Fragments of the #Dream40 [Updated]
Sometime after midnight: ‘Sweet friends, to bed.’
The rain stayed away, the moon shone bright, Act V was played for us, and the iron tongue of midnight tolled on cue.
‘So, good night unto you all.’ read more »
Sometime after midnight: ‘Sweet friends, to bed.’
The rain stayed away, the moon shone bright, Act V was played for us, and the iron tongue of midnight tolled on cue.
‘So, good night unto you all.’ read more »
So this is the easy bit. Easy to experience, that is, if you are in Stratford-upon-Avon, are lucky enough to have an invitation, and are prepared to be awake and alert at 2am. It’s most certainly not easy to create, but it is, in its way, also easy to understand and to appreciate. We know, give or take, what theatre is, and sitting in a lofty rehearsal space as a group of wonderful actors play out the central scenes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream just inches from us is most definitely theatre. Thrilling theatre. Revelatory theatre. Played upon a stage for some fifty of us. What’s not to like? But this is Midsummer Night’s Dreaming, a Royal Shakespeare Company collaboration with Google, and there is a good deal more that is not nearly so easy. read more »
Monday sees the latest live cinema broadcast of a production from the Royal Opera House. The opera is Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana which has just opened in a new staging by director Richard Jones. (Reviews include Andrew Clements 3*s for the Guardian, Rupert Christiansen is similarly ambivalent for the Telegraph, while Michael Church is more positive for the Independent.) I’m very much looking forward to watching this in the Stratford-upon-Avon Picturehouse, and all the more so because it’s an opera with which I have a good deal of history. Back in 1999, with my colleague Shaun Deeney, I produced for Illuminations and the BBC Phyllida Lloyd’s film of her staging for Opera North. (The image above is of our star, Dame Josephine Barstow, during the shoot.) The result is available for purchase as an Opus Arte DVD and it remains one of a handful of films to which I am deeply proud to have contributed. It also won an International Emmy. So what follows are reflections on and recollections of making ‘our’ Gloriana. read more »
(There is quite a bit of cooking and gardening too.)
To the pleasing Picturehouse in Stratford-upon-Avon for Pompeii Live. This is a live-to-cinema broadcast from the British Museum blockbuster and yet another offering in the increasingly crowded ‘alternative content’ marketplace. The idea is a private view of the show, minus the crowds and with the added pleasure of curators and experts as guides. Slick and smart it most definitely is, with Peter Snow and Bettany Hughes presenting and guests appearances from curator Paul Roberts, classicist Mary Beard, archaeologist Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Italian chef Giorgio Locatelli (with the super-ritzy Locanda Locatelli name-checked in his lower-third) and gardening expert Rachel de Thame. I enjoy it in a slightly low-key kind of a way, although on Twitter you can find expressions of near-ecstasy appended to #PompeiiLive (along with the wry reflection – above – from another eminent historian and television presenter). But what I muse on most as I sit through the 85 minutes is (a) what makes this ‘live’ (very little, I conclude), and (b) what difference is there between this and television (ditto). read more »
On Monday afternoon at BFI Southbank I am introducing two early films by Robert Vas (1931-1978) together with a television obituary of Vas made by Barrie Gavin and colleagues. (The obit is on YouTube but – frustratingly – the embedding function is disabled.) Barrie will be present this afternoon, I believe, along with others who worked with and admired the filmmaker. For I am far from alone is believing that Vas is one of the greatest documentarists to have worked in Britain. He stands alongside Humphrey Jennings, Philip Donellan, Mike Grigsby, Marc Karlin and others, each of whom in their own way forged a distinctive film poetry from reality. Do please watch the film and read Byrony Dixon’s BFI ScreenOnline piece to get a sense of Robert Vas’ work. Yet as I noted in my 2008 post Robert who?, the director is all-but-unknown today and not one of the major films that he produced for the BBC is legally available. (The early films Refuge England, 1959, and The Vanishing Street, 1962, can be found on the invaluable BFI DVD set Free Cinema.) The inaccessibility and consequent invisibility of Vas’ work is – simply – a subject of scandal and concern. read more »
21:52 Going to bed now, but I’ll try to post some more considered thoughts once I’ve slept on it.
21:51 Andy Dickson at the Guardian says they are hoping to make the stream available on demand tomorrow – I hope they do that with the ones to come as well.
21:50 The question Mark Ravenhill asked was ‘What is your “ideal theatre”‘?
21:49 Rather engaging hearing peoples’ chat in the auditorium when I’m certain they don’t know they can be overheard on the stream…
21:48 The others were April de Angelis, Tim Crouch, Chris Goode, Zinnie Harris, Ella Hickson, Gregory Motton, Philip Ridley, Simon Stephens.
21:45 And with ‘Everyone breathes easier when there’s a cat in the room’ we’re out. Applause and – roll credits. There is a list of the playwrights whose views are included but it went through too quickly for me to catch it. Howard Barker was one.
21:44 Maybe you have to be there – and certainly the audience in the house seems to be having more fun than I am at home – but it’s coming across as slightly banal to me.
21:43 People making guesses about who said what: Caryl Churchill? Lucy Kirkwood?
21:42 Now we’re on the audience at The Royal Court, and the possible fire-bombing of – some laughs on offer here.
21:40 and from the chat stream… “o”: ‘has this a plot? or has it lost it?’
21:37 We don’t seem to be in the theatre now, or hearing about the theatre – we’ve moved onto transgression and onto male and female subjectivities – although it does spin back to the ‘ideal theatre’ – sort of.
21:34 My stream, which has been immaculate to this point, is struggling a bit at the moment.
21:33 181 viewers.
21:32 Twenty-five minutes in and I’m feeling a bit… ho hum.
21:31 Apparently this is called Cakes and Finance – the Royal Court has just revealed this in a Tweet.
21:29 It does feel as if Mark Ravenhill is enjoying this now, at least more than he was at the start – it’s become more of a performance, with more pleasure in the language and less focus on the (unremarkable?) ideas.
21:25 Some love on the chat stream for “RobertElkin”, enthusiasm for that last comment.
21:24 more from the chat stream… “RobertElkin”: ‘How can you not be enjoying this? It’s a variety of voices airing their thoughts on the one thing that’s brought us all here to this website.’
21:23 Tweet from @andydickson: ‘Trying to guess the voices being done – who’s the playwright who can only contemplate October …? (Quite agree btw)’
21:20 from the chat stream… via “e”: ‘ah. click..its the other playwrites verbatim opinions on their ideal theatres!’
21:19 Down to 198 viewers now, which feels quite modest, although this is also being presented via the Guardian.
21:17 Visually, this is just a single unchanging mid-shot. It’s smart and sort-of funny, but I think I’m a little underwhelmed so far.
21:16 The lecture is parcelled out in sections by a female off-screen voice speaking brief headings.
21:15 The slides include patisserie, cityscapes, architectural details.
21:14 So if @DanRebellato is right and this is a ‘verbatim meditation’, does that mean that these comments about theatre are quoted from others. If so, who? Does it matter?
21:12 Interesting to see the chat window alongside the Royal Court stream, although the comments so far are pretty unremarkable.
21:12 The Royal Court stream says it currently has 211 viewers at http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/opencourtlive/
21:10 @DanRebellato tweets (having seen this earlier in the evening): ‘Tonight’s Surprise Theatre @royalcourt was a brilliant, funny, and oddly inspiring verbatim meditation on ideal theatre by @markravenhill ‘
21:07 It’s a kind of a lecture, about an ideal theatre, about the qualities of an idealised space. It’s not clear if this is a lecture or a performance, or both.
21:06 He says that audiences crave the provocative and the challenging and the unexpected…
21:05 Mark Ravenhill is at a podium, with slides being projected behind.
21:03 I wasn’t actually planning to blog the first surprise theatre from the Royal Court, but then I thought I would, so here I am.
After a weekend off when I was occupied with the Coronation re-run, Links… returns with a lede devoted to the late Allan Dwan. What? Who? Born in 1885 and living until 1981, Dwan was a Canadian working primarily in Hollywood after 1911 making motion pictures. He directed more than four hundred films, a goodly number of them westerns, like the glorious Cattle Queen of Montana (1954) with Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Reagan. (The film’s one-liner was, ‘She strips off her petticoats… and straps on her guns.) Wondrously, editors David Phelps and Gina Telaroli this week released a free downloadable e-book devoted to Dwan and his films, following on from their similar collection devoted to William Wellman. There is a host of great reading in this (including Telaroli’s extensive visual essay on Cattle Queen…) even if a good part of it is not (yet) in English (a translation is forthcoming); for background on the project see Presenting ‘Allan Dwan: a Dossier’ at Mubi.com. New York’s MoMA has also just started an Allan Dwan season (until 8 July) tied to Frederic Lombardi’s new book Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios (you can read the Preface here). At The New Yorker Richard Brody has more on all this. Meanwhile, across the jump is a selection of further links, with thanks to @filmstudiesff, @JackofKent, @manovich and @mia_out, and below is all 88 minutes of Cattle Queen of Montana.
So this evening has been dire – and it should have been a delight.
A month or more ago, the arts department at Channel 4 very kindly sent me an invitation to an party-type thingy tonight with nibbles and Grayson Perry. I RSVP’d with enthusiasm. Then I learned that a company called Glass Slipper was broadcasting to cinemas the world’s first live ballet in 3D. Not only that but it was to be Swan Lake from the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg with Valery Gergiev conducting. Now I’ve seen live opera in 3D (and posted about it here) but this promised to be a bit special – and I have a professional interest in this stuff given the forthcoming RSC Richard II screening. Bye-bye Grayson, privyet Gergy! I booked my £16.95 ticket at the Vue in Islington and didn’t give a second thought to the doubtless dazzling frock I was missing. From there on, it was downhill all the way. read more »
Eugene O’Neill’s remarkable play Strange Interlude opened at the National Theatre today to some strong reviews. Michael Billington for the Guardian praises the ‘excellent’ production (directed by Simon Godwin) and awards the evening 4 stars. Even at three hours twenty minutes, it’s well worth seeing, with some great performances (including from . Moreover, productions of the play come along comparatively rarely – the last on the London stage was in 1985. Which makes it all the more remarkable that back in 1958 there was a BBC Television production shown in peak-time on two Sunday evenings. In September last year I wrote about this production for the Screen Plays: Stage Plays on British Television blog and I am taking advantage of the National Theatre success to post a slightly revised version here. read more »
Yesterday, I thoroughly enjoyed the full seven hours of the BBC’s 1953 Coronation coverage which BBC Parliament re-ran in (almost) its entirety. You can read the blog that I wrote here as well as see the numerous screengrabs that I took along the way, and the coverage is on iPlayer (until Sunday 9 June) here, here, here and here. And if you only watch one fragment of it, do take a look at the delightful introduction with Sylvia Peters – who hosted the broadcast in 1953 and who, astonishingly, did the same for BBC Parliament yesterday.
Taken together, this material is a historical and televisual document of the highest order, and I very much hope that the fine new digitally restored print is soon made available on DVD. I was engaged by numerous aspects – by the brief ‘intimate’ images of Price Charles, for example, in the Abbey and framed in a window at Buckingham Palace; by the centrality of the endless military parade in the afternoon; by the realisation that the BBC did not have sufficient facilities to cover the whole of the Queen’s route either to or from the Palace; and by the fact that the engineers in 1953 seem to have saved a roll of 35mm film (on which the recording was being made) by missing out a section of the ‘break’ at 2pm when television was showing simply the front of Westminster Abbey and listening to the bells.
Most of all, the full broadcast showed how ‘light’ was television’s touch on this event. Throughout there was a strong sense that the BBC was ‘simply’ relaying all of this to the nation and the world (albeit in an operation of huge technical complexity). Apart from Sylvia Peters, there were no in-vision announcers, there were no interviews, no studio couches from which experts could pontificate, and only the most modest of graphics. Even Richard Dimbleby and the other commentators allowed lengthy sequences of images simply to unfold in front of us with few words. Television appeared to shrink back from making its own mark, withdrawing from any apparent mediation, even as it was constructing a media event with profound consequences for its own form and for the nation.
Thanks to the BFI, there is a fascinating comparison to line up against the BBC’s coverage in extracts from Long to Reign Over Us, 1953 (embedded below, and from which I have taken a framegrab above). The production is an amateur film of very high quality made by John de Vere Loder, 2nd Baron Wakehurst (he also provides the narration), and it is in sparkling colour. The picture of London in June sixty years ago is both familiar and deeply strange, just as the world appears in all the very best documentary footage.