BBC Radio feature programmes written by established literary figures in the mid-twentieth century enjoyed richly creative afterlives across many decades and in a variety of media-for example, in ...print, as commercial recordings, in theatre performance and on television-as well as in a succession of new productions on radio. This activity kept works alive in the public imagination beyond the ephemeral moment of first broadcast and, it is argued, contributed to the sense (for audiences past and scholars present) of an informal canon of literary radio features. This essay explores the intermedial afterlives of three such literary features-Sackville-West's The Rescue (1943), MacNeice's The Dark Tower (1946) and Thomas' Under Milk Wood (1954)-in order to demonstrate the significance of the form as a site for exploration of social issues, politics and cultural life. The essay concludes with a call for more wide-ranging attention to the protean feature form, including work that may not have persisted in the schedules, or had rich, intermedial afterlives, but that may still offer significant insights into the history of social, political and cultural life in mid-twentieth-century Britain.
This important collection of essays both contributes to the expanding field of classical reception studies and seeks to extend it. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, it looks at a ...range of different genres (epic, novel, lyric, tragedy, political pamphlet). Within the published texts considered, the usual range of genres dealt with elsewhere is extended by chapters on books for children, and those in which childhood and memories of childhood are informed by antiquity; and also by a multi-genre case study of a highly unusual subject, Spartacus. "Remaking the Classics" also goes beyond books to dramatic performance, and beyond the theatre to radio - a medium of enormous power and influence from the 1920s to the 1960s, whose role in the reception of classics is largely unexplored. The variety of genres and of media considered in the book is balanced both by the focus on Britain in a specific time period, and by an overlap of subject-matter between chapters: the three chapters on twentieth-century drama, for example, range from performance strategies to post-colonial contexts.The book thus combines the consolidation of a field with an attempt to push it in new and exciting directions.
The guilds bringing it to you are no longer the Barbers, the Blacksmiths, the Bakers and the Fishmongers, but Equity, ACTT, ABS, NATTKE and ETU," wrote Julian Mitchell in his Radio Times article ...which, in introducing the techniques, the sheer labor and the individuals that made the production work, seeks almost to create a living connection between those individuals whose talent and skills lay behind the production and those viewers at home who received the program on their television sets (5). In 1977, the Open University, in collaboration with the BBC, produced and transmitted the Brome Abraham and Isaac and the York Crucifixion as a double-bill television program that served as part of the study materials for the undergraduate A307 Drama course and as entertainment for a general, non-student audience.11 This television program, which was produced by Nick Levinson in Alexandra Palace's relatively small studio A, was part of the course materials for the Medieval English Drama component of the course. Since the A307 Drama course was an annual offering, this program was transmitted each year until 1981. ...the camera script indicates an "Arid setting in Palestine" for both plays ("Checked as Broadcast Script"). The degree to which these productions were concerned with contributing an understanding of mystery plays as a medieval mode of expression relating to religious, social, and civic traditions and community life very much depended on the commission behind a particular production and, within those constraints, individual directorial vision. ...both the 1961 BBC Schools production and the 1977 Open University double bill utilized relatively inexpensive landscape settings, safe in the knowledge that detailed information on the debates surrounding the original performance conditions would be conveyed in accompanying print resources.
Joan Kemp-Welch (1906-1999), one of the first female television directors, started out as an actor on both the stage and film before becoming a theatre director and finally moving to television in ...1955. She directed a variety of entertainment programmes for Associated-Rediffusion before marrying her evident skills as a television director with her rich experience of theatre work, in a number of important television plays, some from the stage and others written for the new medium. This article will examine how Kemp-Welch's experience of theatre practice may have inscribed itself on her television productions of stage plays, focusing on the practical and aesthetic use she made of space in extant studio productions of plays set in very different locales and time periods, including Sophocles' Electra (1962), Three Sisters (1963), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1964) and Romeo and Juliet (1976). This case study of an accomplished director of television plays will, therefore, attempt to understand the social, cultural and specifically theatrical meanings of the use of space in these productions to represent and suggest a variety of domestic, rural, urban and national places on the British small screen.
Dylan Thomas' radio play Under Milk Wood was performed on stage and television soon after its BBC radio premiere won the Prix Italia in 1954. Textual analysis of the 1957 BBC television production ...demonstrates how it contributed new resonances deriving from the medium's performative conventions and communicative strategies. The nature of the aesthetic values sought by the professional critic and the domestic viewer are evaluated: it is observed that the comparative approach of critics, focusing overwhelmingly on the work's originating form, inhibits full engagement with the innovative creative possibilities of performances of Under Milk Wood in forms of representation with a visual dimension.
Joan Kemp-Welch (1906-1999), one of the first female television directors, started out as an actor on both the stage and film before becoming a theatre director and finally moving to television in ...1955. She directed a variety of entertainment programmes for Associated-Rediffusion before marrying her evident skills as a television director with her rich experience of theatre work, in a number of important television plays, some from the stage and others written for the new medium. This article will examine how Kemp-Welch"s experience of theatre practice may have inscribed itself on her television productions of stage plays, focusing on the practical and aesthetic use she made of space in extant studio productions of plays set in very different locales and time periods, including Sophocles" Electra (1962), Three Sisters (1963), A Midsummer Night"s Dream (1964) and Romeo and Juliet (1976). This case study of an accomplished director of television plays will, therefore, attempt to understand the social, cultural and specifically theatrical meanings of the use of space in these productions to represent and suggest a variety of domestic, rural, urban and national places on the British small screen. (Author abstract)
Greek tragedy is currently being performed more frequently than at any time since classical antiquity. This book is the first to address the fundamental question, why has there been so much Greek ...tragedy in the theatres, opera houses and cinemas of the last three decades? A detailed chronological appendix of production information and lavish illustrations supplement the fourteen essays by an interdisciplinary team of specialists from the worlds of classics, theatre studies, and the professional theatre. They relate the recent appeal of Greek tragedy to social trends, political developments, aesthetic and performative developments, and the intellectual currents of the last three decades, especially multiculturalism, post-colonialism, feminism, post-structuralism, revisions of psychoanalytical models, and secularization.
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