SCREEN PLAYS

Yesterday came welcome news of the publication of the online edition of the latest issue of Critical Studies in Television, a themed collection of essays titled ‘The Liveliest Medium’: Television’s Aesthetic Relationships with Other Arts which promises to enrich significantly current debates on television aesthetics. It contains three essays that explore the aesthetics of theatre plays on television: John Wyver’s ‘Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance and the Politics of Possibility in Two Television Adaptations’, Billy Smart’s ‘Three Different Cherry Orchards, Three Different Worlds: Chekhov at the BBC, 1962-81′ and my own ‘Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, “a Play for Voices” on Radio, Stage and Television’. In this blog post I share a taster of my essay, in the hope of directing readers to the volume as a whole. Continue reading →

Seeing Philip Saville’s remarkable adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 play Huis Clos at BFI Southbank has, prompted me to pen at least a short note in response. The drama was screened as part of the current season celebrating 50 years of The Wednesday Play, although as a production based on a classic of the European theatre, it was hardly a typical offering from the strand. In fact, as an opening title sequence revealed, it was commissioned by producer Peter Luke for his Festival series, but when this was cancelled by incoming executive Sidney Newman, In Camera ended up as one of the first broadcasts in the new series dedicated to dramas of the contemporary world. Continue reading →

Today being Maundy Thursday in the Christian calendar prompts me to look back at a television production of a play which was transmitted on a Maundy Thursday over fifty years ago. When I was recently doing some data entry for the Screen Plays database the production caught my eye because it was staged in the unusual location of the nave of Bristol Cathedral. What a technically challenging location this may have been for the performance of a play for television transmission, with its potential complexities with regard to space, lighting and sound. The play in question is The True Mistery of the Passion, James Kirkup’s translation and adaptation of the 15th-century French mystery play Mystère de la Passion by the brothers Gréban, which seems, in this 1960 BBC production by James Acton-Bond to have achieved a remarkable intimacy, making the viewer at home feel part of the drama’s internal ‘audience’ of medieval villagers. Continue reading →

This is the last of three posts on The Theban Plays, a trilogy of Sophocles’ tragedies Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, directed by Don Taylor, which was broadcast on BBC2 over three evenings of one week in September 1986 (and all three are available on YouTube). Antigone is by some degree the most successful production of the three, with strong performances throughout and a thoughtfully designed set which works dynamically with the director’s interpretation of the play. Continue reading →

One of the most interesting aspects of our research is starting to get a sense of some of the key creative figures in the story of stage plays on television. This is particularly the case with producers and directors from the earliest years of television, before and after World War Two. And among these a particularly intriguing figure, but at present also an elusive one, is Fred O’Donovan. Continue reading →