OTD in early British television: 29 November 1937
John Wyver writes: OTD, Monday 29 November 1937, from the BBC’s ‘high definition’ Television service… more Shakespeare. Scenes from Cymbeline, broadcast from 3.39pm to 4.24pm, and then again from 9.31pm to 9.55pm, was a presentation of minimally restaged elements of André van Gyseghem‘s production at London’s Embassy Theatre, which had opened 13 days previously. The image above, taken from The Sphere, 11 December 1937, shows Geoffrey Toone as Posthumus and Mario Francelli as Philario.
This autumn was when the Television service moved on from presenting short, individual scenes from Shakespeare’s plays and began to present longer screen versions, featuring multiple parts of the play. This was the first, and it was followed by producer George More O’Ferrall’s Scenes from Othello on 14 December, which was a 67-minute broadcast of an original staging for the studio, with Balliol Holloway, playing in blackface, as the Moor and Celia Johnson as Desdemona.
Rehearsed for the cameras only from 10 o’clock on the morning of transmission, Scenes from Cymbeline featured elements of act 1 scene 1, the whole of 1:3, known as ‘the wooing scene’, both set in the palace garden; 1:4 in Philario’s house in Rome; and then elements of 1:6 and 2:2, in which Iachimo (George Hayes) emerges from his hiding place in a trunk stored in the bedroom of Imogen (Joyce Bland).
Van Gyseghem’s production was notable as being the first to use George Bernard Shaw’s variation of act 5, which he had written ‘as a lark’ for the Memorial Theatre at Stratford but not played there. An anonymous Times critic wrote of the staging that it was ‘intrinsically interesting’ but it ‘left the impression that the actors were saving themselves up for Shaw at the expense of Shakespeare.’
Remarkably, a basic camera script survives for the television presentation, preserved in the BBC Written Archives at Caversham. This shows that the four cameras used for the transmission were split between stucio A at Alexandra Palace for the bulk of the action, and the adjacent studio B, used for just Philario’s house. This meant that each scene was covered with just two cameras.
The total number of lines in the script is 790, which if played in full as appears to have been the case during the 44 minutes of the afternoon transmission, would have meant that the verse-speaking was, well, rapid. Significant cuts must have been made for the shorter live ‘repeat’ in the evening.
By contrast, the visual rhythm of the shots and mixes (cutting between cameras was not possible before the war) would have seemed, judged by later standards, funereally slow. There are just 25 shot changes specified for the whole broadcast, and half of these are mixes to and from captions.
Another half-hour of scenes from Cymbeline was broadcast nearly 20 years later, when elements of Michael Benthall’s Old Vic production were played from studio D of the BBC complex at Lime Grove. Should you wish to know more, I have written in detail about both television productions (before I knew the exact running times), in a Screen Plays blog post about the 1937 production, and about both in ‘Scenes from Cymbeline and early television studio drama’, in Sarah Hatchuell and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, eds., Shakespeare on Screen: The Tempest and Late Romances, Cambridge University Press, 2017.
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