Essential media about the arts

Out of the past

20.02.2012 posted by John Wyver Category: Performance, Television

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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Catching up…

17.02.2012 posted by John Wyver Category: About Illuminations, Performance, Television

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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Noises

26.01.2012 posted by John Wyver Category: Performance

To the Old Vic to sit with Clare in two eye-wateringly expensive seats to watch an immaculate performance of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off. The back-stage comic complications, combined with the high-end prices (top whack £85 a seat – that’s eighty-five pounds!), have attracted an audience that is well-heeled, well-dressed… and well rude. I am used to people trying to talk through movies, and I have extensive experience in cinemas of tapping shoulders or turning round and emitting an urgent, audible ‘Shhh’. But in the theatre?
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The film of the films of the books

10.01.2012 posted by John Wyver Category: Film, Performance, Television

Headline: while The Mystery of Edwin Drood, part one of which we saw on BBC Two tonight, has much to recommend it, the television treat of the evening – and indeed most certainly of the year to date – was Arena: Dickens on Film. I’ll write more about this tomorrow, but let me record my immediate enthusiasm for a film that is imaginative, intelligent, distinctive and delightful as well as being, before all else, a film. Kudos to Arena and Film London for co-producing such a treasure, to the estimable Mick Eaton and Adrian Wootton for conceiving and achieving it, to some tremendous film research (and the confidence to allow the film extracts to have their own place and presence), and to D. W. Griffith, Alastair Sim, David Lean, W. C. Fields, Johnny Vegas, Sergei Eisenstein, John Mills, Hablot Knight Browne, Arena editor Anthony Wall (who also directs) – together with a few more – as well as the genius who was Charles Dickens.
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Happy 20th birthday, NVAP

5.01.2012 posted by John Wyver Category: Digital media, Performance

The National Video Archive of Performance (NVAP) is a great and glorious resource – and shamefully little-known. Thanks to a generous agreement with theatre unions (which permits taping without the payment of fees to artistes and others), the NVAP creates high-quality archival recordings of theatre shows. These can be accessed by researchers (and back in 2009 Annette Brausch contributed a wonderful guest post here about this process), but for the most part – because of the terms of the agreement – they are not publicly screened or otherwise distributed. To mark twenty years of the NVAP, however, the V&A, which is where the archive is based, is mounting a series of showings on Sunday afternoons – including on 12 February Gregory Doran’s recent Cardenio in Stratford (above). All the details are across the jump. (I know we don’t usually do announcements of forthcoming screenings here, but these are rather special.)
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‘This grave shall have a living monument’

12.12.2011 posted by John Wyver Category: Performance

To King’s College London on Saturday for the stimulating symposium Monumental Shakespeares. ‘Remembering Shakespeare in 1916 and after’ was the subtitle for a day of talks exploring the ways in which the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death was marked. The discussions felt timely because two very significant dates will soon be upon us: 2014, which is the four hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the poet’s birth, and 2016, the quatercentenary of his death. On the other hand, numerous institutions under the title of the World Shakespeare Festival 2012 are going big on the Bard next year, alongside the Olympics. (Our film of Julius Caesar with the RSC for BBC is a contribution to the WSF.) So what might we learn from events a century ago to help us find appropriate ways to remember Shakespeare in the coming years?
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‘Friends, Romans, countrymen…’

24.11.2011 posted by John Wyver Category: About Illuminations, Performance, Television

Needless to say, we are completely thrilled at the announcement that we are to film the RSC’s 2012 production of Julius Caesar for the BBC. The full text of this morning’s press release is here, but here’s the heart of it:

Julius Caesar is one of Shakespeare’s greatest political thrillers and, as directed by the RSC’s Chief Associate Director Gregory Doran, the play finds dark contemporary echoes in modern Africa. The cast will include Adjoa Andoh, Ray Fearon, Paterson Joseph, Jeffery Kissoon and Joseph Mydell.

This will be the third Shakespeare film for television that we will have made with Greg Doran, after Macbeth (2001) and Hamlet (2010), and we could not be more delighted to be collaborating with him once again.
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Nine Imagine irritations…

21.11.2011 posted by John Wyver Category: Performance, Television

… and one delicious delight. I wanted to like last week’s Imagine: Alan Ayckbourn – Greetings from Scarborough. I really did. Contemporary theatre gets few enough full-length documentaries devoted to it, and Sir Alan Ayckbourn (the link is to his excellent website) is one of our greatest writers. But as I watched Jenny Macleod’s film for BBC Scotland (which remains available on BBC iPlayer until 27 December) I could feel myself becoming more and more frustrated – to the extent that I decided that rather than writing a conventional review, I would simply itemise my irritations. Nor would I neglect to celebrate the programme’s moment of wonder – but for that, along with the irritations, see below.
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Make it new

14.11.2011 posted by John Wyver Category: Digital media, Performance, Television, Visual arts

Arts Council England and the BBC today launched a hugely exciting initiative called The Space. As they describe it, this is ‘an experimental digital arts media service and commissioning programme that could help to transform the way people connect with, and experience, arts and culture. the arts and media.’ You can read more about it here – and on the same site you can read my ‘Inspiration essay’ (their title) suggesting how important The Space might be. I’ll blog this project’s development over the coming days and weeks, but to kick things off here’s my essay.

The arts on television have long been defined by forms and formats established more than fifty years ago. The documentaries and magazine shows of the 1950s and ‘60s still set the terms for mainstream media presentation of the arts on our screens. In those fifty and more years, the arts have changed, technologies have changed, audiences have changed – all to the most extraordinary degree – while media about the arts, by and large, has not.

Medieval modernism

7.11.2011 posted by John Wyver Category: Film, Performance

To the Barbican last night for a screening of Carl Dreyer’s silent film classic The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Accompanying the film live were the London Symphony Orchestra and Synergy Vocals, but this was far from a standard new scoring for an old film (not, of course, that any such compositions are really ‘standard’). Rather, this was a concert performance of Voices of Light, a large-scale choral work composed in 1993 by Richard Einhorn. Einhorn created the composition in response to Dreyer’s images, but it very much had its own strength and presence – and in a way it was the film that was providing the accompaniment. At key moments, music and film synced together, but the music’s primacy was reinforced as the projection came to an end, when the lights on orchestra and choir came up and, for a minute or two, the band played on.
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