2nd October 2013
How fascinating to see three different productions of the same great play in one week. Last Friday I watched a preview of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts adapted and directed by Richard Eyre at the Almeida (until 23 November). Over the weekend I wrote a Screen Plays post after viewing the 1987 BBC television production by Elijah Moshinsky (which is available on the Judi Dench BBC Collection DVD box-set). And tonight I was at The Rose Theatre in Kingston for Stephen Unwin’s new production of the play (until 12 October) with Kelly Hunter as Mrs Alving (above). A co-production with English Touring Theatre (see link for tour dates until 7 December), this is Stephen Unwin’s final offering as artistic director of the Rose. All three productions have considerable strengths, but it’s striking that from a direct comparison across six days the starrily-cast small-screen adaptation (with Judi Dench, Kenneth Branagh, Michael Gambon, Natasha Richardson, Freddie Jones) comes off least well. read more »
1st October 2013
Press features for Richard II get into gear this evening, Tuesday, with the appearance of David Tennant and director Greg Doran on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row at 7.15pm. I will post an iPlayer link once that goes live. Other elements in this (once again, delayed) update from the preparations include RSC rehearsal photographs (one of which is featured above), news about this final week before the production enters the theatre and the newly released Young Shakespeare Nation video with the voice of David Tennant.
First, though, here is the latest production diary video, featuring the terrific James Shapiro, Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Professor Shapiro is the author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare and Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare, both of which are highly recommended. He also wrote and presented last year’s BBC Four series The King and the Playwright. Among much else, he a governor of the RSC and recently he attended rehearsals and spoke with the Richard II cast. Here he reflects on the play’s reception at the end of Elizabeth I’s reign.
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29th September 2013
Throughout the summer my MacBook Pro was developing little signs of fatigue. The ‘u’, the ‘i’ and ‘o’ keys started working only intermittently. The lower part of the screen sometimes showed a light brown stain. Then somehow or other, I really don’t know how, the casing got damaged and the power input proved dodgy. Just over a fortnight ago I took it to the ‘Genius Bar’ at the Apple Retail Store in Bromley (it was the only place I could get an appointment) and now , with nothing to pay because it was still – just – in warranty, I have it back in perfect working order. I had no idea how disruptive this would prove to my life but I am happy to have it all resolved. There have been occasions on which I have been driven mad by Apple, and especially by various ‘Genius Bars’, but on this occasion my sincere thanks are due to the Apple staff in Bromley. And now… there are some links below, with thanks due this week to @emilynussbaum, @lukemckernan, @KarlinMarc and @Chi_Humanities. read more »
27th September 2013
To Clapham Picturehouse last night for the NT Live broadcast of Othello with Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear. Excepting only the sound bleed from the bar next door through much of the second half, this was a triumph. An exceptional staging translated to the screen with skill and sensitivity. Nor was this simply a pale reflection of a theatrical original; the evening was one of the best demonstrations yet of the expressive power of the live-to-cinema form.
I felt the play was revealed to me as never before, in part because of the intelligence and immediacy of Nick Hytner’s production and in part because I was taken by the cameras right into the play and its relationships, its deceptions and its horrors, even on occasion its humour. read more »
26th September 2013
So just how excited are we? Homeland S3 starts in the States on Sunday – and a week later, on Sunday 6 October, on Channel 4. In one of my Sunday Links… columns I highlighted the recent Varieties of disturbance, John Lahr’s terrific New Yorker profile of Claire Danes. For those of you recently returned from Mars, Danes plays troubled CIA operative Carrie Mathison – and her performance is among the edgiest, most dangerous and most compelling that I think I have ever seen on the small screen. Danes has had a remarkable career, literally growing up on television and invariably taking on roles that are far from comfortable. As Lahr writes,
Over the decades, in her performances, she has explored a full spectrum of disturbance, from spousal abuse, autism, and paralysis to Carrie’s bipolar disorder and the paranoia of adolescence.
Anne Helen Petersen’s 2011 Claire Danes’ second act (on celebrity gossip, academic style) is another exceptional piece of writing about Danes. And then there is Margaret Lyons’ New York Magazine piece, also from 2011, Is Claire Danes’ Homeland character secretly Angela Chase? Re-reading the three together suggested today’s tiny trawl through the online collective memory. We start with Claire Danes’ 13-year-old headlining debut as Angela Chase in the pilot episode of the comedy of adolescent angst My So-Called Life…
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25th September 2013
Here was one we made earlier. More than fifteen years ago in fact, and now brought from the archive for an outing at BFI Southbank on NFT1’s big screen. The production was Gloriana – A Film and the occasion last night was a showing as part of the BFI’s Britten at 100 season. As I am coming increasingly to recognise, it can be disconcerting seeing a production from the past in this way, especially if – as was the case for me last night – you have not watched it during the intervening years.
As it turned out, I need not have been apprehensive. Tony Miller’s Super 16 film images looked terrific, the performances of the stars Josephine Barstow (as Elizabeth I) and Tom Randle (Essex) were as good and rich as ever, Phyllida Lloyd’s debut direction came through as imaginative and creative in all the right ways, musically – under conductor Paul Daniel – it sounded very fine, and even the stereo mix, while thin (there was no 5.1 in those days), seemed acceptable. read more »
24th September 2013
At the end of last week, I posted about the Spaces of Television conference at the University of Reading. I greatly enjoyed the three-day event and I learned a lot from many of the presentations. One of the panel sessions was particularly rich and I want to return to Reading today to draw out some strands from that discussion. For ‘Archives and Access’ the organisers had assembled an exemplary line-up, of which more below. But it was the passionate and (almost) despairing speech by Tony Ageh, Head of Archive Development at the BBC, that made the most impact.
Tony has been working vigorously for the past five years towards the goal of granting full access, through both commercial and non-commercial channels, to everything, everything – programmes, stills, written records and more – of which the BBC has a copy. Given the centrality of the BBC to each of our lives and to national and international history since 1922, this is an aspiration of the most profound cultural importance. Yet as he said, ‘hardly any progress has been made in the past five years’. As we’ll see, this is not entirely true, but in terms of any fundamental shifts towards a world in which such access is possible he is absolutely correct.
And why?
‘Nobody cares’, Tony said. Or rather, ‘Almost nobody cares’. Or again, ‘Not enough people care anything like enough’. read more »
23rd September 2013
With apologies for its late arrival (blame this blog’s server), this is a further post about the preparations for the RSC’s Live from Stratford-upon-Avon broadcast of Richard II to cinemas on 13 November in the UK (and later around the world). As you’ll see below, we are mostly in the rehearsal room this week, glimpses of which are in Production Diary no. 4 with the RSC’s Head of Voice Lyn Darnley and actors Miranda Nolan and Gracy Goldman.
In other news, RSC Education has released the first education pack for the production, The director’s process. Available as a free download here, this is intended primarily for teachers, but it has lots of interest for the rest of us. Tickets have gone on sale for Richard II screenings in Russia and also in Valleta, Malta; details here. And I saw the production trailer in a cinema for the first time – at Clapham Picturehouse on Sunday afternoon – which was rather thrilling. read more »
22nd September 2013
Courtesy of The Notebook at mubi.com and the Spanish film magazine Transit comes The Melville Variations, great video+text essay by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin about the films of the great French director Jean-Pierre Melville. Once you have enjoyed this short, sharp and so-precise montage, do also read the text here: ‘In the end, there is only ever the hat: mute, static, frozen, inhuman.’
There are further film links and much more below, with thanks due this week to @filmstudiesff, @KarlinMarc, @tiffanyjenkins, @manovich, @Obridge, @sebchan and @melissaterras. read more »
20th September 2013
The modern campus of the University of Reading is a pleasant place, especially when flattered by the late afternoon sun of a mild autumn day. That’s where I have been for the last three days, taking part in an enjoyable and enlightening academic conference. Spaces of television: production, site and style [link: .pdf of conference schedule] was intended to be the culminating event of a major research project with the same title, although the organisers may now put together a further one-day conference about design for television. I found the panels, papers and discussions immensely stimulating and I was delighted to contribute one of the keynote lectures. Today’s blog picks out some of the highlights (including a Doctor Who re-enactment by Andrew Ireland, from whose PhD the header image comes) while a future post (now planned for Tuesday) will discuss in more detail a richly interesting panel about television archives. read more »
