Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History

• Published in: Theatre Notebook Vol. 74; no. 1; pp. 58 - 59
• Main Author: Holland, Peter
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: London The Society for Theatre Research 01.02.2020; Society for Theatre Research
• Subjects: Archives & records; English literature; Motion picture directors & producers; Negotiation; Spouses; Television; Theater; United States > US
• ISSN: 0040-5523; 2051-8358

What makes this monograph remarkable is all of those things, of course, but it is also that John Wyver has a long history to tell, a narrative that dramatically (the pun is deliberate) transforms our knowledge and understanding of the filming of theatre and of the particularly complex and varied negotiations between theatre productions on the one hand and the film and television media on the other, in creating features, documentaries, news items and other forms of transfer, often disastrous, occasionally magnificent and with all shades of quality in between. Wyver is concerned not only with the years since the formation of the RSC but also with the years before, from Frank Benson's filming of parts of his Richard III in 1910, through, for example, the 1955 live broadcast of part of Glen Byam Shaw's The Merry Wives of Windsor to the surprising preservation of a reduced version of Peter Hall's 1959 A Midsummer Night's Dream with Charles Laughton in a recording made for US television but never broadcast. For each screening, whether a documentary scrap or a full-length feature, Wyver gives a detailed account of whatever he has been able to recover of the production processes and costs as well as analysis of the resultant product.