8th September 2013
So I was thinking I would find something a bit different as the lead for this week’s Links. Not Shakespeare again, nor movies or television. Then I read one of the scariest pieces of prose to have come my way in a very long time. Remarkably, it’s in the form of a Tim Flannery review of an academic volume in the latest edition of The New York Review of Books. Title: They’re taking over! Subject (I kid you not, and not least because I have been scared of them for decades): JELLYFISH. This is what the author of the book (and serious researcher), Lisa-ann Gershwin, says:
We are creating a world more like the late Precambrian than the late 1800s—a world where jellyfish ruled the seas and organisms with shells didn’t exist. We are creating a world where we humans may soon be unable to survive, or want to.
Be afraid, be very… Or just read on for some much more enjoyable links, with thanks this week to @MovieMail, @RalphRivera and @ThomasDixon2013. read more »
7th September 2013
In March 1958, for the second programme of his ATV series Is Art Necessary?, Sir Kenneth Clark filmed at the British Museum with the sculptor Henry Moore. They did so at night, illuminating the ancient artworks, including the Elgin Marbles, with powerful torches. Many of the programmes in Is Art Necessary? survive in the archives, but seemingly not this one. Apart, that is, from a brief pre-titles sequence, with the two connoisseurs entering the museum. The complete film, far more than any other ‘lost’ trace of British television, is the single programme that I dream one day of discovering. read more »
5th September 2013
Today was the Illuminations Summer outing. Seven of us went to see the Moore Rodin exhibition (on until 27 October) at the Henry Moore Foundation in Perry Green. The sun shone and the sky was blue, lunch at The Hoops Inn was rather special, the exhibition is terrific, and the grounds and studios are among the two or three best places to see modern art in Britain. Below are some further pictures, in addition to Three Piece Sculpture: Vertebrae, 1968 (above) and Large Reclining Figure, 1984 (below). But let’s just say here that it was pretty close to a perfect day.
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3rd September 2013
OK, so I’m not the first person to notice this, but when I came across this clip last week I did find it fairly remarkable. HBO’s The Newsroom (above) which is a cable news drama written by the great and the good Aaron Sorkin, returned to Sky Atlantic last night. (For those of you just returned from Mars, Sorkin created The West Wing, wrote The Social Network and co-wrote Moneyball.) Yesterday’s show was S2 E1 (or the first episode of the second series) but last week to prep for that I was finishing the box set of S1. In episode 8 Stephen McKinley Henderson’s Solomon Hancock, a senior guy at the National Security Agency, meets clandestinely with news division president Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterson) in the New York Public Library. He wants to blow the whistle on the illegal practices of his employer…
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2nd September 2013
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Richard II cast is one week into rehearsals. Thoughts on the first day follow below, but first it’s my pleasure to introduce to you our Production Diary. Each week between now and the Live from Stratford-upon-Avon cinema broadcast on 13 November we are going to release a short video. Episode 1 features an interview with director Greg Doran (who is also, of course, Artistic Director of the RSC) and he does a very good job of explaining how the production diary will work across the next three months.
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1st September 2013
I am not sure if Jonathan Bate’s list of 100+ of the Best Books on Shakespeare has been around for a good while, but it’s new to me – and that feels like sufficient reason to feature it at the head of today’s Links. (Apologies by the way for absences in the past couple of weeks; I’m back for the start of the new term.) Bate is among the very best Shakespearean scholars writing today and one of the editors of The RSC Shakespeare Complete Works from Palgrave Macmillan (this is the one-volume edition I use most frequently, although nothing beats the individual volumes in the Arden series). He is also the author of The Genius of Shakespeare (1997), which if I had to recommend to someone just a single book about the Bard, this would be the one. It is described here as ‘a biography of the idea of Shakespeare and perceptions of his greatness’. Fortunately, we can all read many more than just one – and this list is a great place to start. There are many more links below, with thanks this week to @AndyKesson, @footage, @cinetourist, @KarlinMarc, @zilkerfilms, @filmstudiesff and @Z. read more »
26th August 2013
Rehearsals for Richard II start tomorrow, so this week’s blog is, as it were, a little previous. (New readers should know that I am producing the Live from Stratford-upon-Avon cinema broadcast of the production on 13 November, and I am chronicling the journey towards that in regular posts on Mondays.) The past week has seen a lot of preparation across all departments but the company will only come together for the first time on Tuesday. As far as the filming goes, Chris McGill at Dusthouse has been editing the trailer, which is exciting, and we have been working with Greg Doran on the first of the production diary films. Look out for that on Friday. Also this week the RSC confirmed the full cast for the production, and I have included that, along with some further notes, below. read more »
22nd August 2013
To the Gate Notting Hill tonight for an NT Live encore screening of the Manchester International Festival Macbeth. I was away when this production with Kenneth Branagh and Alex Kingston was shown live in cinemas, and so I missed the discussion that it prompted then. As I’m coming to it late, perhaps it need not detain us long, but I do want to note the things about the cinema broadcast that I thought were good – and those that for me were not so good (primarily the theatre production itself). Before that, though, you might like to read press reviews by Michael Billington for the Guardian, Kate Bassett for the Independent and Dominic Cavendish for the Telegraph, as well as Peter Kirwan’s thoughtful piece for his website The Bardathon. read more »
20th August 2013
At the end of last week I posted the introductory video to the Shakespearean London Theatres (ShaLT) project. As I wrote then, we have been working with ShaLT for more than a year to make a series of short films about Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre in London beyond the Globe. The first bundle of these films have now been released, and their focus is the playwright and entrepreneur John Lyly. Lyly is a profoundly significant but – outside academic circles – comparatively little-known figure, although there is a growing awareness of his importance, and this will be furthered with the publication next month of new book by Andy Kesson (who is one of our contributors), John Lyly and Early Modern Authorship. This is our film that introduces John Lyly – and then there are three further films below:
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19th August 2013
Rehearsals for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new Richard II with David Tennant start a week tomorrow, Tuesday (the cast get the Bank Holiday off too). And we deep in the preparations for the Live from Stratford Upon Avon broadcast to cinemas on 13 November. During the past seven days we confirmed our on-screen host (hurrah!), shot the trailer and began to film the weekly production diary which will start to appear online on 30 August. But before we begin things proper I thought it might be interesting to offer a little background about previous British screen versions of the play. To date, there has been no feature film – Rupert Goold’s highly cinematic treatment for television’s The Hollow Crown (2012) comes the closest, while the 1949 Ealing Studios film Train of Events features an amateur dramatics society performing the play’s last scenes. Including The Hollow Crown, there have been seven full-length small-screen productions so far. read more »
