” he told People magazine. “I couldn’t wait to finish it and become famous.”

William Peter Blatty was born on Jan. 7, 1928, in Manhattan to Peter and Mary Blatty, immigrants from Lebanon. His father left home when he was 6, and his mother supported the two of them by selling quince jelly on the streets, yielding a wobbly income that precipitated 28 changes of address during a childhood he once described as “comfortably destitute.”

The church figured prominently in his life. His mother was a churchgoing Catholic, and he was educated at prominent Jesuit-run schools that admitted him on full scholarships: the Brooklyn Preparatory School, now closed, where he was the 1946 class valedictorian, and Georgetown, from which he graduated in 1950.

After serving in the Air Force, Mr. Blatty worked for the United States Information Agency in Beirut. He returned to the United States for a public relations job in Los Angeles, where he hoped to begin his career as a writer.

He had already published his first book — a memoir, “Which Way to Mecca, Jack?” — but was still working in public relations in 1961 when he appeared as a contestant on “You Bet Your Life,” the television quiz show hosted by Groucho Marx. He and a fellow contestant won $10,000.

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His winnings freed him to quit his day job and become a full-time writer. He never had a regular job again.

Mr. Blatty lived in Bethesda. In addition to his wife, the former Julie Witbrodt, whom he married in 1983, he is survived by their son, Paul William Blatty; three daughters, Christine Charles, Mary Joanne Blatty and Jennifer Blatty; and two sons, Michael and William Peter Jr., from earlier marriages; seven grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. Another son, Peter Vincent Blatty, died in 2006; his death was the subject of Mr. Blatty’s 2015 book, “Finding Peter.”

His work after “The Exorcist” included several more theologically themed works of horror, including “The Ninth Configuration” in 1978 (a reworking of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane,” from 1966) — and “Legion” in 1983. Both books were made into movies, directed as well as written by Mr. Blatty; the film version of “Legion” was released in 1990 as “The Exorcist III.”

Mr. Blatty became reconciled over the years to the overwhelming dominance “The Exorcist” — most recently adapted into a 2016 TV mini-series — would have on his reputation as a writer. (He also maintained a sense of humor about it, as reflected in the name of a comic novel about Hollywood he published in 1996: “Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing.”) He knew, he told several interviewers, that it would be what people remembered him for.

But one thing bothered him.

Many moviegoers, including the president of Warner Bros., had interpreted the movie’s climax — in which the younger of the two priests (played by Jason Miller) goads the demon into leaving the girl to take up residence inside him instead, then jumps to his death — as a win for the demon.

That was not how Mr. Blatty meant it. For years he pleaded his case to Mr. Friedkin, a longtime friend. In 2000, Mr. Friedkin relented, issuing a re-edited director’s cut of the film that made the triumph of Good over Evil more explicit.

With the same purpose in mind, Mr. Blatty rewrote parts of the original book, even adding a chapter, for a 40th-anniversary edition of “The Exorcist” published in 2011.

It was essential to him, he told The Times-Picayune of New Orleans in 2000, that people understand the point of “The Exorcist”:

“That God exists and the universe itself will have a happy ending.”