SCREEN PLAYS
Rudolph Cartier
The Edwardians: Play of the Month: An Ideal Husband (BBC1, 1969)
This Thursday, 1 May, sees the start of our new season of BFI Southbank screenings, Classics on TV: Edwardian Drama on the Small Screen. We begin with a tremendous double bill of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband in a sumptuous 1969 version directed by Rudolph Cartier together with a – dare I say unmissable – rarity from 1960: a BBC schools production of J. M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea with Sybil Thorndike and Sean Connery. My colleague Amanda Wrigley is composing a post about Synge’s one-act poetic drama; this contribution is simply an introduction to the Wilde. Continue reading
‘It Is Midnight, Dr Schweitzer’ (BBC, 1953)
‘It Is Midnight, Dr Schweitzer’, scripted originally by Gilbert Cesbron, is the earliest British television drama to survive. It is also the oldest recording we have of a televised stage play. If only, one feels at the end of its one hundred minutes, if only it was more interesting, more involving, less sententious. Yet simple primacy makes it a historical document of the first order, and its presence is very welcome on YouTube, where it has been posted in ten parts posted by the archive of the Alexandra Palace Television Society. Continue reading
SCREEN PLAYS 