We are coming to the end of the Screen Playsseason at BFI Southbank of television adaptations of Jacobean tragedy. In the final two screenings, tomorrow night (it’s sold-out but there may be tickets on the door) and on Monday, you have the chance to see two full adaptations of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s play The Changeling together with substantial extracts from the other two surviving versions. Monday night’s showing is Compulsion (2009, with Parminder Nagra above), a modern updating of the play set in London’s Asian community – from which I have embedded an extract below. More details of this and the other adaptations in a moment, but I want also to use this round-up to mention that we have organised a very informal discussion group about the season from 3-5pm on Friday afternoon at BFI Southbank; if you think you might like to attend, do please e-mail me via john[at]illuminationsmedia.co.uk. Below, I am compiling through Thursday and Friday a number of links and a handful of reflections about the season so far.
Best show on TV? Easy. The Good Wife. But now that Broadchurch has finished, the second-best show (at least on a non-subscription channel) is most definitely Nashville, a series from ABC in the States that More4 screens at 10pm on Thursdays (right after TGW). It’s the story of the life and loves of a traditional country singer Rayna James (Connie Britton) and her rivalry with the younger, Pop-ier, much bitchier Juliette Barnes (Hayden Panettiere). There are lots of other characters and plotlines too, and it’s set in the home of country music and on the road. It was created and is run by Callie Khouri, who wrote the great Thelma & Louise (1991), and it’s soap-y and sexy and super-enjoyable, in part because it has great songs. So it’s a modern musical. Glee for grown-ups. This is one of the best duets, with Rayna and Deacon Claybourne (Charles Esten), the man she walked away from years ago to marry the father of one (but not both) of her adorable daughters.
If you too like Nashville, you’ll love the two-part Nashville Roundtable, hosted by Anne Helen Petersen who writes the great celebrity gossip, academic style blog. Part one is here, and the second part has just been posted. These two pieces are a wonderful mix of fan-talk and analysis, some of it spoken in a demotic that’s as complex and as referential as critical theory. But remember that we’re maybe six episodes or so behind the States, so there are things in part two that we don’t know yet. Anyway, here’s another song from the series, maybe the musical highlight so far, with so-far-not-an-item Scarlett (Clare Bowen) and Gunnar (Sam Palladio).
On Thursday night BFI Southbank screened Roland Joffé’s 1980 BBC television adaptation of John Ford’s play ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. This was shown as part of ‘Classics on TV: Jacobean tragedy on the small screen’, a season of television productions of early seventeenth century dramas curated by Screen Plays, the academic research project on which I am working with Dr Amanda Wrigley.
On the basis of my memories of seeing ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore on transmission more than three decades ago and of viewing more recently a poor VHS copy of – for some reason – only the first half, I wrote a Screen Plays blog post about the film. I knew this was a significant television production but I was unprepared for the impact of Thursday’s viewing. For me, as for many others in the sold-out auditorium, seeing the drama on a big screen was quite simply overwhelming. This is a major work of British film – I am not embarrassed by the word ‘masterpiece’ – that is all but unknown. And it is is crazy, crazy, crazy that it is hidden away in the archives and has hardly been seen for the past thirty-three years. read more »
On at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art until 27 May there’s an exhibition that I really want to see. Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity is a sumptuous assembly of 80 or so figure paintings along with ‘period costumes, accessories, fashion plates, photographs, and popular prints’ which explore the relationship between fashion and art from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s. But I’m pretty certain that I won’t get there before the end of next month and so I’m contenting myself with frequent virtual visits to the show – and, you know, I’m OK with that. The Met has a really good web site about the show with a room-by-room guide and great photos; there’s a catalogue of exceptional splendour and sumptuousness edited by curator Gloria Groom; and I can read detailed criticism about it like Paris: The thrill of the modern by Anka Muhlstein in the New York Review of Books. Who needs Manhattan? Below, more links to more stuff, with thanks for recommendations this week to @emilybell and @KeyframeDaily. read more »
Our colleague Todd MacDonald (@toddmacd), who works at Illuminations as our in-house editor, facilities manager and much more, has for the past few weeks been putting together an eclectic and enlightening selection of videos each Saturday. He has been posting the list on his own blog, and now we have asked him if we can share it. It will make a terrific complement to Links for the weekend on Sundays. Enjoy!
Todd Macdonald: This is only my sixth week of posting my videos of the week and I’m delighted that it is being hosted on the Illuminations blog for the first time. This week is probably the most mixed bag yet so I hope that readers from both my own site, and at Illuminations, find something that interests them. read more »
I had a ticket to the National Theatre’s Othello tonight, but circumstances now mean that I’m at home. Which offers the perfect opportunity to watch the online live stream of The Arrest of Ai WeiWei from Hampstead Theatre. The stream is on this page – and I’m offering commentary here (read up from the bottom). Do please contribute to the discussion below.
21:55 Of course no-one contributes to blog discussions anymore, do they?
21:52 I really would love to know how much #aiwwlive stream cost – and how many people watched. We need this information to be shared so that other theatres can consider whether or not this is an approach they want to explore.
I was 16 years old in the summer of 1971. At school I had just taken my O’ levels, including English Language and English Literature, for both of which I had been taught by the poet Brian Jones. He told my class that in London there was a production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream which, if we went to see it, we would remember for the rest of our life. I followed his recommendation, even though it meant I had to come back to Canterbury on an early-hours’ milk train. And, as it has for so, so many others, that Dream has stayed with me across the past forty-two years. I’m grateful for so much to Brian Jones, who died in 2009 (see here for my earlier tribute) – and I am eternally grateful to the director of that production, Peter Brook, who thankfully and thrillingly is still with us. read more »
There’s one straight-up, stand-out recommendation this week, Eric Naiman’s lengthy essay for The Times Literary Supplement, When Dickens met Dostoevsky. It’s the tale of a notable literary hoax about an alleged meeting encounter between the two authors in 1862, but of course it’s also about what we fervently want to be true and why. Some of the same ideas run through The Fort Bragg murders – is Jeffery MacDonald innocent?. This is another of this week’s good long reads, in this case from Andrew Anthony in theGuardian about truth, relativism and the 1970 murders about which Joe McGinniss, Janet Malcolm and now Errol Morris have written notable books. Below, there are further links to interesting stuff, with thanks this week for recommendations from @audiovisualcy, @manovich and @poniewozick. read more »
To Clapham Picturehouse for Manet: Portraying Life, the Royal Academy of Arts exhibition (until 14 April) ‘captured for cinema screens worldwide’. That’s the claim of Exhibition: Great Art on Screen, a new initiative from Seventh Art productions and philgrabskyfilms.com in association with distributors BY Experience. It’s a follow-up to Leonardo Live in 2011 (about which I wrote here), except that it’s not live. It is, however, another element of the rapidly developing bundle of events that cinema owners call ‘alternative content’, along with Met Opera: Live in HD, NT Live and a forthcoming Pompeii Live from the British Museum (on 16 June). Except that this isn’t live. Manet: Portraying Life is a documentary of the kind that is familiar (perhaps over-familiar) from the BBC and Sky Arts. It’s 91 minutes long, it’s on a big screen, it’s thoughtful and finely-shot, but it’s not… well, you get the idea. read more »
Let’s suppose that Arts Council England employed the critic Andrew Graham-Dixon and a team of researchers and production staff to put together a substantial 3-volume history of the art of the Netherlands. ACE committed, let’s say, £300K of public funds to the project and this was felt to be money well-spent. The result was generally agreed to be engaging, authoritative and a valuable contribution to extending awareness and understanding its subject.
Now imagine that it was announced that the book was going to be available for just one month. We could all read it together during that month, but after thirty days the book was going to be hidden away. We couldn’t even consult it in public libraries, although it might come out for another month at some point in the future, and it might be the case, although no-one could promise, that we could buy our own copies in the future.
What do you think? Appropriate use of public money? Viable model for subsidised cultural production? Well, um, probably not. But this is EXACTLY the way in which television about the arts (and much more) works now. It’s illogical, crazy, dumb – and we are all the poorer because of it. Yet no-one seems to notice just how weird it is. read more »
