SCREEN PLAYS
NT Live
Conference report: Theatre Plays on British Television, 19 October 2012
On 21 February 1896 in what was then the Regent Street Polytechnic Louis Lumiére brothers showcased his Cinematographe for the first performance of a moving film to a paying audience in Britain. On Friday what today is the University of Westminster’s Regent Street building hosted an only slightly less auspicious occasion, when some thirty or so interested scholars, together with a contemporary producer or two, gathered for the Screen Plays conference Theatre Plays on British Television. Continue reading
Beyond the boundaries: intermedial ideas in Paris
Paris, you will be delighted to know, looked gorgeous in the spring sunshine over the past two days. Not, of course, that I saw much of the city, because I was attending the colloquium Théâtre au cinéma / cinéma au théâtre: aires culturelles francophones et anglophones at which I was presenting a paper. This was the first conference in 2012 at which Screen Plays was represented – but there are plenty more to come in the year, including the Classical Association Annual Conference and the Performance and Television Space Conference, both in April, the International Screen Studies Conference at the end of June and our own one-day event on 19 October (further details of which will be available soon). Continue reading
Back for the future: NT Live’s The Cherry Orchard
I was delighted to be invited last night to watch the live transmission from the Olivier Theatre on London’s South Bank of Howard Davies’ staging of The Cherry Orchard. While the drama itself left me unmoved, I was fascinated to see NT Live’s six HD cameras in action. The operation reminded me of nothing so much as classical studio drama, much of it working comprising plays originally written for the theatre, of the kind that dominated the broadcast schedules in the 1950s and early 1960s. Continue reading
SCREEN PLAYS 