Two Reviews: Shakespeare & the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience and Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History 

After triumphant seasons in Stratford and London, Peter Brook’s legendary 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream toured the world. An invitation to perform in Japan in 1972 nearly failed due to insufficient funding, but broadcaster NHK offered to supplement the funding if the show could be recorded for broadcast on Japanese television. Brook was reluctant, so it was agreed that the recording would be destroyed after the broadcast. In Brook’s account of the story, a copy of the broadcast was sent to the director, who was pleased with NHK’s approach. He contacted the network to ask that the master be preserved, but it was too late. Reflecting on this, Brook wrote, “The life of the play begins and ends in the moment of performance. This is where author, actors and directors express all they have to say. If the event has a future, this can only lie in the memories of those who were present and who retained a trace in their hearts.”[1] Sour grapes? Perhaps, but with the Digital Theatre on-line service, NTLive, RSC Live, and other theatres that broadcast shows from their stages, stream online, or distribute on DVD, many productions have other lives during their runs, after their runs, and in places other than the originating theatre. The tension in Peter Brook words is incarnate in the books under review. Both are about shows that live outside of the “memories of those who are present,” and both are in part about the reliability of screened events to deliver a theatrical experience outside of a theater.

The title Shakespeare & the ‘Live’ Theatre Broadcast Experience (Bloomsbury/Arden 2018) alludes to the minutia that is of interest to the contributors, who investigate the concept of what it is for broadcasts to be live and to  experience seeing these shows in the theatre where they are recorded, in the cinemas where most are screened, and wherever else you may watch these programs as a live stream or on DVD. The book does not intend to cover the history of theatre broadcasts or previous screened theatre, nor address the quality of the original stage productions or their broadcasts to any great degree. The editors prefer the expression “theatre broadcasts” to other appellations, though it is hardly more accurate than most alternatives since some of the productions discussed were not broadcast. I have not heard a suggested taxonomy that is not problematic and it is useful to have a term, whatever it may be, that we all understand to be the kind of programs discussed in this book. All but one of the contributors use this expression.

Editors Pascale Aebisher and Susanne Greenhalgh write in their introduction that theatre broadcasts are expected to earn £60-80 million in the UK and $1 billion worldwide by 2019, and while the editors could not have known this, NTLive boasts of 19,940 screenings in 2018, which supports Aebisher’s and Greenhalgh’s point that these events are big business.[2] The book will treat these broadcasts as “performance in their own right” (3), and “the focus of this book … addresses this need to examine how actual audiences engage with production of Shakespeare through ‘live’ theatre broadcasting” (7). The authors believe that theatre broadcasts are akin to screen Shakespeare in that broadcasting fundamentally changes the experience of watching Shakespeare. I agree, and suspect the editors would agree with me that the changes are not really as radical as they indicate. No one mistakes a Shakespeare film for a theatre production, but it is easy to understand why some audience members think they are getting an authentic theatre experience in their local cinema, since theatre broadcasts do not adapt plays to the same extent as screen Shakespeare has traditionally done and the recording is done in a theatre with the original sets and cast. The goal of the book is to challenge “our readers to re-think … the ideological and political implications of consuming Shakespeare through theatre broadcasts, the role of Shakespeare in a globally-connected media environment, and what constitutes spectatorship of Shakespearean stage performances in an age of global digital theatre broadcasting” (13). Since UK theatre broadcasts dominate worldwide, colonialist concerns are briefly raised. Susan Bennett, Margaret Jane Kidnie, and Michael Ingham also mention these concerns in their chapters. Let us stake that vampire before we go any further.

There is no ivory tower concern that makes my eyes roll higher than the hand-wringing about the export of Shakespeare to other nations and cultures. Motives for exporting Shakespeare matter little at this remove, and export would fail if new audiences do not like what they see. There is a vast market for Shakespeare’s works in their many incarnations despite academic disapproval. Do these same critics wail over the acceptance of Manga in western culture? Gladly, no. Manga acceptance is rightly viewed as a welcome openness to another culture, and protests would certainly be called racist. Without being insensitive to the occasional misuses of exporting Shakespeare, most exports should be welcomed. It is absurd to criticize the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, or other Shakespeare suppliers for giving people what they want. What are these companies to do, not extend their brands or their markets so that alarmists will like them better? This kind of expansion will continue no matter how much some in the academy decry it, and as a consumer of exported Shakespeare, I am glad. This judgmentalism fails to engage the real world.

The book is organized in four parts. The first is “Wide Angle” which “provides broad historical and conceptual perspectives on the history of the theatre broadcast” (10). Half of the little history in this book is in Susanne Greenhalgh’s first chapter which shows that theatre broadcasts had previous incarnations that used older technologies. The chapter is enormous fun to read, briefly recounting the history of Shakespeare on screen, then lingers over selected films and television broadcasts from 1965 to 2016, examples of stage performances that received wider audiences in cinemas and on television.

Susan Bennett calls the shows she discusses “event cinema” instead of theatre broadcasts, a choice I support since theatre broadcasts have much in common with ballet and opera broadcasts. Bennett begins with the uncontextualized claim that the Kenneth Branagh Company broadcast of The Winter’s Tale made £1.1 in the U.K. on 26 November 2015, out earning the second place Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2. What Bennett does not tell us, and I trust she does not know, is that tickets for The Winter’s Tale were more costly than Mockingjay tickets, £13 or £15, depending on where you sat, compared to an average of £9.84 at peak times and £8.40 off-peak, with other complications, for Mockingjay, according to the Stephen Follows website.[3] Mockingjay actually earned £11.26m on its opening weekend which began on 20 November after a 5 November London premiere. Mockingjay was in its sixth day when The Winter’s Tale was broadcast, and patrons knew that The Winter’s Tale was a one-day event and Mockingjay could be seen on other days.[4] Bennett is not comparing apples to apples. Bennett’s research, such as it is,[5] does not compare the numbers of tickets sold or the numbers of screens showing each film that day. Both figures would be more revealing than the amount of money made. More usefully, Bennett briefly recalls the technologies that produced remote events from the théâtrepnone of 1881 to those delivering event cinema today.

The real point of her chapter focuses “on the relationship between NTLive and its Shakespeare broadcasts to consider how the consistent presence of Shakespeare within event cinema has fused the success and dominance of the NTLive brand as well as ways this programing has affected play production within the overreaching National Theatre repertoire” (45), and that is fascinating. The National Theatre only twice produced Shakespeare between 1999 and 2009, but only failed to produce Shakespeare once between the first NTLive season in 2009 and the time of writing. The NT believes that Shakespeare promotes NTLive attendance, and that has driven the plays selected in recent seasons.

Bennett’s next claim, that well-known actors are cast to drive attendance, is dubious, at least internationally. Shakespeare performance scholars know the Shakespeare work of Simon Russell Beale, Lenny Henry, Rory Kinnear, and Adrian Lester as well as UK audiences, but I am incredulous that any of these actors are household names outside of the UK, and indeed, casting most of them was not unusual before 2009. Another problem is that many shows are staged and cast by NTLive’s partners, so the National Theatre had nothing to do with the Donmar Warehouse casting of Derek Jacobi as Lear in 2010, Benedict Cumberbatch starring in the Sonia Friedman Production of Hamlet in 2015, or Ian McKellen playing Lear for the Chichester Festival Theatre in 2018. I would be much happier if Bennett cited a survey that supports her claim, if one exists. A similar unsubstituted claim is made in the chapter about theatre broadcasts in Hong Kong.

Erin Sullivan looks at “liveness” and its many possible meanings: in the theatre, watching in a cinema, at home, and seeing a live broadcast to an encore showing. She finishes with Twitter as a way of participating in live events, finding that tweets tend to reveal emotional engagement. I will comment on why the study of liveness is of questionable value below. To the extent it is a valid inquiry, Sullivan inquiries better than others in this book.

Can digital technologies affect the ways that audiences interact with productions? Rachael Nicholas shows they can from two test cases, an encore performance of the NTLive Coriolanus (2014, encore 2015), which had a DVD-style commentary for those who chose to listen to it on their smart phones, and Forced Entertainment’s Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare (2015), which streamed to digital devices seen wherever the viewer happened to be. Those viewers were encouraged to tweet during a livestream that allowed split concentration; one viewer listened to the audio of the stream whilst watching the muted Wimbledon Tennis tournament. Nicholas establishes that theatre broadcasts are not necessarily passive or shared events.

The book’s second section, “In the Theatre,” has just two chapters about the experience of being in a theatre during a broadcast. Beth Sharrock writes that “the practicalities of broadcasting can have a number of effects on an attempt to replicate theatrical performance” (96), with telling comments from actors who worked in RSC Live shows. One difference is the theatre audience filling the stalls on non-broadcast days and their smaller numbers when cameras occupy a portion of the stalls. The reduced audience changed the performance of Martin Hutson, who was unable to play to the audience in the middle stalls as Cassius in the 2017 Julius Caesar broadcast. He eventually recruited an usher to sit in the section where he needed someone. Julie Raby reveals ways the audience in the rest of the house experience the plays during broadcasts. These include altered sightlines and the director’s pre-show talk. Raby goes into some microscopic factors, such as ticket sales being organized differently for broadcast performances. The microscopic changes seem of small moment.

Section three, “Close-ups,” examines particular theatres and events. In the first of her two chapters, Pascale Aebisher examines ways the auditoria of the National Theatre and Shakespeare’s Globe shape those companies, identifying house styles. Aebisher finds that the NT stage tends to produce “illusionist Shakespeare, attuned to the modern technologies and performance styles,” whereas Globe stagings capture the company’s presentational style. Fair enough. I am doubtful, however, when Aebisher applies this to the theatre broadcasts produced by these companies. The result is, Aebisher claims, double time, with the NT building delivering a “here and now” feeling due to the modernist design and the Globe a “there and then” feeling derived from that building’s early modern design (115). This observation seems subjective. When I see women playing male characters on Globe DVDs, the non-early modern ramps allowing entrances and exits from amongst the groundlings, and audiences in both spaces wearing modern clothes, my subjectivity regards time at both theatres in exactly the same way because I am constantly aware that the Globe is a new building housing a recent production. Theorizing some of this with de Certeau’s “law of the proper” failed to persuade me (123).[6]

Margaret Jane Kidnie explores what it means to be live from several angles, and again, more on that below. The thing I found interesting was the exploration near the end of her chapter of the Stratford Festival’s multiple platforms, which made me question what it means for theatre to be ephemeral. She examines a 2015 production of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, seen in the Tom Patterson Theater in the company of academics with an understudy in the title role, and later in a cineplex with the original cast. Perhaps theatre is not traditionally ephemeral when Kidnie can compare one viewing to another. A brief comparison of one scene in the theatre and the theatre broadcast is helpful. Kidnie notes that some theatre broadcasts have pick-up shots made when the cameras at a live show do not capture everything needed to tell the story.

After noting the dismal record of casting actors of color in Shakespeare and that theatre broadcasts show how much things have improved, Jami Rogers asserts that, “much of the ground-breaking work by regional and minority-led theatre companies has there been erased simply by virtue of not being recorded” (150). Using these terms, were Burgage, Garrick, Siddons, and other actors also erased? The assertion seems problematic. The emphasis in this chapter, however, is on two small ventures. One is the Talawa Theatre Company, which has digitized selected productions, and Black Theatre Live, which livestreams a consortium of small black theatre companies. Both record black actors performing Shakespeare. Though Rogers nods to Asian actors, nearly all comments are about black actors.

Peter Kirwan writes about Cheek by Jowell’s livestream of a Russian language Measure for Measure in 2015 “to consider how the livestream affects the company’s aesthetic” (163). He compares two versions: a live steam that was edited while streaming and a remix by directors Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormer, who made changes that “prioritize different characters’ subjectivity and ultimately reflect on the live audience’s complicity, indicating some of the ways that editors of the live camera footage utilize the active potential of liveness” (164). Clearly, theatre broadcasts do not convey the experience of attending the play in a theatre if the data can be edited for different outcomes.

The fourth section, “Reaction Shots,” spotlights reception of theatre broadcasts around the world. Kitamura Sae reveals that many Japanese viewers of NTLive productions were unhappy with the subtitles created in England. Some complained on social media that the translation by Matsuoka Kazulo for Coriolanus was used without credit, typos were bothersome, and some speeches were not given subtitles. In response, NTLive promised that future subtitles would be checked in Japan before broadcast. Sae’s is almost a fantastic, fact filled chapter except that it reads as if a referee complained about the lack of a theoretical framework, and so Sae added words about Henry Jenkins theory of Negative Convergence,[7] but the chapter does not need it and would be better without it. Theatre broadcast problems are different in Hong Kong, according to Michael Ingham, where screenings have no subtitles thanks to a trilingual, biliterate public policy that includes education in English, though public comprehension does not always live up to the policy. To explain why some shows are more popular than others, Ingham writes that while star power is a big attraction, a bigger star is Shakespeare himself. Does Ingham undercut the latter part of this statement on the next page: “the screen-star system … is a key factor in enticing audiences in Hong Kong” without further reference to Shakespeare (187)? On the basis of the popularity of Gregory Doran’s marvelous Tempest (2017) with its hi-tech special effects, Ingham suggests that technically spectacular shows are also big draws, but one theatre broadcast is too small a sample size to draw a statistically valid conclusion. Ingham presents anecdotal evidence as facts when he writes that audiences are half locals and half expatriates without citing a source, and cites a spokesperson for a single Hong Kong theatre to establish that broadcasts do not impact local box office. I do not know that Ingham is wrong about any of this, but I am not convinced that he is right. I wish that his referee had been as conscientious as the reader I suspect Sae may have had.

Kier Elam takes a fascinating look at the different reactions the 2015 NTLive Hamlet received in two cinemas in Bologna, Italy: the Lemière, a public institution known for showing classic films that attract cinéastes, and the Odeon, a popular private cinema that often shows English language films. The Lemière added the show to a 2016 program celebrating Shakespeare films in the legacy year. It was the first time the Lemière had screened a theatre broadcast, which it advertised as cinema. The theatre-ness of the event seen in the paratexts, the interval, and audience laughter and applause on the soundtrack, rankled cinéastes. The Odeon audiences had seen theatre broadcasts before, knew what they were getting, and appreciated the screening. At the Lemière, at least, theatre broadcasts are not cinema.

Can theatre broadcasts result in a “communal experience which, in turn, leads to a more complex reception than previously assumed of what many are calling a hybrid form” (200)? It did for Ann M. Martinez’s students in Ohio. There were class discussions before attending the 2015 NTLive Hamlet, and more discussions followed. This process forged Martinez’s students into a community, though the theatre arts majors disliked the close-ups and not being able to look at any part of the stage they chose while her English majors had no problem with the screen director’s choices. Am I wrong in thinking community is a standard result for any class that attends an outside concert, play, or film, and so is unremarkable here?

Aebischer’s second chapter looks at the first play broadcast by a French theatre company, the Comédie-Française production Roméo et Juliette (2016) in François-Victor Hugo’s translation. Ballet and opera had been broadcast in France, but a play was a new venture. Aebischer tells this story well. I suppose it is inevitable that she attempt to find something distinctively French about this broadcast, but comparing screen director Don Kent mixing the edit to English theatre broadcasts with directors directing technicians to mix the edit seems pretty thin. The prestige of the Comédie-Française and the use of Hugo’s translation are better Francophile credentials. Kent’s comment that “the broadcast director is essentially a translator of the stage director’s ‘intentions’” is a great line that summarizes much of this book in a single sentence (212).

Third editor Laurie E. Osborne’s epilogue identifies three precursors to theatre broadcasts in what she calls “Richard Burton’s ‘Electronovision’ Hamlet” (it was directed for the stage by John Gielgud and for the screen by Bill Colleran, and should probably be so identified), the television series she calls Lincoln Center Live (the correct title is Live from Lincoln Center), and productions available through the online Broadway Theatre Archive. This is valid. Unfortunately, she adds that these and the theatre broadcasts discussed throughout the book “redefine liveness” (217) and believes that “’Liveness’ in this current mode is more than a marketing or venue gimmick” (225).

The authors treat liveness as a problem when it really is not. After wading through 252 pages, plus the front matter, all I really took away is what I had figured out on my own a decade ago: theatre broadcasts are only truly live for the people in the theatre. Everyone else is removed by degrees: people in the cinema get the show from a distance and with a small delay and encore performances have a longer delay, but because cinema audiences see the theatre audience on screen they get the illusion that something is happening live. People in the theatre do not see the paratexts and trailers, which is one way that cinema audiences experience the performance differently than theatre audiences. Theatre audiences see the stage director’s choices. Cinema audiences see the screen director’s choices which are limited by the stage director’s work. Osborne and other contributors make big deals of these tiny matters, but I believe that everything interesting about liveness is summarized in this paragraph, and if it is, and if the shows are only truly live for those with the actors in the theater, then the word really is just a gimmick. The marketers from the companies that supply these events would be shocked that so much is made of a gimmick word. They know that calling these events “Live” is just a way to sell some expensive cinema tickets.

Sullivan and Kidnie do the sanest job by far of exploring liveness combined with marketing. Bennett’s discovery that the National Theatre expanded its Shakespeare offerings after launching NTLive and her look at certain paratexts does a fair job of considering a range of marketing matters through a look at the National Theatre, and so does Sae’s conclusion that a “good translation is essential to marketing” (182). These are, however, less matters of liveness than they are marketing concerns, and that is the biggest problem I have with this book.

Several of the investigations are uncomplete looks into the marketing of theatre broadcasts, incomplete because the investigators have no marketing background. This is especially true of the comments about imperialist Shakespeare, casting by Bennett and others, most comments about paratexts by Sharrock and many others, Nicholas on the audio commentary during an encore performance of Coriolanus, and Rogers section about Black Theatre Live. Michael Ingham’s chapter would not suffer my complaints had he supplied some actual marketing data to support his claims, and Kier Elam’s and both of Pascale Aebischer’s chapters are about nothing but marketing, but are not written in the language that marketers use and so lack some insights they might have brought to the work. Marketing is a word the authors superficially deploy as if it explains something, then do not tell us what it explains. I have long wondered if scholars of Shakespeare in modern culture should take a marketing class or two before they begin work. Shakespeare & the ‘Live” Theatre Broadcast Experience convinces me this should be required. I will let you know if I ever figure out how to enforce this.

Shakespeare & the ‘Live” Theatre Broadcast Experience ends with a fifteen-page appendix of all Shakespeare digital theatre broadcasts created between 2003-17. This is a wonderful resource.

All of John Wyver’s Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History (Bloomsbury/Arden 2019 is a wonderful resource that may lead to future research projects, scholarly papers, and academic theses.

The book gets liveness and experience right. The most informative inquiry into both is to take us inside the theatre to tellingly explore striking moments on stage that do not come across on camera, or conversely, reveal strategies used by broadcasters to capture those striking moments in the new medium. Aside from those great pages by Kidnie (140-1), Kirwin (164-72), and Aebischer (209-12), you find little of this in Shakespeare & the ‘Live” Theatre Broadcast Experience. Wyver’s book excels at this. The books ultimately have different goals: the first is in the thrall of misunderstood minutia and the latter tells an important previously unrevealed history, but reading the books in succession I often wondered how the chapters in Shakespeare & the ‘Live” Theatre Broadcast Experience might be better if Wyver had been available to the contributors.[8]

Wyver looks, for example, at the approach the BBC used in 1965 when recreating the 1963 Wars of the Roses plays for television. Producer Michael Bakewell realized that merely bringing cameras into the Royal Shakespeare Theatre would not penetrate “to the center of what is going on on the stage.” The solution was to “convert the Royal Shakespeare Theatre into a television studio” adapting “the stage [so] that our cameras could involve themselves as deeply as possible in the action” (52).  Wyver explains the success of this broadcast in a very specific way, whereas Shakespeare & the ‘Live” Theatre Broadcast Experience mostly addresses the translation to a new medium in generalities, when it does this at all. Anyone who has seen the BBC’s Wars of the Roses knows the effectiveness of Bakewell’s approach.

The televising of John Barton’s 1967 All’s Well That Ends Well used a different method. Instead of taping the play in the Aldwich Theatre, BBC director Claude Whatham moved the actors into a studio, calibrated performances for a camera and the small screen, and used set-ups and compositions to tell the story televisually. Reviewer Stanley Reynolds called this is “the first televised Shakespeare I have seen that looked actually a television play and not like something roughly transplanted from the stage” (59). The portion of the production that survives is one of the finest screen Shakespeares I have seen.

Peter Brook made his 1967 film Marat/Sade on a short shooting schedule and a small budget, so the most effective way to film the play was to recreate the 1964 stage production in a film studio where two and sometimes more cameras captured the action. Wide even lighting was used, or the film from different cameras would not match. “Close-ups of characters, often employing direct address to the camera, are counterpointed with panoramic frames shot with wide-angle lenses. Profile framings and out of focus shots contribute to the developing sense of unease, and as the undertones of violence build, sequences increasingly employ hand-held cameras and rapid cutting” (82). The result is a film that uses an entirely different technique to deliver the mad fever of the production on stage.

Gregory Doran in collaboration with Wyver developed a strategy for producing effective Shakespeare films based on Doran’s stagings. Starting with Macbeth (on stage 1999/Channel 4 2001), they “preserve[d] as much of the text as was feasible” while “strip[ping] away any irrelevant scenic details … to present the action … in a setting that possessed a vivid neutrality.” The director of photography “sought to catch the action like a documentary filmmaker operating in a war zone … to achieve an edgy unpredictability” (162-3). Doran has been using that basic template ever since, but with tweaks for different plays. His stage Hamlet (2008), for example, emphasized a watchdog state. The BBC 2 film (2009) added dozens of security cameras and monitors to achieve an equivalence, bringing a specific look to a background that was not neutral.

Doran launched RSC Live. The cinema events would have “minimal changes to the stage work” and “a strong degree of fidelity to a pre-existing original as well as a recognition of inevitable and intentional creative mediation. The broadcasts are dependent upon the precise positioning of cameras and microphones, the choice and sequencing of shots, the carefully planned adjustments throughout of audio levels, the pace of cutting and much more besides.” This results in a hybrid: “the visual language of the broadcasts is clearly closely related to that of conventional cinema but at the same time, because it is archived in real time and within a coherent space … it is a specifically televisual language.” So, these events have a live theatrical origin, but experiencing them is somewhat the same and somewhat different. “There are also elements of the production that are missed or minimized by the broadcast” (172-3). Wyver does not look at specific achievements or failures of these goals in RSC Live events, but as we have seen, there is plenty of this kind of analysis in the previous chapters.

While I have spotlighted the screen translations of some specific shows, the main thrust of Wyver’s book is to tell the critical history on the RSC on screen. This began when Sir Frank Benson’s company was hired to make at least four short films. The 1911 releases were Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Richard III, and The Taming of the Shrew. There is trace evidence of two more films made at the same time, but these four are certain. Only Richard III is known to have survived. Benson’s company had a residence in the Memorial most years between 1886 -1918,[9] and filming was done on the Memorial stage. These were typical Shakespeare films of their time, following the “dominant British model in the years before 1914 of memorializing existing stagings” (11). This was not great filmmaking, but Richard III probably tells us quite a lot about how the Benson company looked performing this play on the Memorial stage, making the film is an important record.

Going back to 1911 makes clear that Wyver gives the film history of not just the Royal Shakespeare Company, which was founded by Sir Peter Hall in 1961 to present plays in the renamed Royal Shakespeare Theatre, but of the entire life of that theatre which opened in 1879, the year after Horse in Motion by Eadweard Muybridge, which some claim to be the first motion picture (though many film historians  begin with later films). While it is true that the Memorial Theatre and film grew-up at the same time, it cannot really be said that they grew up together, though from time to time both had the synergy Wyver reveals in his book.

The book is organized more or less chronologically, from the beginning through 1959, television productions from 1961-8, films from 1964-73, a combination of film and television between 1972-82 largely based on stagings in the RSC’s more intimate auditoria, additional film and television productions between 1982 and 2002, and the launching of event cinema and its precursors from 2000.

Of the eleven feature films Wyver lists in the filmography, seven were not based on Shakespeare. In the selected television and theatre broadcast performances screenography, fifteen of the thirty-three are not adaptations of Shakespeare. Works by other playwrights are an important part of this story.

After Benson, there were no screen adaptations from the Memorial stage until one act of The Merry Wives of Windsor was broadcast by BBC television in 1955, but the company was busy on BBC radio between 1936 and 1958. Wyver identifies fourteen such broadcasts, though only goes into detail about selected shows.[10] Stage productions were frequently broadcast at the time, especially the Old Vic company, and the BBC produced occasional broadcasts from the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park, the Haymarket, the Bristol Old Vic, and other theaters. These were sometimes remote broadcasts, and actors sometimes came into a radio studio, as would be later true on television.

Royal Shakespeare Theatre productions in other media tended to come in batches, in part because potential media partners were only sporadically interested in the company’s work and some artistic directors were more interested in reaching audiences through the media than others. RSC stage directors tended to direct films made from their work, but television directors usually mediated stage productions for the small screen, though Doran is an exception and so are Trevor Nunn’s most recent television films.

Hall made television and later film a priority at a time when media companies were interested Many adaptations of both were produced by him and other directors who worked at the RSC during his artistic directorship, especially by Peter Brook, though screen versions sometimes lagged behind stagings by many years. Screen highlights of shows staged during Hall’s tenure include Brook’s superb King Lear (on stage 1962/film released 1971). There were also plenty of television productions, the most notable include Michael Elliott’s sublime staging of As You Like It which aired on the BBC (1961/1963), Clifford Williams brilliant Comedy of Errors on ATV (1962/1964), and that Barton All’s Well That Ends Well on BBC 2 (1967/1968). The aforementioned BBC series The Wars of the Roses was based on the staging by Hall and John Barton (1963/1965). These shows prove that some stage productions can be effectively produced for the screen. One of Hall’s best films is Harold Pinter’s play The Homecoming, based in his staging (1965/1973), though it is not as well-known as his A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1962/1968).

Hall’s replacement, Trevor Nunn, put less energy into adaptations, producing far fewer, but some made during his years were remarkable, especially his stage/television productions of Antony and Cleopatra on ATV (1972/1974), Macbeth on Thames Television (1976/1979), and The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, co-directed for the stage with John Caird. It was broadcast by Channel 4 (1980/1982). Nunn’s film Hedda was based on Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1975/1977). Sharing artistic director duties with Nunn during his final eight years, then on his own for an additional five, was the late Terry Hands, who was not keen on other media. Nevertheless, some shows did go to television, including Hands’s Cyrano de Bergerac on Channel 4 (1983/1985) and the production of Pam Gems’s Piaf (1978/1982), directed for the stage by Howard Davies. This aired on cable television in the U.S.

Adrian Noble directed only one film during his twelve years as artistic director, his low-budget and low-energy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, based on his surrealist staging (1994/1996), but Doran became a well-known stage director while working for Noble and was dedicated to turning his stage productions into films starting with The Winter’s Tale, released on DVD (1999/2005), though there was an abridged version used by educators prior to the release. This is in addition to the already mentioned Macbeth directed for Channel 4 (1999/2001).

Noble’s successor was Michael Boyd, who was not interested in screening stage productions: “It will be a long time before cinema can capture anything more than a pale reflection of the art form” (154). Nevertheless, digital media was growing and Boyd was talked into allowing two of his shows to be recorded for Digital Theatre, his inventive staging of As You Like It (2009/2011) and The Comedy of Errors (2010/2011), the latter made for educators. Trevor Nunn returned to both stage and film King Lear (2007/2008), and Doran continued to film. His previously mentioned staging of Hamlet was shown on BBC 2 (2008/2009). He later staged and filmed Julius Caesar in 2012, the location portion of the filming made while the show was in rehearsal.

Doran replaced Boyd as artistic director in October of that year, and created in initiative to record the thirty-seven play canon as both event cinema and for DVD release, the first of these broadcasts going out in 2013. The idea was to build an RSC canon to represent the Company’s work and as a resource for educators. It is anticipated that the canon will be completed in 2022, with no plans for further recordings. With the exceptions of Doran’s Richard II (2013)[11] and his high-tech Tempest (2016), these events have not made money. All other RSC event plays as of the time the book was written “required investment from the company’s discretionary funds” (171), so continuing the events beyond 2022 and adding some of Shakespeare’s collaborative plays, such as Sir Thomas More and Edward III, seems unlikely, though the company has shown they can stage these plays well. The 2017 production of Two Noble Kinsmen was recorded but not broadcast and has not been released on DVD, so I assume that even the most likely candidate for a thirty-eighth play is off the table.

I find this especially disappointing since I live 5031 miles from Stratford (8037 kilometers), so event cinema and RSC DVDs are the way I usually keep up with the company, however imperfectly. It also means that some productions representing the company’s canon are subpar work. I saw neither production in a cinema, but the Hamlet (dir. Simon Godwin) and Cymbeline (dir. Melly Still) cinema events are those I saw in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre during the Congress in 2016. I did not think the Hamlet was bad, though many colleagues disagreed, but it does not present the best work the RSC can do. Cymbeline is a misfire; many of the novel ideas added by the director put barriers between the story and audience. Using discretionary funds is a problem, but I hope that RSC will find a way to replace these productions in their digital canon. There is “active discussion about how to develop screen versions of the productions of early modern drama plays in the Sawn Theatre,” (183), in other words, by Shakespeare’s contemporary playwrights. The RSC recorded Nunn’s 2015 staging of Ben Jonson’s Volpone, but it is unreleased. I have little hope of a digital Swan canon.

Though the RSC has produced and released a prodigious number of screen versions of plays, the majority of their screen appearances have been in documentaries, educational films, and arts programs. These cover everything from traditional film documentaries, such as a film about Peter Brook’s 1966 production of US called Benefit of the Doubt (1967). This was directed by Peter Whithead and included footage of the play on stage. US was later reworked as a film by Brook and released as Tell Me Lies (1968). Actors are sometimes filmed in a studio where the documentarian has more control. An example is the Nancy Thomas directed Monitor segment on John Whiting’s The Devils (1961).[12] Most of the segment was an interview with Whiting, but there were a few studio enacted excerpts. England’s Shakespeare (dir. unknown, 1939) is a travelogue to encourage tourism to Stratford and environs. Included are the Memorial Theatre and some of the actors working there. A thematic documentary is an episode of the BBC 2 series Arena called “Hands off the Classics,” described as “a film essay about the legitimacy (or not) of radical contemporary interpretations of classic plays” (228). John Barton and Terry Hands were two of the talking heads, with Alan Howard performing lines from the plays discussed. Wyver gives good coverage of the widely seen London Weekend Television series Playing Shakespeare (1984) and its precursor, the two-part Word of Mouth on ITV (1976). Many of the documentaries containing RSC and Memorial Theatre material are lost, or at least cannot be found. Wyver has watched everything he could and reports on these as fully as he does the adaptations of plays. Much of this material is fascinating in itself, but also interesting for the things revealed about the Stratford companies during the times these shows were made, and for the preoccupations of the producers of these documentaries.

The book has a complete filmography. My only complaint is that Wyver’s screenography of RSC television and event cinema productions is selected instead of complete, and the same is true for the documentaries. I wrote earlier that this book will launch future research projects, scholarly articles, and academic theses. Wyver’s -ographies were very helpful in writing this review. Complete versions would be far more helpful to working scholars and graduate students who will do important work based on the facts in Wyver’s book.

Yes, this is a book full of facts and informed judgements, and that makes Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History by far one of the most useful scholarly books I have read in some time. Now I want to catch up with John Wyver’s past work.

Notes

[1] Quoted in Wyver, where I found this story, pp. 97-9. An account by Bill Wilkinson differs at key points, p. 97.

[2] The publication date of the book is 2018. The 19,940 figure comes from a handout for the NTLive showing of The Lehman Trilogy, which I received at an encore presentation on 2 February 2020.

[3] https://stephenfollows.com/average-cost-of-a-cinema-ticket/

[4] The Winter’s Tale eventually received encore performances, but these were after the 26 November box office report.

[5] Bennett’s information seems to come uncredited from a 27 November 2015 Variety article that may be accessed here: https://variety.com/2015/film/global/kenneth-mockbranagh-winters-tale-u-k-movie-box-office-1201649357/

[6] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, 1984.

[7] Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York University Press, 2006. Complaints about a lack of a theoretical framework are sadly endemic in modern scholarship.

[8] Many of the chapters in Shakespeare & the ‘Live” Theatre Broadcast Experience began in a crowded seminar at the World Shakespeare Congress in 2016 that I was able to audit. John Wyver also audited. That book was published 26 July 2018. Wyver’s book was published eleven months and a day later, 27 June 2019.

[9] Marian J. Pringle, The Theatres of Stratford-upon-Avon 1875—1992: An Architectural History, Stratford-upon-Avon Papers No. 5, 1993.

[10] Those who want more information may consult my section of Shakespeares After Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture, Volume 2, Richard Burt, ed., Greenwood Press, 2007. The information is alphabetically and chronologically scattered between pp. 512-555.

[11] This and the following shows were broadcast live during their runs, so the stage years and broadcast years are the same.

[12] The play was directed for the RSC by Peter Wood.