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 »
17th August 2013
Another Saturday, another review of another DVD set from Network’s The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection. Following last week’s engagement with the first release, today’s post is concerned with Volume 2. Here is another quartet of lesser-known British feature films shot mostly (location filming is minimal) on the stages at Ealing between, this week, 1935 and 1942. Embedded below is Network’s trailer for the quartet – and across the jump are my thoughts about each of the four films.
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16th August 2013
For the past year and more, we have hugely enjoyed working with the academic team putting together Shakespearean London Theatres. The ShaLT project is dedicated to telling ‘the full story behind the vast theatrical scene that thrilled London for over fifty years during the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I.” As the ShaLT website says,
This project aims to increase public awareness of these sites and to promote their enjoyment by producing, through a partnership between De Montfort University and the Victoria and Albert Museum, a map, a printed ShaLT Guide, interactive software, public talks, and downloadable short films that will enable the public to travel to the modern London locations of these theatres and learn about them.
The excellent website has a wealth of detail, historical analysis and images, and Illuminations has been working on the short films. The first of these films – a general introduction to the project and to the period – has just gone online, and is embedded here. More will appear over the coming days and weeks, and we will be highlighting those here too – as well as discussing further the ShaLT project and our part in it.
15th August 2013
I am delighted to have been invited to edit a special edition of the journal Shakespeare Bulletin to appear in 2015. Published by The John Hopkins University Press, the journal has as one of its editors Pascale Aebischer, who is the author of the new – and highly recommended – book, Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare (borrow it from a library, the cover price is a tad steep).
Pascale and I share an interest in screen adaptations of plays by early modern authors other than Shakespeare, and the presentation of these works on television and other screen media (although not movies) is the focus of the issue that we have titled ‘Beyond Shakespeare on the small screen’. This is the call for proposals (which can also be found here) – and then across the jump I discuss the idea a little more, as well as embedding two relevant examples. One is an amazing version of the opening scene of Robert Greene’s The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay; the other is Bed Trick (with Sinéad Mathews, above), a rather wonderful if also oblique example from The Young Vic and the Guardian of what I’m talking about:
The issue will consider a wide range of adaptations of early modern drama by authors other than Shakespeare produced for media forms that were not primarily conceived for cinema distribution. We are interested in critical and analytical discussions of plays from medieval literature through to the 1630s that have been adapted for broadcast television in Britain or elsewhere, for DVD distribution in either a commercial and/or an educational context, and for other forms of digital or online dissemination.
Proposals of up to 300 words for academic articles should be sent to me (email: [email protected]) by 31 March 2014. I would also be very interested to hear about any projects that you think I and colleagues might consider for discussion. read more »
13th August 2013
… a bit, well, ordinary. At least that’s how David Bowie is happening now came across in my £14.20 seat at the Cineworld Wandsworth. Tonight’s 7pm screening was billed as ‘a live nationwide cinema event’ and the ‘finale’ to the V&A exhibition that closed on Sunday. As a ‘live’ cinema event (I’m going to keep using the inverted commas), this followed in the footsteps of Pompeii Live from the British Museum (about which I posted here) in aspiring to present an exhibition on a cinema screen in real time.
As I commented then, Pompeii Live didn’t feel very, you know, live, and neither, if truth be told, did DBihn. This was despite the slightly desperate measure of cutting from the numerous prepared packages back to our uncertain presenters – exhibition curators Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh – leaping up onto a little stage to floor-manager-cued applause. Otherwise, I saw some compelling archive footage, admired some nice video graphics and got told again and again and again what an amazing, transformational, astoundingly original, epoch-defining genius DB is. Yet I didn’t even really feel that I actually saw the exhibition. read more »
13th August 2013
Oh to be in Edinburgh now that Hamlet‘s there. The Wooster Group‘s radical adaptation of the play has its last performance tonight as part of the official festival – it’s sold out, of course, but there is a hope that the production may come to London next year. As the company’s web site explains, this is ‘Shakespeare’s classic tragedy… re-imagined by mixing and repurposing Richard Burton’s 1964 Broadway production, directed by John Gielgud’, and a taste of its pleasures can be gleaned from this ‘flight plan’ video:
HAMLET in NY – flight plan [10.24.12] from The Wooster Group on Vimeo.
Lyn Gardner for the Guardian was won over when the show was in Dublin last year and for the same paper Andrew Dickson more or less concurs. Dominic Cavendish in the Telegraph is, by contrast, underwhelmed: ‘altogether too much straight-faced mucking around’. But what this clearly glorious theatrical event does offer me is the chance to replay the astonishing video interview and trailer with Richard Burton (extracts of which appear above). He gave the interview and recorded the trailer when his Hamlet – on which The Wooster Group base their production – was filmed on the Broadway stage back in 1964 for release to cinemas. How prescient of NTLive and RSC Live from Stratford Upon Avon is that! As Burton rightly says, ‘This is the theatre of the future, taking shape before your eyes today.’
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the launch of ‘Theatrofilm with Electronovision’.
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12th August 2013
Time, I think, to start posting – initially on a weekly basis – about the preparations for Richard II Live from Stratford Upon Avon. This is the Royal Shakespeare Company’s live-to-cinemas broadcast of the company’s new staging with David Tennant as the king. Directed by the company’s artistic director Greg Doran, this opens in Stratford’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre on 10 October before transferring to London’s Barbican Theatre for a run between 9 December and 25 January (for which there are some tickets still available).
The live showing in more than 250 UK cinemas is on Wednesday 13 November and this will be followed by a range of encore screenings as well as by presentations in the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia, Japan, Russia and elsewhere. We are also very excited that the broadcast will be shown for free in more than 1,000 schools in the UK in the week following the cinema showing. Details of the cinemas where screenings are already on sale are on the RSC’s Live from Stratford Upon Avon web site. The broadcast is not an Illuminations production, but I am producing it for the RSC – and I hope you will not object if I chronicle its development here each Monday from now on. read more »
11th August 2013
Continuing this weekend’s British cinema theme (see Ealing before Ealing here), my first recommendation has to be for Xan Brooks’ delightful Guardian essay and video A pilgrim’s progress: on the trail of A Canterbury Tale. Brooks uses the detective work of local historian Paul Tritton who has identified many of the locations used for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s extraordinary 1944 feature (details here, along with a page of links of various walks around Canterbury). If you want to know more there are further links at The Powell and Pressburger Pages lovingly assembled by Steve Crook. There are more film links across the jump, as well as links of other kinds, with my thanks this week to @KeyframeDaily, @OWC_Oxford and @longform. read more »
