Mary Warren returns to the fold (BBC, 1981)

Three productions of The Crucible in 1959 (Granada), 1968 (Rediffusion) and 1981 (BBC)

The previous post in this series of four which, together, seek to sketch out the production history of Arthur Miller’s theatre plays on British television, considered productions made by Granada in the late 1950s. The last of these was The Crucible produced by the Canadian Henry Kaplan in November 1959: this ‘powerfully glossy production’ of Miller’s 1953 dramatization of the late 17th-century witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts which served as an allegory of contemporary McCarthyism, starred Susannah York as Abigail and Sean Connery as her master John Proctor (Maurice Richardson, ‘Television: Dark House Dramas’, The Observer, 8 November 1959, p. 15). It is exciting to learn that the first fifty minutes of this production exists in the archives, even if it is not possible to view the BFI’s master copy on umatic tape. (My thanks to Lisa Kerrigan of the BFI for this archival information.)

There were two other productions of The Crucible in subsequent decades. In 1968 Alex Segal directed a modern adaptation of The Crucible for Rediffusion, a year after he appears also to have produced the play for the American television network CBS (Susan C. W. Abbotson, Critical Companion to Arthur Miller: A Literary Reference to his Life and Work, New York, 2007, p. 124). The Rediffusion production (now lost) was transmitted four years after a BBC Radio production of the play had failed effectively to evoke through sound alone the necessary sense of community and panic, and two years after the BBC had presented a so-so television adaptation of Miller’s novel Focus in the Theatre 625 strand (BBC2, 24 December 1966: see J. C. Trewin’s review, ‘Drama and Light Entertainment’, The Listener, 3 February 1966, p. 183). The Crucible was Rediffusion’s second production of a Miller play, following on from Joan Kemp-Welch’s production of A View from the Bridge of 1966 (the two known television productions of this play will be the subject of my next and final blog post in this Miller case study).

More than a decade later in 1981, in response to the third television production of The Crucible which was made by the BBC, Michael Church intriguingly suggested in The Times that Miller ‘has hitherto never allowed The Crucible to be televised, rightly fearing its fatal diminution in the streamlining process through which even the best directors put classics’ (‘The Crucible, BBC 1’, The Times, 13 April 1981, p. 7). This seems to suggest that Miller’s permission wasn’t directly sought by the independent television companies for their productions; however, as noted in my previous blog post, on the Granada productions of the late 1950s, Miller explicitly stated in a 1960 interview that it was precisely because of Granada’s willingness to screen his plays ‘at full length’ that he granted permission for these productions to be made (Arnold Zeitlin, ‘Why You Can’t See an Arthur Miller Play’, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 4 October 1960, p. 56).

Derek Granger wrote in to The Listener to state that the BBC had been wrong to announce the 1981 Crucible as a ‘World Television Premiere’ (‘Miller’s Tale’, 7 May 1981, p. 610) – and he was in a very good place to know this, having been head of Granada’s play department at the time of the 1959 transmission. Louis Marks, the producer of the BBC’s Crucible, however, was moved to question Granger’s claim that Granada had in fact presented Miller’s play at all, on the basis that the 78-minute production must have drawn on less than half of the text. Marks continued, ‘We never claimed that ours was the first ever television production, merely that it was the first time the play had been presented in its full form. Arthur Miller’s own view is that the play suffers greatly from heavy cutting and results in little more than what he terms “scenes from the play” ’ (Louis Marks, ‘Miller’s Tale’, The Listener, 28 May 1981, p. 712; my emphasis) – a statement which offers food for thought when thinking through the textual cutting which is often felt to be necessary in the process of adaptation of a theatre script for effective performance on the small screen.

1981 BBC production: Act 1

Despite this slight bickering in the press, it is at least clear that in 1981 the BBC presented the play entirely unabridged, and that this was at Miller’s request (The Guardian, 11 April 1981, p. 18). Indeed, the production was said to have carried Miller’s ‘special blessing’ (Michael Church, ‘Television’, The Times, 8 June 1981, p. 11). This accomplished studio production – a 170-minute transmission in two parts on one evening (Sunday 12 April 1981), with a ten-minute news programme serving as interval – not only presents the text word-for-word but also adheres closely to Miller’s famously detailed and extensive stage directions. Only occasionally does it depart from these and always for good televisual effect, as I discuss below.

Act 1 is a little creaky around the edges, but the action being concentrated (as Miller specifies) in one, rather bare, bedroom in the home of Reverend Parris, a useful intensity is built up which provides a solid base for the exploration of motivation of several characters in the promulgation of the central lie of the play. Revd Parris is deeply concerned for his own reputation, having stumbled across his daughter Betty, niece Abigail and many other girls ‘dancing like heathen’ (p. 231 of the 2009 Methuen edition of the text) in the forest, a practice which has led to a rumour of witchcraft in the community. When questioning Abigail (Sarah Berger) about this, begging her to tell him of ‘whatever abomination you have done’, Parris (Denis Quilley) stands behind her; he cannot see her face, but the audience sees that her face betrays nothing at all of her falsehood. She does, however, express some emotion when he relates how Goody [=Goodwife] Proctor, in whose house she used to work, has described her as ‘soiled’: her expression quivers momentarily, but immediately she regains her composure and disputes this accusation (232; see adjacent image).

As other characters come and go during the course of this first act it becomes clear that not only is Abigail lying about these things but that she holds a dominant and persuasive power over both the other girls and her uncle’s Barbadian slave Tituba (played by Peggy Phango). That Tituba is considerably older (Miller specifies that she is in her forties) counts for nothing against her status as a slave: Abigail seeks to pin the blame for the accusations of witchcraft onto her, when in truth she and the other girls sought her knowledge in charms etc for personal and romantic matters. She is the first woman in the play to be given the opportunity to ‘tear [her]self free’ of the Devil (257) – in other words, choosing between confessing to the practice of witchcraft and in the process implicating others, or facing death by hanging or whipping – she works herself up into a frenzy of fear, panting and rocking back and forth on her knees with the camera closing in on her wide-eyed face, with community members behind. The pressure she is under, as a black slave accused of witchcraft by the white community, is emphasized by the composition of the frame. At this important moment in the drama, Abigail recognizes that a confession can quickly be followed by accusations of others in the community (and she has specifically within her sights Elizabeth Proctor, her former employer and the wife of her former lover John). At the end of the act Abigail cries:

‘I want the light of God, I want the sweet love of Jesus! I danced for the Devil; I saw him; I wrote in his book; I go back to Jesus; I kiss His hand. I saw Sarah Good with the Devil! I saw Goody Osburn with the Devil! I saw Bridget Bishop with the Devil!’ (259).

1981 BBC production: Act 2

These ecstatic hysterics contrast sharply with the silence with which Act 2 opens. The camera follows John Proctor (played by Michael N. Harbour) around the capacious living spaces of his house as he puts his gun away on arriving home, tastes the supper cooking on the open fire and washes his face in a basin. That all is not quite right between husband and wife (Lynn Dearth) is gently suggested by the fact that he seasons the pot in her absence (as specified by the stage directions) then complements her cooking:

PROCTOR: It’s well seasoned.
ELIZABETH: I took great care. (262)

There is a solidity and warmth in the set, but it is also a little austere. The darkness and heavy wooden furniture underscore Proctor’s complaint that ‘It’s winter in here yet’, whilst the big open hearth and roaring fire in the centre of the room suggests that deep down there may still be love between husband and wife, just as there is warmth beneath the soil he has lately been tilling on the farm (‘It’s warm as blood beneath the clods’, 262). It is springtime in Salem, the farm is coming to life and he talks of summer. ‘You ought to bring some flowers in the house’, he says, and she promises to, ‘tomorrow’.

This metaphor for the current coolness of their marital relationship is brought yet further into focus when they move to the doorway to look out upon the garden in the evening. A lilac tree is visible on the left of the frame as they emerge outside. It remains partially in shot as the camera observes their gaze. The evening light falls brightly on their faces and they take in the view against the backdrop of birdsong. But as Proctor notes that ‘Lilacs have a purple smell. Lilac is the smell of nightfall, I think. Massachusetts is a beauty in the spring!’ Elizabeth’s face falls and she swiftly turns and re-enters the house. The purple lilac, a symbol of the early stages of romantic love, here reminds the wife painfully of her husband’s infidelity with the young Abigail, former employee of the household. The marital relationship has yet to emerge from the winter caused by his infidelity and, perhaps Elizabeth fears, all is fully in bloom and full of promise between Proctor and Abigail.

For a production that follows both the words of the text and the playwright’s extensive stage directions so faithfully, it is notable here how the production makes a diversion in order to emphasize visually the potency and weight of the words in this scene, especially the symbolism of the lilac. Miller indicates that Proctor ‘goes and looks up at the sky through the open doorway. […] She [Elizabeth] is watching him from the table as he stands there absorbing the night’ (262). But by having Elizabeth join him at the open door, there is for just a moment the sense that husband and wife are, or are soon to be, at peace. They are looking in the same direction, shoulder to shoulder, even if they do not make eye contact; and yet, following the mention of the lilac, when they return indoors the gulf that separates them is starker than ever.

A poppet on the mantelpiece

As he returns indoors, night swiftly falls; he lights candles and the room becomes much brighter. The generous size of the set for the Proctors’ main living space comes into its own as the act progresses and the camerawork emphasizes the fear and uncertainty in the community regarding the accusations of witchcraft by focusing on small groupings of people from different positions.  When the court officials come to question Elizabeth following an accusation of witchcraft (made by Abigail), the camera is positioned close to the wall of the fireplace on which a poppet, or doll, sits on the mantelpiece. As can be seen in the adjacent image, clever use of perspective has the poppet – which will be a crucial piece of evidence – foregrounded left whilst Elizabeth is asked whether she owns any such poppets. She says no, at first, then when the poppet is spotted, she walks towards it – and the camera.

The interiority of this studio production is typical of Don Taylor’s productions of stage plays in that it does not often or extensively go beyond the confines of the imaginative space outlined within the play. So, when Elizabeth is taken outside and chained to the cart, the cameras don’t follow Proctor when he demands, unsuccessfully, that she not be chained. The cameras remain ‘indoors’, offering the audience the experience of the characters who remain there, listening. The imaginative use of outside space in this play is important: it is where Proctor and Abigail consumated their passion; it is where the girls, together with Tituba, had been found to be dancing and engaged in witchcraft-like practices. The production therefore opens with a view of a misty forest in darkness, a visual reminder of the forest in which they cavorted. This view is used again as an act-divider between Acts 1 and 2. It appears again at the end of Act 2 but at this point it develops into a scene of its own, a scene which was new to me and which I describe below.

Strange interlude

After the close of Act 3, the camera lingers on the forest view until a figure appears in the distance and walks to the clearing. It is John Proctor. Abigail, with her hair loose and in her nightwear, joins him and we learn that he has summoned her here. This scene was a surprise to me for it does not appear in the usual editions of the play, but it is one that Miller, at some point, wrote. For Corinna Adam, writing in The Listener, its inclusion was a mistake: ‘Perhaps the decision to include it was a scholarly one. But by making it clear that John’s explanation of the deadly game – that it is all pretence – is the only right one, much of the central mystery of the play was lost’ (Corinna Adam, ‘Broadcasting and the Arts: Television’, The Listener, 16 April 1981, p. 518).

It is a strange scene, for sure, but I don’t agree with Adam’s estimation of its contribution to the drama. We know from the private conversations of Act 1 that Abigail and the other girls are engaged in pretence. In this scene, however, she seems to uphold the pretence even in front of Proctor, referring to her new-found social potency almost as if it were divinely sanctioned, seeming to believe in the myth that she originally fabricated in order to protect herself from censure. Here she uses the myth in an attempt to get what she wants in a way which not only shows her as self-serving to the detriment of others (for example, his wife, who is now in jail) but also, I think, psychologically disturbed: she will not stop, she says, until all the ‘liars’ and ‘hypocrites’ of the town are dead, until she has ‘scrubbed the world clean’. She accuses John, too, of hypocrisy but declares herself his personal saviour (‘I will save you tomorrow. From yourself I will save you’), because, she says, through their sexual encounters he purged her and brought her to knowledge: ‘It was a fire you walked me through and all my ignorance was burned away. It was a fire, John, we lay in fire’. Abigail, this scene suggests to me, is dangerous not just because she is determined to save herself and extinguish her romantic competition but also because she appears to be highly unbalanced with a grandiose perception of herself.

This builds on the words she spoke to him in private in the first act: ‘I look for John Proctor that took me from my sleep and put knowledge in my heart! I never knew what pretense [sic] Salem was, I never knew the lying lessons I was taught by all these Christian women and their covenanted men! And now you bid me tear the light out of my eyes?’ (241). Interestingly, this speech is followed by the sound of a psalm being sung below, and in a stage direction Miller explicitly states that the words ‘going up to Jesus’ are sung. It is almost as if Abigail, in this heightened moment with her former lover who at this point rejects her, has taken her cue from the psalm. Her elaborate attempt to win him back and replace his wife draws the social currency that is most powerful within her community: although she has learned from him to critique the community’s Christianity, she knows that she must appeal to their religiosity - to ‘go up to Jesus’ – in order to protect herself and remove Proctor’s wife from the equation.

1981 BBC production: Act 3

Mary Warren vs. Abigail and the other girls

The second part of this two-part production – shown either side of a news bulletin across one evening – opens with Act 3, the scene of which is the vestry room of the Salem meeting house which is serving as the anteroom of the General Court. Miller specifies that the set is to be ‘solemn, even forbidding’ in order to represent the shift at this point from the domestic to the public (285). The first shot is down from the rafters onto an empty throne-like chair and a long wooden table and the second takes in the empty table from ground level. The court proceedings are heard at a distance for a few seconds before they erupt into the anteroom.

The long table functions effectively as a structuring device for the court’s more intimate resumption in the anteroom. When Mary Warren, the Proctors’ young servant who has come with John to retract her words, declaring that the other girls are fabricating their testimony, it stands for the great gulf she is setting up between her and her peers (see adjacent image), but it does not protect her feeling the pressure and threat from Abigail. As the emotion builds to a crescendo they, following Abigail’s lead, begin to imitate her voice and actions – a display which the authorities interpret as Mary sending her spirit out to control the girls. This performance, and the authorities reaction to it, so intimidates Mary that she retracts her statement and rushes to the other side of the table into Abigail’s open embrace.

John Proctor is denied as an adulterer by his wife Elizabeth

At this point in the drama, the only card John Proctor has left to play is the knowledge that Abigail is largely driven by her desire to replace Elizabeth as his wife. This involves outing himself as an adulterer. She denies it, and the resulting scene in which Elizabeth is brought in to be questioned about this is powerfully arranged with John and Abigail standing on either side of the table facing towards the camera. The camera lingers more closely on John’s pained expression when Elizabeth enters only to deny that her husband is an adulterer (see adjacent image). Act 3 culminates in John’s furious, desperate cry that the authorities ‘are pulling Heaven down and raising up a whore!’, on which his hands are bound and he looks across to the triumphant gaze of Abigail who glories in the embrace of all her friends (see the very first image published here, above).

1981 BBC production: Act 4

The dank darkness of a cell in Salem’s jail serves as the setting for the last act. It is the day of John Proctor’s hanging and his wife is persuaded to appeal to him to save his own life by confessing to having bound himself to the service of the Devil (325). The large empty space that hangs between them momentarily when he enters the cell reminds us not only of the three months they have been parted but also of the gulf that separated them in their marriage. It also makes their loving, and sometimes passionate, reunion now all the more potent.

Following this touching, intimate scene between husband and wife, in which each, dirty and ravaged from their stay in jail, take some blame for the failings in their marriage, Proctor admits to the authorities for having consorted with the Devil. Frustratingly for them, however, he will not accuse others, arguing that ‘I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it’ (326).

He signs his name to this confession but refuses to hand the signed piece of paper over, despite the fact that he will not save his life unless he does so: ‘How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!’ (328). Elizabeth recognizes that he has now purged himself of the guilt he long felt for his adultery with Abigail and that he is at peace with himself, having also nobly resisted the imperative of accusing others in the community. He is resigned to imminent death and Elizabeth has deep respect for his choice: ‘He have his goodness now’, she says as she presses herself up towards the bars of the window from which she sees him hang (see image adjacent), ‘God forbid I take it from him’ (329).

This is an accomplished and thoughtful production of The Crucible. The straightforwardness of the absolute fidelity to the text means it no doubt served as an excellent production for those studying the text as part of school curricula. This fidelity means that there is no hint of the McCarthyism for which it works as an allegory; indeed, the English regional accents used by the residents of Salem mean that the story of the plot, for those viewers coming to the play fresh, may have been divested almost entirely of its historical and allegorical American contexts. It would be absolutely fascinating to learn how Granada had managed these aspects of the play in its production transmitted a little over twenty years earlier. If a viewing copy of the umatic tape master at the BFI ever becomes available rest assured I shall respond on that here!

Alan Bates as Kenneth in A Memory of Two Mondays (Granada, 1959)

Given the popularity of Arthur Miller’s American tragedies on the stage and in educational curricula in Britain, it is not surprising to find that at least twelve productions of the plays were transmitted on British television networks from 1957 to 1997. What is a little surprising is that there has been no systematic study of Miller’s theatre plays on the British small screen. In February this year I posted my first instalment of a study of these television texts in response to this lacuna, focusing on three productions of Death of a Salesman which were transmitted in 1957 (Granada), 1966 (BBC, Play of the Month) and 1996 (a five-part BBC series for schools).

Very shortly after publishing my thoughts on Death of a Salesman I gave birth to twins, Matilda and Dylan, and for this reason part two of this case study has been quite a long time in the writing! Today, three months to the day later, I pick up the narrative with a glance at Granada’s three other Arthur Miller productions which followed hot on the heels of the 1957 Death of a Salesman.

In its second year of broadcasting the north of England weekday franchise Granada mounted Death of a Salesman, and this was soon followed by productions of All My Sons, A Memory of Two Mondays and The Crucible – all of which were British television premieres.

As noted in my last blog post, Miller’s attractiveness to the commercial networks around this time and the seeming reluctance of the BBC to engage with his work until the 1980s (the BBC’s 1966 Death of a Salesman was the anomaly in the production chronology) need to be understood in the context of institutional factors such as Granada’s employment of Canadian Silvio Narrizano (1927-2011) as head of drama output and Miller’s political position in America and how this may have impacted on the different television networks’ perceptions of his performability. Whereas the BBC seemed largely to steer clear of this American theatrical giant, Granada on the other hand – even before the Court of Appeal in August 1958 annulled Miller’s conviction for contempt of Congress (for refusing to name former members of the American Communist Party to the House of Un-American Activities) – had produced both Death of a Salesman and All My Sons, and these followed close on the heels of a production of Miller’s adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in March 1957.

‘There is something about the American theatre which appeals to the best in Independent Television’, wrote a critic in The Manchester Guardian in response to All My Sons, the second of four Miller plays mounted by Granada from 1957 to 1959 (‘Television Notes: The Time of Your Life’, The Manchester Guardian, 20 October 1958, p. 5). All My Sons was produced and directed by Cliff Owen and presented – as were the other three productions – in the ITV Play of the Week series. The 14 May 1958 transmission seems to be the only time that the play has been produced on British television, although BBC Radio had broadcast it on the Home Service two years earlier in 1956 (which was eight years after its British stage premiere).

The Times considered that this production of All My Sons - a play on the topic of wartime profiteering, with structural echoes of Sophoclean tragedy – was ‘sombrely concentrated’ and as ‘equally distinguished’ as Granada’s Death of a Salesman almost six months earlier. This assessment may have had something to do with the fact that Albert Dekker, the American actor who had played the role of Willy Loman in Salesman, also took the role of the protagonist Joe Keller in All My Sons: his performance of the self-made businessman who had shipped damaged aircraft parts out of his factory during the Second World War, leading to the deaths of twenty-one pilots, was considered to be ‘a perfectly controlled progression from guilt-ridden self-ingratiation to a savage power which lent unassailable dignity to his confession’ (‘Study of Wartime Profiteering: Arthur Miller Play on Independent Television’, The Times, 15 May 1958, p. 5). Reflecting on Dekker’s performance in The Observer, Maurice Richardson wrote ‘Let no one tell you under-acting is necessary on television’ and, for another critic, Megs Jenkins who played Keller’s wife Kate, traversed the emotional landscape from ‘hysterical obstinacy’ to a ‘final acceptance of tragedy’ ‘most sensitively’ (‘Cephalopod Culture’, The Observer, 18 May 1958, p. 14; Anon., ‘Harrowing Drama but Convincing: All My Sons’, The Manchester Guardian, 15 May 1958, p. 5).

Granada’s A Memory of Two Mondays, transmitted a few months later on 27 February 1959, presents an elegy to the difficult lives of the workers in a New York warehouse at the time of the Great Depression. This production of a fairly recent and therefore little known work, which had premiered in the US just four years earlier, was prefaced by a lengthy introduction in the TV Times. The reviewer in The Times found the play itself, with its focus much more on character rather than plot, wanting, but admired the ‘moments of dramatic resonance’ and ‘sombre performances’, particularly that of Alan Bates as Kenneth, that Silvio Narizzano (who also produced Granada’s Death of a Salesman) was able to elicit (‘Demand for Pity: Defects in Memory of Two Mondays’, The Times, 28 February 1959, p. 4).

Later that year, on 3 November 1959, The Crucible - perhaps as the more accomplished and better known play – seemed to make more of a splash amongst the critics, with Richardson in The Observer considering it to be ‘a powerfully glossy production’ in a review which offers a few tantalising hints about the visual aesthetic of the production by Henry Kaplan:

‘For the long and very strong cast there was a lot of black shadow to suggest the tempter’s home ground and offset the prim white collars of the girls who had been kicking over the Puritan traces dancing naked in the woods. It was spectacular viewing, particularly the bedside interrogation of the allegedly possessed Betty and the mass hysteria in court. Susannah York had a field night as Abigail, the nymphomaniacal pseudo-witch who causes half the trouble by her passion for her master, Sean Connery.’ (Maurice Richardson, ‘Television: Dark House Dramas’, The Observer, 8 November 1959, p. 15)

Kaplan was another Canadian working alongside Narizzano at Granada; interestingly, in the same year, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation produced a television adaptation of the The Crucible. Stimulated especially by the Granada productions into reflecting on the absence of Arthur Miller’s plays on American television networks, Arnold Zeitlin went to Miller himself for an explanation, which came in three parts:

’1. [...] I refuse to permit their being cut to an hour or an hour-and-a-half in conformity with my belief that any good work is already reduced to its minimum length by definition. The English produce my work at full length and for that reason I have permitted them to show all my plays.

2. For many years, no work of mine was permitted on TV by virtue of the blacklist. [...]

3. I would not sell any play to television without a large payment because part of my annual income derives from amateur and semi-professional productions which I believe would probably be fewer once my work was seen on TV. Also, I would not sell anything unless I had complete control over casting and direction just as I have on stage or on screen.

[...] I don’t believe that authors should, in effect, give away their works for practically nothing but should receive a minimum of 50 per cent of everything earned by those works. An author does not exist so that others may get rich from his labor.’ (‘Why You Can’t See an Arthur Miller Play’, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 4 October 1960, p. 56.)

Granada’s Death of a Salesman and All My Sons are regrettably lost, but both A Memory of Two Mondays and the first fifty minutes of The Crucible are listed as surviving in The Kaleidoscope British Independent Television Drama Research Guide (ed. by Simon Coward, Richard Down and Christopher Perry, 2010). I am grateful to Lisa Kerrigan for the information that the BFI holds copies of both titles: The Crucible exists on master umatic tape so it is not, unfortunately, viewable; I do, however, look forward to adding a substantial postscript to this post once I have consulted the VHS copy of A Memory of Two Mondays.

‘We’ve taken a central idea from The Changeling about the sexual awakening of a young girl,’ producer Steve Matthews acknowledged in a Daily Telegraph preview feature about Compulsion.

Middleton in this play stumbles on an idea of sexuality that is about 300 years before its time. Then, suddenly, he fumbles the ball because he hasn’t got Freud, he hasn’t got modernism. Our writer, Joshua St Johnston, has turned it into a twisted love story about a privileged girl who has only ever been allowed to exist as a construct of other men. Her affair with Flowers is the first real thing that happens to her. (Serena Davies, ‘Interview: Ray Winstone and Parminder Nagra on Compulsion‘, 28 April 2009)

Whether or not Middleton – and Rowley – ‘fumble the ball’ in their script, they certainly provide many of the key elements in Compulsion, including the fetishistic sniffing of a pair of discarded gloves (although Don Flowers – as De Flores has become – asks a prostitute to wear them for sex, rather than, as the original stage direction has it, ‘He thrusts his hand into the glove’.) It is tricky to write about the specifics of further plot developments without giving too much away, but since we are in a modern-day world infused with the spirit of Jacobean tragedy, you can expect things to end badly and bloodily.

Beatrice-Joanna (Parminder Nagra) is translated from The Changeling into Anjika, a beautiful young Indian woman whose parents enjoy a gilded London life-style funded by her father’s tobacco business. She is just down from Cambridge with a white boyfriend, Alex (Ben Aldridge) about whom her parents know nothing. Her father initiates a version of an arranged marriage which will be convenient for his business interests and Anjika turns for help to the family chauffeur Flowers (Ray Winstone) who she despises. Familiarity with The Changeling will help the viewer know in advance the reward that he demands. And you might already have guessed that the original play’s ‘madhouse’ sub-plot has no modern equivalent.

In an article published in Shakespeare Bulletin after the film’s transmission, director Sarah Harding reflected on her approach to the film.

Our preproduction coincided with the publication of Gary Taylor’s authoritative collection of Middleton’s works [published by Oxford University Press in 2007]. By chance I heard him on Radio Four making the provocative but illuminating distinction that Shakespeare writes about love and Middleton about sex. At his talk during the run of The Revenger’s Tragedy at the National Theatre, this charismatic speaker with matching purple fingernails and waistcoat opened a door to the Middleton world of uncertainty, direct speech and ‘angry young men.’ ‘Welcome to the modern world,’ he wrote in the play’s program… [Taylor’s] idea of ‘Middleton, our Contemporary’ validated my student response to a play full of complexity and ambiguity about morality and desire. We, too, do not always do what is good for us; in our modern world of recreational sex we underestimate the power of our animal responses.

Anjika… thinks she is in control, whereas she is actually playing with fire… Joshua told the story from her point of view and, without removing the ambiguity, I hoped that making the film would explore her inner contradictions and agency in the process. Hovering, though, was the danger that we would end up with a near-pornographic old man’s fantasy as he enthrals his employer’s daughter with a transformative sexual experience, but that was a risk worth taking. (‘Compulsion: A view from the director’s chair’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 29.4 Winter 2009, p. 605)

Compulsion was screened in a 9pm primetime slot on ITV1 and it achieved a respectable audience, according to the overnight figures, of 4.7 million. But the critical reception was not kind, as reviewers attacked it for its far-fetched qualities. Sam Woolaston wrote in the Guardian

It’s all so utterly implausible. I don’t believe in Anjika’s relationship with her English boyfriend, or anything they say to each other (“At least you know I’m not just after your money!”). I don’t believe that she would allow Flowers to have his wicked and creepy way with her… [It’s] not just implausible, that’s bordering on icky – a seedy old man’s fantasy, and I don’t care if the story is based on a Jacobean play. (‘Last night’s TV’, 5 May 2009)

In part at least these strictures speak to the prevalent expectation that popular television drama should be in some sense ‘realistic’, or at least that melodrama should be contained and constrained. As other dramas in this ‘Jacobean tragedy on the small screen’ season have attested, such were not the presumptions of the stage four centuries ago.

In contrast, Peter Kirwan, one of the finest academics writing on screen adaptations of early modern drama, contributed a far more sympathetic blog post about Compulsion on his site The Bardathon

The strength of this drama for an understanding of The Changeling… was in its exploration of the line between hate and love that Beatrice-Joanna and DeFlores tread finely. While I felt that the film possibly dipped too far in the middle towards romanticising the relationship between the two (having a jolly weekend together while her parents were away, for example), for the most part the couple were tied together by strong, irrational bonds that governed them. It’s yet another example of Middleton being effectively translated to explore the complexity of contemporary morals, and a call for revived interest in the original play. (‘Compulsion @ ITV1′, posted 5 May 2009)

The neglect of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore is all the more regrettable because the film is a compelling drama, richly re-imagined for the screen, politically astute and with a clutch of exceptional performances, led by Kenneth Cranham’s fiercely insistent Giovanni and the wondering, knowing innocence of Cherie Lunghi as his sister Anabella. They play the incestuous couple whose forbidden love leads to multiple murders and the near-breakdown of the closeted society in which they, their family and the families of Anabella’s public suitors live. In the most authoritative modern edition, Arden Early Modern Drama: ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, editor Sonia Massai describes the play as ‘dark, elegant and spine-chilling’ (London: Methuen Drama, 2011, p.1)

John Ford’s play was first printed in 1633 and scholars dispute how much earlier than this it was written. It was popular during the Caroline period, played briefly at the Restoration in 1661 (Samuel Pepys wrote of it as ‘a simple play and ill-acted’) and then disappeared from the stage for some 250 years. During much of this time, its central subject-matter of incest put it beyond the critical pale. The play was revived in Paris in 1894 and then by the Phoenix Society in London in 1923, but the first modern professional production was given by Donald Wolfit in 1940, since when it has been accepted as one of the most significant plays of the early modern period.

In 1972 Roland Joffé mounted a National Theatre touring production, in period costume played against a simple set of white drapes, and with Anna Carteret and Nicholas Clay as lovers. The following year Joffé joined Granada Television as a trainee director, and for the Manchester-based company he made episodes of Coronation Street, Crown Court and the Trevor Griffiths-scripted serial Bill Brand, about the life of a radical Labour MP.

Producer Tony Garnett brought him to the BBC in 1978 to direct The Spongers, written by Jim Allen (which can be seen at BFI Southbank on 31 May). Both this and the Verity Bargate-scripted No, Mama, No, which he directed in 1979 for ITV Playhouse, are powerful slices of contemporary social realism driven by a leftist politics (Joffé was for a time associated with the Workers Revolutionary Party). Both The Spongers and No, Mama, No are also shot on location and on film, the former by Nat Crosby, the latter by Ernest Vincze.

According to Martin White in his John Ford: ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, where he credits a personal communication from cast member Tim Piggott-Smith, Joffé was due to shoot a film about the painter Stanley Spencer (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012, p. 127). When this collapsed, he suggested an adaptation of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. As a consequence, the film was made outside of the established BBC structure for classic theatre adaptations and it was scheduled in a slot dedicated to the Play for Today strand.

The text was adapted by Joffé, producer Richard Broke and Kenneth McLeish, known for his effective translations of Greek dramas. Elements of the language throughout were updated (‘gallants’ becomes ‘fellows”, ‘Call me not dear’ becomes ‘I am not your dear’), while what is perhaps the most egregious substitution attracted the critical wrath of Andrew Sinclair writing in The Listener,

Ford’s good line, ‘Oh, ignorance in knowledge!’ was removed for [Alexander] Pope’s most notorious one, ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing’… Texts are not sacred but they may be respected. Otherwise all the splendour of what is seen may be overwhelmed by anger at what is misheard.’ (‘The enemy within’, 22 May 1980, p. 662)

‘The most extensive interventions are made to the final act of the play,’ Martin White notes, ‘many designed to smooth out the shifts in Ford’s text that can present some difficulty in tracking the link between the characters’ words and actions.’ (John Ford: ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, p. 130) While some additions may jar, the overall effect is to create a fast-paced and largely credible period drama, which at many points allows Ford’s language to make a considerable impact. See, for example, the whispered attack of Alison Fiske’s glorious Hippolita on Soranzo (Anthony Bate) from Act II Scene 2.

Joffé and his colleagues transposed the play from Renaissance Parma to a northern country house in mid-nineteenth century Britain. Filming in fact took place at Chastleton House, a Jacobean wool-merchant’s estate built in the early seventeenth century, and where James MacTaggart had shot The Duchess of Malfi eight years before. The all-important urban context of the original is lost, as is much of the religious and intellectual context (it is arguable, for example, that for Ford, Giovanni’s embrace of incest is as much an intellectual challenge as it is driven by the passions).

The setting is that of a prosperous, agrarian bourgeoisie and the corruption of the society around the lovers becomes primarily financial. Martin White identifies how

Putana’s altered lines emphasized the priorities of this mercantile society where there is ‘bargaining, talking, dealing on every side’ rather than Ford’s ‘threatening, challenging, quarrelling and fighting’. (John Ford: ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, p. 129)

‘Tis Pity… was filmed during the first year of Margaret Thatcher’s first Conservative government, and the production is an effective if oblique riposte to the ‘Victorian values’ about the Prime Minister was so enthusiastic.

Filming in a contained world like Chastleton has practical advantages, given that urban exteriors do not need to be dressed in period, but the house also offered Joffé numerous opportunities to conjure up a claustrophobic world in which supposedly secret conversations can be overheard. Note how many scenes (including the first passionate kiss of the lovers) are shot as if being observed through doorways, and like James Taggart for Malfi, Joffé uses Chastleton’s staircases to suggest a world lacking all stability. There are other felicities of staging also, as when Giovanni declares his love to Anabella in what appears to have been their nursery, with that potent symbol of innocence, a rocking-horse, prominent in the establishing shot.

The escalating brutality of the play’s actions is observed dispassionately by the somewhat distanced camerawork of Nat Crosby, who shoots with muted colours and a style that echoes the social realism of The Spongers and other films from producer Tony Garnett set in contemporary Britain. By the end the affair Giovanni and Anabella may not have brought about the collapse of an urban polity and the takeover of Parma by the Cardinal, but the vicious authoritarianism of Soranzo triumphs and the household and estate of the good-hearted Florio is erased. The world is harsh and pitiless, whether the time and the place are those of late sixteenth-century Italy, of mid Victorian England or of the country in which the television audience was watching in May 1980.

Shooting on videotape on location at Chastleton House, James MacTaggart achieves a fluid and compelling production of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi that is entirely credible – which is far from easy through the second-half bloodbath. Among its strengths are a vibrant performance by Eileen Atkins as the Duchess and some truly remarkable chiaroscuro camera work.

The Duchess of Malfi in 1972 comes from a moment that we might think of as a high-water mark for productions of classical theatre on television. In the early 1970s ITV continued to present occasional classics while on BBC1 Play of the Month, offering nine major productions each year, was a Sunday night fixture.

In 1970 BBC Television committed to an additional three two-hour productions of classic plays for BBC2 under the series title Stage 2, and this short strand ran from 1971 to 1973. Produced by Cedric Messina, as was Play of the Month, Stage 2 in 1972 included Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and Mrs Warren’s Profession by George Bernard Shaw, as well as The Duchess of Malfi (which was made as a co-production with Time-Life Films).

Two notable stage productions of The Duchess of Malfi appeared the year before the 1972 television presentation, one by Peter Gill at London’s Royal Court and another directed by Clifford Williams for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In her introduction to the Arden Early Modern Drama edition of the play, Leah S. Marcus notes that at the time, ‘literary critics were beginning to devote new attention to questions like patriarchal domination in the play and its connection with early seventeenth-century history and cultural artefacts.’ (The Duchess of Malfi, London: Arden Shakespeare, 2009, p. 106)

Leah Marcus suggests that Williams’ production ‘was self-consciously based on emerging Webster criticism from the universities’. James MacTaggart’s approach, however, while relishing the decorative elements of its early seventeenth century setting, adopts a more conventional psychological reading of the drama.

Chastleton House, its gardens and the adjacent parkland – all of which are used to considerable effect – ground the events of the play in a recognisably English milieu, which also acts to distance the action from its Italian court setting and associated political concerns. (The house was completed in 1612, Webster’s play was first performed in 1613 or 1614.) Cuts to the text reinforce the evacuation of the political context, with the lost scenes including the important opening exchange between Delio and Antonio about the ‘fixed order’ of the French court as well as the whole of Act V Scene 1 with its detailed discussion of a land ownership issue.

The influential literary critic Raymond Williams was television critic of The Listener at the time of the first transmission. In his informed review he contrasted what he described as ‘a relatively straight production’ with earlier understandings of the play which stressed ‘the arbitrariness of the violence, the exhibited distortions of the sexual feelings, the conscious playings with the bizarre and the insane’:

Perhaps the main reason for the straightness with which it was played was that it was set in a great house, so that the realism of a social location was persistently stressed. Also, the text, with less cuts than is usual, was respected in the speaking [...] And then, as in the original, this spoken action created an active dimension within which the spectacular horrors were significant rather than instrumental or isolated. (‘Versions of Webster’, 19 October 1972, p. 515)

The plot of The Duchess of Malfi, briefly, centres on a widowed Duchess (who has no name, only a title) and her two brothers, one of whom is a cardinal. Neither brother wishes to see her marry again, in part to protect the good name of the family but also because Ferdinand, who is not a cardinal, harbours an incestuous sexual jealousy.

The Duchess secretly marries a member of her household, Antonio, and the brothers eventually discover this by means of their spy, Bosola. The Duchess flees, is captured, and psychologically tortured – there is a notorious scene set in which in pitch darkness she receives what she believes to be the hand of her dead lover. Her death by the agency of Bosola spurs his moral reawakening, but despite this he is only one of many who meet their death, messily, in the final act.

MacTaggart for much of the time plays down the horror, just as he encourages his cast to mute the passions that can be drawn from the text. In many ways, this is a low-key, almost introverted Malfi, and as such it is all the more effective on the screen. At the Old Vic recently Eve Best brought a fizzing, flirty energy to the early scenes, whereas Eileen Atkins is measured and controlled from the start. Her resigned dignity in the moments before she is strangled is particularly impressive, but prior to this her marriage is perhaps felt as motivated as much by convenience as love or lust. Michael Bryant’s Bosola is more than a match for the Duchess, and the translation of his monologues to interior speech, spoken in voiceover, reinforces his psychological complexity.

By 1972, James MacTaggart was BBC television drama’s most respected producer. As Oliver Wake’s profile for the British Television Drama website details, MacTaggart ‘was responsible for numerous stylistic experiments and technical innovations in the medium from the early 1960s until the mid-1970s.’ He was central to the formal experiments of Troy Kennedy Martin, Ken Loach, John McGrath and others in the early 1960s, and from 1965 he was the producer of the often controversial strand of contemporary drama The Wednesday Play.

In the early 1970s MacTaggart pioneered the use of electronic post-production techniques, and especially the employment of Colour Separation Overlay techniques, in his productions of Candide and Alice Through the Looking Glass (both BBC, 1973). He died suddenly in May 1974, at the age of 46 and less than two years after The Duchess of Malfi, having just returned from a filming trip to Tobago where he was shooting an adaptation of Robinson Crusoe.

The Duchess of Malfi exhibits none of the electronic trickery of Candide or Alice…, but its location-based videotape camerawork is just as bold and equally cutting-edge. There is a fluid quality to much of the camera movement, as with the continuous track back (lasting 1′ 42″) with the Duchess saying farewell to her brothers in front of the house. Note too the effortless use of the different levels of the house, with several scenes being set on staircases, indicating perhaps uncertainty and a lack of fixity.

The most notable feature of the production, however, is that many of the interior scenes make extraordinary use of shadows and deep pools of darkness. Subtle lighting, sometimes seemingly from candlelight alone, picks out just the silhouettes of characters. Bright doorways are set far back in frames with the most minimal foreground detail. This is a dark, dangerous domain, suggestive, as John Buckingham has noted, of film noirs of the 1940s and early 1950s with their ‘shadows and menace, an appropriate metaphor for an uncertain world of treachery and murder’.

The visual contrast, literally, with harshly overlit studio dramas of the time (such as the 1974 Play of the Month production of Thomas Middleton’s Jacobean drama The Changeling) is remarkable, and the achievement of MacTaggart and his team (Tommy Thomas is credited as ‘lighting technician’) is all the more extraordinary given the comparatively crude technical development of videotape recording at the time.

Many television productions of stage plays from forty years ago (and sometimes much less) require a certain sympathetic understanding, even forgiveness, to be watched with pleasure today. We are required to recognise the constraints of the studio, the limitations of its imposed aesthetic, the impediments of limited time and modest budgets. James MacTaggart’s The Duchess of Malfi, however, needs no such apology.

One of the most significant of all television Shakespeare productions on television was produced nearly fifty years ago as a contribution to the quatercentenary celebrations of the playwright’s birth. The idea for a television version of Hamlet recorded on location at the castle where the events are set originally came from Danmarks Radio. The project became one of the earliest major European co-productions and was pioneering in its exclusive use of outside broadcast cameras to record a drama. It also resulted in a distinguished adaptation that is engaging, insightful and often thrilling.

There was, however, a tradition of companies playing Hamlet at Kronborg Castle, a Renaissance palace built rather later than the medieval king Amleth whose legend was one of Shakespeare’s sources. Denmark’s Royal Theatre from Copenhagen staged a spectacular production there in 1916. Visiting troupes from Britain included the Old Vice Company with whom Laurence Olivier performed the lead role in 1937, while Michael Redgrave was the prince when the same group returned in the summer of 1950. The Old Vic Company went again in 1954, this time with Richard Burton.

Under the terms of the broadcast co-production arrangement BBC Television provided most of the fifty-strong creative team, including director Philip Saville and producer Peter Luke together with the cast, while the Danes contributed the magnificent location, 230 soldiers as extras and two outside broadcast units staffed by forty engineers.

Almost all drama at the time was shot with multiple cameras in television studios, but Saville extended the techniques of this form by taking to the castle units that were usually deployed for state occasions and sports events. Two-inch ‘quad’ videotape was used for the recording, and this contributes both the vivid immediacy of many sequences but also the ‘streaking’ across the images, especially during the nighttime scenes.

The twelve days of rehearsals and shooting were plagued with problems, including persistent rain and fog, as well as the regular blasts of the Elsinore foghorn. Saville quickly learned how to shoot 24-second takes that nestled into warning signal’s regular periods of silence. There were times too when Saville was deploying ten cameras for a scene, although some of the most effective parts of the drama, such as the fractured sequence of locations for ‘To be or not to be’, are shot with just one or two cameras.

Sydney Newman, Head of BBC Television’s Drama Group at the time, described Hamlet at Elsinore as ‘the most wonderful, complicated and exactly production ever done for television’. Including the special cable that was needed to run electricity from the nearby town, the total budget was announced as £40,000, of which the BBC contributed £25,000.

Christopher Plummer makes a fine Prince, but tucked away in a production file in BBC Written Archives at Caversham is a cable recording an even more intriguing casting idea. The brief message to the Artists Booking Department at BBC Television reads, ‘Previous commitments prevent my accepting your kind offer. Thank you for thinking of me.’ It is signed, ‘Sincerely, Marlon Brando’.

Plummer was cast largely on the strength of his theatre work at Stratford, Ontario, where he had taken the role seven years before. He apparently insisted that the 18 year old Jo Maxwell Muller be cast at Ophelia, and other major roles went to Donald Sutherland, Michael Caine and Robert Shaw, none of whom was nearly as well-known as later film careers would make them. Lindsay Kemp, who would later work with David Bowie, Kate Bush and Derek Jarman, is the Player Queen in a mimed ‘Mousetrap’.

In The Observer (26 April 1964), Maurice Richardson gave the production a mixed review:

It recovered nobly after a distastrous start – one of those typical directors’ whims – with the ghost scene dispersed over sand dunes in a gale of wind. Some of the exteriors, such as the arrival of the players and the start of Ophelia’s funeral procession, came off beautifully and really did add to one’s pleasure. But there was often a struggle with too much space, noticeably in the Queen’s bedchamber, where a touch of claustrophobia is essential.

For the Sunday Times (26 April 1964), Derek Prouse was more taken with the playing than with he described as the ‘gimmick’ of filming Hamlet on location:

Christopher Plummer’s introspective scenes were compelling; here was a face on which one could read thoughts. Robert Shaw’s Claudius, speculative and self-seeking, was also a commanding presence, and Roy Kinnear’s gravedigger was admirably estimated and a small triumph.

Mother (Marjorie Withers) and Leantio (Stuart Organ)

In my previous post I wrote about the 1965 adaptation of Thomas Middleton’s early modern drama Women Beware Women. The only other British television production of the play to date is one made by The Open University in 1980, and it is this that I want to discuss here.

My colleague Amanda Wrigley has posted on several occasions about adaptations of theatre plays made for The Open University as part of the A307: Drama course, including ‘Greek plays: Oedipus the King‘, ‘A307 Drama: Macbeth‘ and ‘A307 Drama: The Balcony … banned!‘. But the 1980 Women Beware Women was produced in another context, as part of the course A203: Seventeenth Century England: A Changing Culture, 1618-1689. And an opening title to the recording is explicit about the intent of the inclusion of Middleton’s drama; it reads, ‘An insight into seventeenth century society’.

In the garden with The Ward (Tom Kelly)

In the recording transmitted on BBC2 for several years from 1981 onwards, the drama is preceded by a short introduction from Arnold Kettle, Professor of Literature at The Open University, and followed by a ten-minute discussion between Kettle and the renowned historian Christopher Hill, Course Team Chairman for A203. Although ‘discussion’ is perhaps too generous a description, since Kettle asks some questions of Hill which he answers with great confidence in a direct address to the camera.

Mother, Guardiano (Ian Frost) and Livia (Rosemary McHale)

In his introduction, Arnold Kettle acknowledges that the drama has been ‘shortened’ (it lasts a little less than an hour, whereas stage productions conventionally stretch across at least two and a half hours). He also reassures the audience at the same time as directing them as to how they might approach the drama:

We don’t suggest that you should pretend to be a member of a seventeenth century audience, any more than a television producer could pretend that he was in a theatre of the time of the Stuarts. So don’t approach Middleton’s play as though it was some kind of museum piece. Just take it in, respond to it, and think about it as unacademically as you like.

When the drama begins, it is clear that we are in a very different world from that of the 1965 production. There is no opening caption here to tell us we are in Florence, and indeed the costumes and minimal, stylised settings (by designer Colin Bowles) are strongly suggestive of the London of James I. Produced by one of the drama directors who also worked on A307, Nick Levinson, the recording is in colour, but the studio space in which he is working is far more cramped than that of the 1965 adaptation.

The Cardinal (Bosco Hogan) appears between the Duke (Bernard Lloyd) and Livia

The camerawork is largely static, with an extensive use of close-up and with none of the fluidity of the earlier piece. There are also few opportunities here for stagings which make creative use of depth within the frame, although the Cardinal makes his first appearance far back in a shot but literally between the Duke and Bianca as they part from an embrace that the Church would regard as illicit.

Bianca (Giselle Wolf) with Leantio addressing an aside to the camera

The language is close to Middleton’s original, with none of the updating that Philip Mackie brought to the 1965 adaptation. Also, rather than a filleting of the text throughout, this production plays fuller versions of fewer scenes. Although exchanges between Isabella and The Ward are included, with latter played as an effete rather than memorably vulgar figure, the story of Isabella’s incestuous relationship with Hippolito is excised entirely. The Cardinal is a prominent here than in the Granada version and the religious concerns of the drama are brought out more strongly.

The visual austerity of this production complements its clarity of plotting and helps impart an immediacy to the drama that is different from the impact of the comparatively more lavish 1965 production. There are also a number of distinguished performances, including from Rosemary McHale as Livia, Giselle Wolf as Bianca and Bernard Lloyd’s Duke. Particularly notable in the production is the extensive use of direct address to the camera, used by characters both for sections of the text indicated as ‘asides’ and also for certain of the soliloquies. The effect is to create an intimacy with the viewer and to draw her into a complicit embrace with the character, however venal may the ideas being expressed.

The production, however, is even less effective at handling the events of the Act V masque than is the earlier version. Here the paucity of resources really tells, and there is an unproductive absurdity about the final five minutes or so. But in relation to this, do read Luke McKernan’s comment on the post about the 1965 Women Beware Women where he suggests that

The 196[5] production came close to getting it right, because we laughed as much at the protagonists as at the absurdity of the set-up – and I do think we are meant to laugh at the scene, at least to a degree. It showed that it might be done, so that one sees in Women Beware Women a challenge to the TV medium – how to make the bizarre scene work. It is not that it is unworkable – that’s a different matter. It’s that it taunts TV with what actually lies within its scope. Film this persuasively, it says, and then you will really have achieved something. Last night’s screening [at BFI Southbank of the 1965 production] did not achieve the extraordinary – but it showed that to do so would not be impossible.

In the discussion that follows the drama, Christopher Hill offers a revealing gloss on the concerns of the play and makes the point that the masque can be seen as mocking the elaborate court entertainments that were known to be favoured by King James and his courtiers. ‘It may be expressing’, Hill argues, ‘deeply felt city and patrician criticisms of the court and its ways.’ He also details the ways in which the drama would have been related to the concerns of its original audiences around 1621:

I don’t think we’re imagining things when we feel that Middleton’s play contains a pertinent criticism of some contemporary attitudes to marriage. A new middle-class ideal of marriage as a partnership, founded on love, was challenging the traditional aristocratic code of property marriage plus philandering for men only.

By way of conclusion, Arnold Kettle also contributes a reflection about the play’s morality, when he says,

It’s a highly moral play, not in the sense of being crudely moralistic, but in delving into and illuminating moral problems.

Together with the spare but revealing adaptation, the thoughts of these two distinguished academics make a strong case for the value of approaching ideas about seventeenth-century England through Thomas Middleton’s achievement in this play.

All images are screen grabs from a recording of Women Beware Women © The Open University, 1980.

Blood and Thunder at Granada

Women Beware Women, together with a paired small-screen production of The Changeling, are among the earliest television adaptations of non-Shakespearean early modern drama to survive. Before the Second World War Royston Morley had mounted a production of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (17 January 1938). Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday was also seen that year (on 11 December 1938) via the fledgling service from Alexandra Palace, as was a presentation of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (19 December 1938); all of these pre-war productions are lost.

Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (22 June 1947) is one of a group of early modern plays shown in the aftermath of the war; the others were Marlowe’s Edward II (1947), Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1948) and The Duchess of Malfi (1949) by John Webster, all of which were produced by Stephen Harrison; again, all are lost. A 1959 Stephen Harrison production of Ben Jonson’s Volpone is preserved in the archives but there is no known copy of Peter Dews’ version of the same writer’s The Alchemist (broadcast 25 May 1961).

Broadcast on the ITV network on the Monday evening of 11 January 1965, Women Beware Women was preceded a week before by a Granada production of The Changeling by Middleton and Thomas Rowley. The two plays were shown under a series title of Blood and Thunder, and both were adapted and produced by Philip Mackie. As the late Tise Vahimagi details in his BFI ScreenOnline profile of the producer, Mackie had been Head of Drama for Granada Television from 1958 to 1962, after which he continued to work regularly for the ITV contractor as a freelance.

A decade on from the company’s foundation (it had gone on-air on 3 May 1956) Granada Television was particularly proud of its achievements in current affairs and drama. The company had an early success in late 1956 with a television version of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger as staged at the Royal Court, and in the late 1950s it broadcast highly regarded productions of plays by the ‘Manchester school’ of playwrights that been originally written for Miss Horniman’s Gaiety Theatre. In a Guardian review of Women Beware Women, Mary Crozier wrote:

Granada have always been the foremost company in television drama, finding out plays old and not so old and putting them in groups tied by their time in dramatic history and their social significance. (‘Women Beware Women on ITV’, 12 January 1965, p. 7)

Philip Mackie was responsible for a strong tradition of historical adaptations at Granada, beginning with Saki (1962), a series drawn from the short stories of H. H. Munro, and continuing with The Victorians and Maupassant (both 1963) as well as Paris 1900 (1964), which adapted six farces by George Maupassant. Although on a more modest scale, the Blood and Thunder pair should be seen in this line, which would continue later in the decade with the lavish and immensely popular The Caesars (1968). A decade after Blood and Thunder, Mackie was also the leading creative force for one of the defining television films of the 1970s, The Naked Civil Servant (Thames for ITV, 1975), with John Hurt playing Quentin Crisp.

Thomas Middleton and Women Beware Women

Thomas Middleton, who is championed by the scholar Gary Taylor as ‘our other Shakespeare’, was a prolific writer in early 17th century London. He wrote plays for a number of different companies and playhouses and he also scripted many civic entertainments. He almost certainly collaborated with Shakespeare on Timon of Athens and after Shakespeare’s death he contributed significant revisions to the versions that we know today of Macbeth and Measure for Measure.

Many of Middleton’s plays, including The Roaring Girl (1611) written with Thomas Dekker, are centred on figures who Richard Dutton describes as ‘strong, resourceful female characters’ (‘Middleton and his women’, Women Beware Women, National Theatre programme, 2010, unpaginated). In Women Beware Women, which was probably written in 1621, there are three prominent women, at least two of whom, Bianca and Isabella, are subject to patriarchal subjection from their husband (Leantio) and father (Guardiano) respectively. Sutton praises ‘the intelligence, wit and free spirit of the women characters [who are] painted with a degree of realism which suggests real sympathy’.

The scene is set in Florence and elements of the plot are drawn from events in the Medici family known to have occurred around 1580. Two distinct stories of seduction come together around Livia, a widow who helps the Duke seduce (we would today say rape) Bianca and who lies to Isabella about her parentage and so facilitates her affair with her uncle Hippolito. Bianca’s husband, Leantio, is bought off by the Duke, and is then seduced by Livia. As the plottings unravel, imperatives for revenge are acted out at a masque to celebrate the Duke’s betrothal to Bianca, and as is to be expected many of the characters die violently in a very short space of time.

Women Beware Women is a dark and cynical tale of sexual desire and power, and of the inevitable links between the two. As John Jowett has written in the introduction to the play in the recent authoritative volume edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino:

The play presents an image of the psychology of human behaviour that… denies sentiment or illusion, yet recognises, especially in the case of Bianca, the force of human passions… characters speak almost obsessively or material value as if it were abstract value. In Middleton’s Italy, though it is a country populated with strange vices, the human characters and social mores are disturbingly familiar. This is a class-conscious play, and Florence is Jacobean London writ large. (Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 1491)

No specific productions of the drama can be identified until 1962, when the first modern professional production on the stage was given by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Directed by Anthony Page, this opened at London’s Arts Theatre on 4 July that year and starred Pauline Jameson as Livia and Nicol Williamson as Leantio. In the Financial Times, T. C. Worsley described the performance as ‘fascinating’ and wrote of the play:

The play is Jacobean psychological drama, a sort of Tennessee Williams of the time, in which men and women live in a stew of sexual corruption unredeemed by belief, faith, or even hope… It is the world of today as the Italian cinema sees it, and we feel that reality pulsing through the play. (5 July 1962)

The play has been staged twice more by the RSC, in 1969 and 2006, and other notable productions include an adaptation by Howard Barker at the Royal Court in 1988 and a spectacular National Theatre staging by Marianne Elliott in 2010. The only other British television production is a version presented by The Open University in 1980 as part of the A203 Seventeenth Century England course – and this will be the subject of my next post.

‘A thundering production’

Women Beware Women was treated with respect by the television critics in 1965. Mary Crozier in The Guardian described it as ‘a thundering production’ while Lyn Lockwood for The Daily Telegraph characterised the television adaptation as ‘a most efficiently conducted tour of sin among a group of pleasure seekers in 17th century Florence’ (12 January 1965). The anonymous critic of The Times paid the most attention to the inevitable cuts to the text that halved the drama’s normal running time to 75 minutes, writing:

… it was inevitable that Mr Philip McKie’s adaptation of Middleton’s grim morality play turned [it] into a melodrama of facile vice and too easily corrupted virtue. Obviously to cut a play is to impoverish it, and only the intermittent pangs of conscience which torment Middleton’s lecherous, treacherous, ambitious characters can be spared if the play’s lurid action is to be made clear. Nevertheless, judged as cynically garish melodrama, Mr McKie’s adaptation was neat and skilful. (‘Grim morality play’, 2 January 1965, p. 12)

The text is compressed throughout with many of the major speeches shortened and Middleton’s language subjected to a light updating. In Act I scene 2, ‘If now this daughter / So tendered – let me come to your own phrase, sir / Should offer to refuse him’ becomes ‘If your daughter should to offer to refuse him’, and there are numerous similar examples throughout. At the climax, Livia’s great line ‘Like our own sex, we have no enemy, no enemy’ becomes ‘We have no enemy like our own sex’.

The scenes with the coarse character known simply as ‘The Ward’ and his companion Sordido are the ones that suffer the harvest cuts of all, with Act III scene 3, which takes place between The Ward and Isabella, being lost entirely. The role of the Cardinal is also greatly reduced, and much of the religious background to the drama is stripped away.

Until the closing ten minutes or so, Women Beware Women stands up remarkably well nearly fifty years on. Anchoring the production is a very fine performance by Diana Rigg as Bianca, who handles the turns from demure to brazen, retiring to scheming with great subtlety. Gene Anderson, who was to die unexpectedly later in 1965, is also immensely impressive as Livia. Another of the production’s ‘stars’ is the expansive two-level set designed by Roy Stonehouse, with a courtyard and a reception room in which much of the action takes place. The latter has a checkerboard floor echoing one of the central metaphors of the play.

Director Gordon Flemyng opens proceedings with a bravura tracking shot that reveals the breadth of the set and demonstrates the skill of the camera team. In addition to coaxing strong performances from a number of the actors (although the men do not in general make as great an impression as the women), Flemyng also employs staging in depth to draw out the relationships between characters and to advance the action. In Act III scene 2, for example, at one point Leantio is featured in a foreground close-up while far behind him, and on the upper-level of the set, we see Livia and The Widow. The drama then cuts to Livia giving the first indication of her sexual interest in Leantio.

The problems with the production arrive with the final masque, when the sequence of deaths quickly descends to the risible. The complexity of who is taking revenge on who is part of the problem, but there is also the range of methods of despatch (a poisoned cup, deadly fumes, a trapdoor above a nasty set of spikes) and their coming with great speed one after the other. The production entirely fails to find a strategy  and a tone that can deal with this excess. But in this it is far from alone, either in stage productions or in other television adaptations of comparable scenes in Jacobean drama. As such it is indicative of the difficulties of attempting these plays from the early seventeenth century – although other productions in the BFI Southbank season negotiate this problem with greater success than is achieved here.

The drama known as The Marowitz Hamlet, a ‘condensed’ version of which was filmed by the BBC in 1969, could not be more different. In the rather compromised television version that has survived, this has a radically re-worked and fractured text, startlingly stylised playing, a white box for a set and the small cast in modern dress with heavy make-up. Hamlet here is challenging and experimental, and, despite being only available in a faded 16mm copy, of considerable interest.

The Marowitz Hamlet on stage

Born in 1934 and still active today as a writer, the American critic and director Charles Marowitz was the co-founder in 1954 of Encore. This London-based magazine chronicled the city’s ‘new drama’ that developed after John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956, and Marowitz was soon involved as a creator as well as a commentator. In early 1964 Marowitz worked with Peter Brook and the Royal Shakespeare Company on the twelve-week ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ workshop season at the New LAMDA Theatre. Inspired by the ideas of the French provocateur Antonin Artaud, the offerings included Marowitz’s 28-minute adaptation of Hamlet. ‘Our Drama Critic’ for The Times described the provocation in the feature ‘Opening the door to experiment in the theatre’:

Splitting up the soliloquies for two speakers, reallocating speeches for ironic effect (‘Oh what a noble mind is here o’erthrown’, spoken as an aside by Hamlet about Polonius), freely rearranging the order of events (‘From this time forth my thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth’, spoken as Hamlet’s final lines to jeers from the Court), it was accessible only to audiences capable of mentally counterpointing it against the original text. On those terms it was a thrilling and perfectly legitimate act of interpretation, transforming the drama into a nightmare of the dying hero. (19 February 1964, p. 13)

In 1965 Marowitz’s new company In-Stage Group toured an expanded version of this Hamlet to Berlin and it was also seen in Italy and Sweden. When the text was published by Marion Boyars in 1968, Irving Wardle praised it as ‘a work of great speed and dexterity with a solidly thought-out subtext’ (‘Hamlet in a permissive age’, The Times, 6 April 1968, p. 19).

The following year Marowitz played Hamlet at the Open Space Theatre in Tottenham Court Road, along with a cut-up collage of Macbeth. Marowitz was Artistic Director of the company, and directed both Hamlet and Macbeth, and Thelma Holt, who is the doyenne of theatrical producers today, was Executive Director and occasional actress. The designers were John Napier and Len Drinkwater, and a selection of images of the staging by photographer Donald Cooper (one of which is reproduced here) can be found at the ahds performing arts collections web page. Ronald Bryden, drama critic of The Observer, was enthusiastic about this 1969 revival:

It’s staged on a bare white platform like a circus ring, with Hamlet (Nikolas Simmonds) a white-faced little Everyclown swapping music-hall patter (‘Not where he eats but where he is eaten’) with a baggy, red-nosed Polonius-Gravedigger. Ophelia becomes a nymphet doll in socks and ponytails. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern a double-talk duo in parti-coloured faces… The result is a kaleidoscope of astonishingly rich insights and relevance. (‘McLuhan in command’, 20 July 1969, p. 23)

The most detailed response to The Marowitz Hamlet is contained in Jinnie Schiele’s book Off-centre Stages: Fringe Theatre at the Open Space and the Round House, 1968-1983 (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2006). Schiele concludes the discussion with this link to Marowitz’s intentions:

One of the things Marowitz claimed his collage work accomplished was ‘to find a way of transmitting speed in the theatre’. If the play Hamlet was to reflect our lives today, he argued, then it must in some way suggest the ‘relentless, insatiable motor-power that makes the world move as quickly as it does’. The incessant changing of images, location and personality kept the tension high and demanded intense concentration from the audience. (p. 27)

One further characterisation of the play can be found at Charles Marowitz’s website Marowitz Theatre, which contains this summary alongside his other collage responses to Shakespeare including A Macbeth, An Othello, The Shrew and Variations on Merchant of Venice:

A 90-minute ‘collage’ assembled from different scenes of Shakespeare”s original play which posits a highly unromantic version of the lead character. Hamlet as seen through the prism of the central character”s mentally besieged consciousness.

The Marowitz Hamlet on television

At 10.55pm on 30 December 1969, BBC2 broadcast an edition of its regular magazine strand Late-Night Line-Up which was devoted to The Marowitz Hamlet. According to the BFI’s authoritative ScreenOnline, ‘Late-Night Line-Up discussed Charles Marowitz’s collage reinvention of the play, with filmed examples performed by the Open Space Theatre Company describes the programme’. But what is preserved in the BBC film archive is a 59-minute fully-edited film of much of the production, including its opening and closing.

Frustratingly the film print has no titles or credits (these would have been added in the studio for a live transmission), and no music either, but the BBC Motion Gallery catalogue of the archive (free registration necessary) includes the following cast list, including Thelma Holt as Gertrude together with Nikolas Simmonds (Hamlet), Christopher Cazenove (Fortinbras), Gordon Whiting (Ghost), Lindsay Campbell (King), Edward Phillips (Clown-Polonius), Natasha Pyne (Ophelia), Eric Allan (Laertes), Ian Price (Rosencrantz) and Ralph Arliss (Guildenstern). (I would love to be able to complement these names with the television production team, and Screen Plays would be delighted to hear from anyone who was involved in the filming.)

The film appears to have been shot at the Open Space Theatre on 16mm (from which the colour has faded in the available viewing copy). It is hard to determine whether more than a single camera was used, and it may be that the production was run several times to facilitate shots from a range of angles. Punctuating the action are close-ups of Hamlet’s face in white make-up with a coloured tear staring into the lens. These, we assume, are the indicators that the action is taking place in his disturbed mind, perhaps as jumbled memories or as a dream.

The performances are almost consistently broad and loud, with seemingly little attempt to recalibrate them for the camera. But as an extended account of this production, the film is of significant interest as well as being a reminder that not all presentations of theatre plays on television are to be found within ‘drama’ strands.

The Marowitz Hamlet as television has a value not only as a document of this particular production but also as a trace of a vibrant moment in recent British theatre which otherwise went largely unrecorded on either the small screen or the large. The late 1960s was the moment at which disparate strands of fringe theatre began to make a mark on the mainstream. Colin Chambers attempts to characterise the impact of the fringe in his book Other Spaces: New Theatre and the RSC (London: Eyre Methuen and TQ Publications, 1980):

Significant early manifestations of this influence included the 1967 visit of Café La Mama and the Open Theatre; the opening the following year of the Arts Lab, which spawned the People Show, Pip Simmons, and the Freehold; Portable Theatre, and Marowitz’s Open Space… women’s theatre, black theatre, gay theatre, theatre-in-education, physical theatre, community theatre, lunchtime theatre, and so on. (pp. 7-8)

Driven by the experimental imperatives of the fringe, The Marowitz Hamlet has no time for the nineteenth-century naturalistic conventions of mainstream theatre. These were the dominant forms that television inherited from the theatre and with little modification applied consistently to the presentation of almost all classic dramas including the plays of Shakespeare. But The Marowitz Hamlet works with distinct theatrical traditions, with commedia dell-arte, with pantomime, and with the stylisations of circus and music-hall. As such it can in a modest way be seen to be as significant a challenge to the dominant forms classic plays on television as the original theatre production was to the theatre of its time.

As you may have noticed, we have not been quite as active on the blog as before. In part this is because my colleague Amanda Wrigley has started her maternity leave – and indeed has given birth to Matilda and Dylan. Many congratulations to Amanda and her husband Dez! (Not that this will mean that we will be denied Amanda’s invaluable writings here in the coming months.)

Meanwhile, we are about to embark on our new season of screenings at BFI Southbank. The six programmes of Classics on TV: Jacobean tragedy on the small screen begin on 25 March with the showing of a 1965 Granada adaptation of Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women starring Diana Rigg. Dame Diana Rigg will join RSC Artistic Director Gregory Doran for a discussion after the screening about Jacobean drama, theatre and television. There are still some seats left and general booking is open either via the website or by telephoning the box office on 020 7928 3232.

I will be blogging each of the productions in advance, and I have planned a special series of posts on Hamlet at Elsinore (which is showing at BFI Southbank on Easter Monday, 1 April). I also very much hope that those who go to one or more of the screenings will share their thoughts afterwards through the blog.

While we have not been as posting here as assiduously as before, a number of recent articles and posts elsewhere are directly related to the concerns of Screen Plays, so do take a look.

• Beyond the fourth wall – Experiments in TV drama: Samuel Beckett’s plays on BBC TV: a fascinating post by Professor Jonathan Bignell about the commissioning and screening by the BBC of plays by Samuel Beckett.

• What goes around, comes around… Sky Arts and UK TV drama history: Professor Stephen Lacey (who is a much-valued member of our Advisory Board) writes on the Critical Studies in Television blog about the Sky Arts anthology series of single studio dramas, Playhouse Presents…

• On television, theatre and theatre on television: my blog post for Illuminations about the neglect of theatre plays and performances by the BBC and the other broadcasters.

• Newly unearthed ITV play could be first ever gay television drama: a fascinating Guardian article by Mark Brown about the rediscovery of the 1959 drama South, adapted by Gerald Savory from the stage play Sud (1953), written in French by Julien Green.