Upstage there is a set with an enclosed room and other smaller spaces, including two booths like those used for sound recording. The room is dressed as a kitchen, with walls which have extensive glass panelling allowing the audience to see inside. Downstage there are elements of furniture, a table for sound effects, and video cameras, monitors and lights. This is the setting for Katie Mitchell and Leo Warner’s astonishing Fraulein Julie, originally staged at Schaubuhne Berlin and at the Barbican only until tomorrow. (I started this post on Tuesday night but it’s been a crazily busy week, so apologies for the tardiness of its appearance.) Over 80 taut minutes, the actors and creatives make and mix a live “film” after Strindberg’s play, with live sound effects and music. The appeal is both to the mind and to the heart, with an experience embedded in the late 19th century but also acutely, precisely of now. Yet for me this bold, sometimes breathtaking experiment brought to mind nothing so much as live television drama as it used to be made in the studio twenty.thirty, even fifty years ago. read more »
This is both irresistible and a touch magical: an eight-minute video courtesy of The Criterion Collection with Martin Scorsese talking about and demo-ing the recent restoration of Laurence Olivier’s 1955 Richard III(above). Shot in VistaVision and Technicolor, the film had been chopped about and was suffering significant colour deterioration, but thanks to an army of experts (and our own BFI National Archive) it can now be seen pretty much as Larry intended – and that version was released on Blu-ray and DVD by Criterion this past week. Do also read Amy Taubin’s new essay on the film …and then explore my other links from the past week, noting my thanks for recommendations to @brainpicker, @jackshebang, @KeyframeDaily and @scrnddct.
We are delighted to feature another selection of videos compiled by our colleague Todd MacDonald, which he is also presenting every week on his own blog.
Todd MacDonald: I’ve got some good’uns this week and I even had to leave a few out of the line-up for fear of overload. The five here are the best that I’ve enjoyed this week including work by Lonely Leap, Callum Cooper and Mark Bader.
First, we go to the birthplace of John Wyver, the man behind Illuminations, to Whitstable for a seaside story about the Whelkman.
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 »
