Monthly Archives: February 2012

‘Shakespeare’s Africa play’

29.02.2012 posted by Category: Performance, Television
‘Shakespeare’s Africa play’

The first day of the location shoot for our film version of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new Julius Caesar is now just over seven weeks away. We have found our location and we are putting together our crew. BBC Four’s funding is in place and everything is moving forward in very exciting ways. The RSC have just released further details of the stage production, which is set (as is the film, of course) in modern-day Africa. The RSC’s release includes a great statement from our director Gregory Doran about his sense of the play. I have included that below, along with the full cast list.
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BBC: ‘bastion of mediocrity’

27.02.2012 posted by Category: People, Performance, Television
BBC: ‘bastion of mediocrity’

I have been reading the late Tony Richardson‘s memoir Long Distance Runner. (I know I promised a Julius Caesar update, but that waits on a RSC press release – tomorrow, I hope.) It is not clear whether Richardson’s book, which was published posthumously by Faber and Faber in 1993, was intended for publication, for his daughter Natasha discovered it hidden away in a cupboard on the day he died. It was probably written around 1985, perhaps – as Natasha Richardson suggests in the Foreword – at the time that he was first diagnosed as HIV positive. It is a compelling, seemingly honest, sometimes angry, often very funny book about theatre and about cinema. What it is not – although this is what I hoped it might be – is a book about television, even though Richardson made a number of distinctive dramas for the BBC in the mid-1950s. It is typical of his attitude towards the small screen that the best he can say about his television output is that ‘this work was better than doing nothing [but] I was dreaming of other things.’
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A Dickens of a day

26.02.2012 posted by Category: Performance, Television
A Dickens of a day

We cried, we cheered and we clapped (a bit), and then we cried some more. At 11.30 in the morning we set out with Nicholas, Kate and friends, plus a few enemies, on the wonderful journey that was (and, in one way, still is) the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. At my side (in the next seat but one) was co-director Sir Trevor Nunn, and he was still there nearly twelve hours and one panel discussion later. NFT3 at BFI Southbank is perhaps slightly less comfortable than I think the Aldwych Theatre was more than thirty one years ago, but did I care? June 1980 was when, on another magical Saturday, I first entered the world that Sir Trevor, co-director John Caird, adapter David Edgar and of course Charles Dickens had conjured up for me (and around a thousand others). That day was one of the great theatre experiences of my life, which I re-lived when Channel 4 showed its screen translation in late 1982 – and which I was engrossed by and felt angry with and thrilled and laughed and wept at once again yesterday.
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Nickleby & co

25.02.2012 posted by Category: Literature, Television
Nickleby & co

To BFI Southbank later for all eight hours of the Channel 4/Primetime version of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. I’ve said before that the stage production, seen over a Saturday in the Aldwych Theatre in the late summer of 1980, remains one of the defining theatrical experiences of my life. And the television adaptation that followed two years later, after the theatre show had enjoyed an extraordinary success, is also pretty good. But it’s a long time since I watched the whole thing, which is what I’m to do today – in addition to chairing a panel with co-directors Trevor Nunn and John Caird, writer David Edgar and David Threlfall, who was such a moving Smike. As the show was coming together, The South Bank Show secured good access to the rehearsals – and much (although frustratingly not all) of Andrew Snell’s documentary is on YouTube, in what appears to be an off-air recording. For this post I have gathered up the four sections and written a few notes on each.
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Blunted Points [updated]

21.02.2012 posted by Category: About Illuminations, Digital media, Television
Blunted Points [updated]

Tomorrow Arts Council England and the BBC announce the projects to be funded for this summer’s exciting digital arts project The Space (see my earlier post Make it new). I did some initial consultancy for The Space but then decided that I wanted to pitch an idea. This entailed pulling back from any contact with those who were judging the applications. The idea, which I called Points, was turned down in the first stage of applications because it was felt that Illuminations did not qualify as ‘an arts organisation’. I appealed this call, successfully, and Points went forward to the second round. But we learned today that it has not been successful. So I thought it might be interesting – in part because people rarely acknowledge their failures in these processes – to reproduce below the core of the Points first-round application, written back in November. The application at this stage was seeking a grant, including all rights costs, of £73,400.
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Out of the past

20.02.2012 posted by Category: Performance, Television
Out of the past

To the V&A for a Sunday afternoon screening of an archival recording of Michael Grandage’s 2004-05 production of Schiller’s Don Carlos. This came courtesy of the invaluable National Video Archive of Performance, which for the past twenty years has been making high-quality recordings of major theatre productions for the future use of researchers and historians – and for limited but perfectly achievable access by the rest of us. To celebrate its birthday. the NVAP has organised a rare series of public showings (see below). A fortnight back Trevor Nunn introduced his 2004 Old Vic Hamlet with Ben Whishaw and Imogen Stubbs, and last Sunday Gregory Doran spoke before the NVAP’s recording of his recent RSC production of Cardenio. Don Carlos was compelling, and fascinating in all sorts of ways, not least for its echoes as theatre-on-screen of a now-lost form of theatre-on-television.
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Elucidating Lucian

19.02.2012 posted by Category: Television, Visual arts
Elucidating Lucian

So why is Randall Wright’s 90-minute documentary Lucian Freud: Painted Life (on iPlayer until 25 February) the BBC’s best film about a visual artist for many a year? The compelling subject helps of course, as do the remarkable and mysterious paintings. Many of the interviewees speak movingly about their complex relationships with the late painter. The thoughtful script is honest about its subject’s private lives, but this never pitches over into prurience. (Randall Wright discusses the filming in an interesting BBC blog post here.) There is also an intelligence about the way the Freud’s paintings and drawings are used, as well as the relatively few (but almost all exceptional) photographs that exist of the artist. (Astonishing home movie footage features Lucian with his grandfather Sigmund.) Many of the artworks (and the photographs) are returned to, sometimes several times, and on each occasion we are prompted to see something fresh. And all of this – the people and the paintings – comes across so much more powerfully and so much more openly because the film, driven by a sensitive narration and the smart use of on-screen quotes from Freud, is focussed on its subject and not (as @AnnaBrk pointed out on Twitter) on the antics of an on-screen presenter. Bravo.

Catching up…

17.02.2012 posted by Category: About Illuminations, Performance, Television
Catching up…

Yes, I’ve been super-busy – and, yes, I feel guilty about not posting here for nearly a fortnight. So let me construct a post about a few of the things we’re involved in and also about one or two new developments relating to previous posts. First up…

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

One of the truly great coming togethers of theatre and television is the 1982 Primetime/Channel 4 adaptation of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Dickens dramatisation. The day-long immersion in its world at the Aldwych thirty years ago remains one of defining theatrical experiences of my life (see here) – and a week on Saturday, 25 February, BFI Southbank offering a chance to re-live that in a way, with an all-day screening of the television version. There’s also a Q&A with co-directors Trevor Nunn and John Caird, writer David Edgar and actor David Threlfall (and me as moderator). The event has been sold out for weeks (it’s in the modestly proportioned NFT3) but a few tickets are back on sale – and if you are quick you might snap one up here. If not, watch out for the blog that will follow.
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Postcard from the battlefields

4.02.2012 posted by Category: About Illuminations, Digital media
Postcard from the battlefields

For a project about the First World War to be released later in the year (when I’ll blog it), I have been filming in Belgium and France. The weather was bitterly cold and our car got caught in a scary blizzard, but we had a fascinating time. On the Menin Gate in Ypres I discovered a trace of a Wyver (above) who was entirely unknown to me, and I was pleased to visit Edwin Lutyens’ vast memorial at Thiepval. From the generous and gracious historian Piet Chielens I learned a lot about the way in which cemeteries write histories across the landscape, and I developed a deep respect for the work of Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC). So having not done a ‘postcard’ for many a month, here is one from the battlefields.
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