Sex and death at BFI Southbank
As part of the Screen Plays: Theatre Plays on British Television research project which I am co-ordinating with Dr Amanda Wrigley at the University of Westminster, I have curated a BFI Southbank season of television adaptations of Jacobean tragedy. The season starts in three weeks’ time with a very special event: a showing of Granada TV’s 1965 adaptation of Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women followed by a discussion with Dame Diana Rigg, who stars in the production, and Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company Gregory Doran. Booking opens today for BFI members and at 11.30am on 12 March for everyone else: www.bfi.org.uk and 020 7928 3232.
The full programme is below.
Monday 25 March
Blood and Thunder: Women Beware Women Granada, 1965. Dir Gordon Flemyng. With Diana Rigg, William Gaunt, Gene Anderson, Karin Fernald. 73 min.
‘A thundering production,’ wrote Mary Crozier in the Guardian about this tightly effective studio adaptation of Thomas Middleton’s drama of illicit desire. There had been no modern staging before a 1962 Royal Shakespeare Company presentation, so this was a bold choice for Granada. Diana Rigg stars, just before she debuted as The Avengers’ Emma Peel, and Gordon Flemyng’s cameras make the most of grilles, screens and staircases to conjure a rich visual style for the fiercely melodramatic action.
The screening will be followed by a panel including Dame Diana Rigg and the Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Gregory Doran (both work permitting) to discuss Jacobean tragedy on television. Illustrated with clips from such works as the rarely seen Women Beware Women (BBC/Open University 1981), and with me in the chair.
Monday 1 April
Hamlet at Elsinore BBC/DR,1964. Dir Philip Saville. With Christopher Plummer, Robert Shaw, Michael Caine, Roy Kinnear. 170 min.
Made with outside broadcast cameras recording to videotape, this ambitious version of Shakespeare’s play (written in 1599, and so not strictly Jacobean but arguably providing the template for the revenge tragedies to follow) employs settings in and around Kronborg castle to brilliant effect. Marlon Brando turned down the lead, but Christopher Plummer delivers an impressively deranged and hesitant Prince. There are many moments (not least for ‘To be or not to be’) when Philip Saville demonstrates his mastery, and there are a decent number of laughs too, notably from Roy Kinnear’s grave-digger cameo.
Wednesday 10 April
Stage 2: The Duchess of Malfi BBC, 1972. Dir James MacTaggart. With Eileen Atkins, T.P. McKenna, Charles Kay, Michael Bryant. 123 min
James MacTaggart makes dazzling use of the rooms, staircases, doorways and fireplaces of Chastleton House to reveal the complexities, both personal and political, of John Webster’s masterpiece. The play was written c. 1612, the year that Chastleton was completed, and the production achieves an appropriately elaborate and detailed Jacobean style while avoiding picture-book spectacle. Delivering the verse with respectful intelligence, Eileen Atkins is quietly magnificent as the tragic Duchess and Michael Bryant is pitch-perfect as the scheming servant Bosola.
Thursday 18 April
‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore BBC, 1980, Dir Roland Joffé. With Cherie Lunghi, Tim Pigott-Smith, Kenneth Cranham, Rodney Bewes. 135 min
In the 1970s Roland Joffé directed some of television’s finest social realist films, and he applied the approach to this truly remarkable version of John Ford’s drama. A tale of incestuous passion written around 1629 is translated to the early Victorian period and turned to critique the sexual and economic hypocrises of the nineteenth century – and of the first years of Thatcherism. As for The Duchess of Malfi, the location is Chastleton House, but cinematographer Nat Crosby’s austerely beautiful images give to this radical adaptation a style that is unique among period stage plays on the small screen.
Friday 26 April
Performance: The Changeling BBC, 1993. Dir Simon Curtis. With Elizabeth McGovern, Bob Hoskins, Hugh Grant, Leslie Phillips. 92 min
Playwright Michael Hastings adapted Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s 1622 play and ruthlessly excised the asylum sub-plot. The cuts tighten the focus on the transgressive affair between the beautiful aristocrat Beatrice-Joanna and the facially disfigured arriviste De Flores. A poised performance from Elizabeth McGovern and a brave and daring embrace of his role by Bob Hoskins are key reasons to see what is, after twenty years, television’s most recent presentation of a non-Shakespearean early modern drama.
plus an extract from Play of the Month: The Changeling (BBC, 1974) with Helen Mirren, Stanley Baker, Brian Cox. 20 min
As directed by Anthony Page, Helen Mirren and Stanley Baker offer a fascinating contrast to McGovern and Hoskins in their differing approaches to acting Jacobean drama.
Monday 29 April
Compulsion Size 9 Productions/ITV, 2009. Dir Sarah Harding. With Parminder Nagra, Ray Winstone, Ben Aldridge. 93 min
Inspired by Rowley and Middleton’s The Changeling, Joshua St Johnston’s screenplay is set in modern-day London. Anjika is the daughter of a wealthy Indian businessman who seeks help from the family chauffeur Don Flowers (De Flores in the original play) to avoid an arranged marriage. Flowers’ obsession prompts a demand for sexual favours in return. An exceptionally polished and provocative adaptation, the film brings the spirit of self-destruction in Jacobean tragedy to contemporary primetime drama.
plus an extract from Blood and Thunder: The Changeling, Granada TV 1965. Dir Derek Bennett. With Derek Godfrey, Kika Markham, Hal Hamilton. 20 min
‘Briskly imaginative’ was critic Maurice Richardson’s description of this polished studio production, centred on Kika Markham’s icily controlled Beatrice-Joanna.
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