1st November 2013
First day of the new month, and just twelve to go until the Live from Stratford-upon-Avon broadcast to UK cinemas of the RSC’s Richard II (full details and links to ticket sales here). On Sunday the trucks arrive for our first camera rehearsal on Monday. On Tuesday the theatre and broadcast teams will review the tape and start to make adjustments, and then the trucks will return on the following Monday. I will blog the process further and also tweet it via @Illuminations. Meanwhile, there is last week’s production diary to catch up on – and following that I want to point you to some further reading and address Michael Kaiser’s recent alarmist remarks about cinema broadcasts of performance.
read more »
29th October 2013
Last week I saw on consecutive nights the National Theatre’s production of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II and Headlong’s 1984 (above, in a production photograph by Tristram Kenton). The former, now closed, was directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins, the latter is adapted by Robert Icke and Duncan MacMillan – and it transfers to the Almeida Theatre from 8 February. Both productions made for truly stimulating evenings in the theatre, and I was particularly struck by the use in each of both live and recorded video. Two such deployments of large-scale moving images do not necessarily a trend make, but seeing the productions so close together made me muse yet more on the relationship between screens and stages – especially when playwright Simon Stephens (@stephenssimon) suggested the beginnings of an explanation in a passing comment on Twitter. read more »
28th October 2013
Earlier this month I was delighted to make a very modest contribution to a conference in Oxford about Louis MacNeice, radio writer and producer co-organised by my Screen Plays colleague Dr Amanda Wrigley. Amanda and Professor Stephen Harrison have just published an edited volume of a selection of MacNeice’s radio scripts, Louis MacNeice: The Classical Radio Plays (Oxford University Press, 2013), and the event was to mark that and also the fiftieth anniversary of MacNeice’s death.
Louis MacNeice (1907-1963, pictured above in 1955) was a mid-century poet who worked for more than twenty years as an imaginative and innovative writer and producer for radio, but who also had plays staged in the theatre and on television. For the conference I offered a paper about MacNeice and television (the subject of a parallel post at the Screen Plays website), and the day’s discussion prompted all sorts of new ideas. But above all, the papers reinforced my sense of how much richer our cultural history would be if it was written and studied far more than it is beyond and across disciplinary boundaries like ‘literature’, ‘film studies’ and ‘broadcasting history’. If, that is, we were all more ‘intermedial’. read more »
27th October 2013
Back in June I had more than a few sceptical words about the Royal Shakespeare Company’s collaboration with Google, Midsummer Night’s Dreaming. Truth to tell, I thought it was a misconceived mess, although with a glorious live event for a privileged few at its heart. Now at BBH Labs Google’s Creative Director Tom Uglow has written An epilogue: 21 Things I learnt from Midsummer Night’s Dreaming with the RSC. It is an exemplary retrospect – thoughtful, positive, humble, not at all defensive and full of praise for his partners at the RSC. This should be required reading for anyone approaching a disruptive digital project in the cultural world. More links below, with thanks this week to @ruthmackenzie, @lessig, @filmnickjames, @matttrueman, @alexismadrigal and @Coxy323. read more »
25th October 2013
On Thursday evening Arena premiered the first of two films looking back at the history of the National Theatre. I am going to wait for the second to air before posting about them, but I do want to look today at significant developments on the Arena website. Initiatives there seem to me to be pointing towards the future of British television.
First off, there are two mash-ups of Shakespeare speeches, both of which I have embedded across the jump. (Yes, embedded – that I think is a first for BBC content.) And it’s worth musing on each of these for a moment. One, perhaps inevitably, is Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be…’, the other is Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene. Both feature extracts from Illuminations productions, and part of why I am writing this post is to help me work out quite what I feel about that. read more »
24th October 2013
I was particularly sorry today to learn of the death at the age of 89 of sculptor Anthony Caro. Like many others, I believe that he was a great artist, and he was also – at least on the evidence of my experiences of filming with him, including for our series theEYE – a warm and generous and entirely unpretentious man. (All three of these qualities are perhaps less common amongst artists than one might hope they would be.) Yet for the last thirty years or more, despite numerous major shows and a seemingly unstoppable flow of new work, he seems to have been an almost defiantly unfashionable artist. There is a very fine tribute to him and his work by Fisun Guner at The Arts Desk and the excellent Guardian obituary by the late Norbert Lynton is here. He also maintained an exemplary website of his works. All that I can add is a handful of memories that are trivial and yet, for me, important to acknowledge. read more »
23rd October 2013
In 1966 Peter Brook and the Royal Shakespeare Company mounted a collaboratively devised stage show titled US. The subject was our relationship to and responsibility for the Vietnam War. The following year, with a minimal budget raised in part by subscription in the United States, he directed a feature film titled Tell Me Lies developed from but in no simply a document of the stage show. The film enjoyed modest distribution in 1968 but for various reasons it has been all-but-invisible for 45 years. Thrillingly, the Technicolor Foundation and the Groupama Gan Foundation have restored the film under Brook’s supervision and this version has just been released in France. I saw a print at a London Film Festival screening on Sunday (at which Brook did a Q&A afterwards) and I am still mentally reeling. My ideas about the film I begin to explore below, but first here is the trailer.
read more »
21st October 2013
Unsurprisingly perhaps, I have been posting a lot recently about Richard II. As a consequence of that, today’s weekly post is rather shorter than usual. I should perhaps say that we had an excellent time at the opening night on Thursday (my reactions to the production are here, and go here for press reviews and other responses). The RSC has posted a selection of pictures from the party online, one of which I have featured above. There is, of course, a new Production Diary today, the eight, with the production’s composer Paul Englishby and RSC head of music Bruce O’Neil. This was shot when Paul and Bruce were recording the show’s music for release, along with a selection of speeches, as a download and on CD.
Otherwise, we head into the final three-plus weeks before the Live from Stratford-upon-Avon broadcast with a full schedule ahead and a lot of work to do. The first camera rehearsal is a fortnight today, and now that we have seen the show on stage our screen director Robin Lough is hard at work on a camera script. That is, he is working out which camera each line of dialogue and each move will be covered by, so that there is likely to be some 900 individual shots across the two hour forty minute broadcast. We will try out this script at the first rehearsal, watch the results on a big screen, and then refine that before a second camera rehearsal on the day before the broadcast.
Then there is also the admin necessary for a broadcast like this: schedules, call sheets, risk assessments, insurance documents. These are not the stuff of compelling blog posts, so over the next ten days or so I will be visiting other subjects and also, I hope, looking a little more at earlier productions of Richard II both on the stage and on screen.
20th October 2013
Let’s start with two important pieces of writing about politics. One is Charles Simic’s Bleak house, a short but devastating state-of-the-American-nation piece for the New York Review of Books blog:
We have forgotten what this country once understood, that a society based on nothing but selfishness and greed is not a society at all, but a state of war of the strong against the weak.
The other is Stefan Collini’s essay on the privatisation of higher education in the London Review of Books, Sold out:
[Future historians] will at least record that, alongside its many other achievements, the coalition government took the decisive steps in helping to turn some first-rate universities into third-rate companies.
If you have the energy to read further below are many more links, some even a touch more cheerful, with thanks for Titter tips to @emilynussbaum, @filmdrblog, @filmstudiesff, @CraigClunas, @KeyframeDaily and @melissaterras, read more »
17th October 2013
I said that I am not going to post a ‘review’ of Richard II, which opened to a wonderful reception last night in Stratford-upon-Avon (with live cinema broadcasts on and after 13 November). And I’m not. Nor am I going to answer the question, is this the best Richard II you’ve ever seen? Deborah Warner’s National Theatre production with Fiona Shaw (which we helped translate to BBC2) was extraordinary. So too was Steven Pimlott’s RSC staging with Sam West. I am also a fan, albeit a cautious one, of Rupert Goold’s television film with Ben Whishaw for The Hollow Crown. But having now seen Greg Doran’s production with David Tennant three times, plus a run-through in the rehearsal room, I am prepared to offer a brief and not in any sense complete list of ten things that I really really like about the production – and as you read the thoughts of others they might give you a sense of why I am excited. read more »
