IN 1977, journalists gathered at Leeds Castle for the launch of what the BBC described as the most ambitious and expensive project in television history. In a transatlantic alliance with Time/Life Television, the BBC was to produce all 37 Shakespeare plays.
The BBC Television Shakespeare took seven years to shoot and broadcast, employed 1,000 actors and cost £7 million. The series remains a unique achievement, and can now be reassessed with the first DVD release of Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The reissues are likely to prompt mixed feelings in those who appreciate television’s ability to bring Shakespeare to a larger public than any stage production. It is good to know that students too young to have seen the original broadcasts can enjoy some outstanding performances, and will be able to compare Derek Jacobi’s Hamlet with Kenneth Branagh’s, or Helen Mirren’s seductive Titania with Michelle Pfeiffer’s bland Hollywood turn.
But there is regret, too, because these DVDs (sadly devoid of extras) remind us that since Titus Andronicus brought the BBC marathon to a gory climax in April 1985, the Bard and our four main TV channels have been infrequent bedfellows. The BBC has commissioned only two full-length, original Shakespeares since 1985 (David Thacker’s Measure for Measure and John Caird’s Henry IV). ITV has not touched Shakespeare in the original language since Laurence Olivier played Lear in 1984. In the past decade Channel 4 has offered us only Tim Supple’s sombre, multi-cultural Twelfth Night (2003) and a riveting film of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Macbeth (2001), starring Antony Sher and Harriet Walter.
Several factors — notably the virtual disappearance of the television play and the rise of “cop and doc” dramas and reality TV shows — have led us to a point where, according to John Wyver, of Illuminations, which produced Macbeth for Channel 4, “it’s almost impossible to get any broadcaster to commission full-length, serious versions of classic drama”.
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Compare this hostile climate with the 1970s, when the late producer Cedric Messina launched the BBC Shakespeare. Back then, the BBC screened at least two plays every week; Shakespeare was a staple of the Messina-produced Play of the Month. Most importantly, Messina had his idea at the dawn of the home video age; it was the prospect of huge revenues from cassette sales, on top of deals with foreign broadcasters (35 countries bought the plays), that made the series commercially viable and, by 1982, profitable.
Messina wrote that the series’ guiding principle was “to make the plays, in permanent form, accessible to audiences throughout the world . . . (they) are offered as entertainment”.
He told his directors to deliver “straightforward productions” devoid of “arty-crafty shooting” and modern dress. This style satisfied the conservative American co-producers and suited the tight budgets and schedules (four weeks’ rehearsal and a week of studio filming). But Jonathan Miller, who produced 11 plays, later revealed that several leading directors, including Peter Brook and William Gaskill, declined his invitation to work under such prescriptive conditions.
Those who accepted could hardly be blamed for delivering productions whose rudimentary sets, camerawork and lighting are embarrassingly exposed on DVD. And yet the low-budget studio intimacy focuses our attention on what matters most: the language, which is beautifully spoken by all members of the casts, and the performances, which have aged well, with Derek Jacobi (as Hamlet), Helen Mirren (as Titania), Michael Hordern (as Lear) and Brian Glover (as Bottom) all at their best.
These days, actors are unlikely to be offered any Shakespeare work on television — unless the production looks and sounds more like Prime Suspect than Pericles. In the wake of Andrew Davies’s gripping Othello (2001) for ITV, with contemporary dialogue and the Moor reinvented as the first black Commissioner of the Met, BBC Drama is planning six 90-minute modernised adaptations of Shakespeare. This is a development that worries John Wyver, who failed to persuade the BBC or Channel 4 to produce a film of the RSC’s acclaimed Othello, directed by Gregory Doran. “The Andrew Davies Othello was very good,” he says. “But this kind of Shakespeare isn’t a substitute for the real thing.”
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Commissioning editors seem wary not only of Shakespeare’s verse, but also of the costs of “authentic” productions: large casts, period costumes, long running times. Wyver disputes the argument: “Our Macbeth cost £350,000 for two hours of high-quality drama, which is half the average cost of an hour of original contemporary drama.”
If Shakespeare can offer good value for money, what about his pulling power? Sher’s Macbeth and Supple’s Twelfth Night both drew 600,000 viewers — a minority compared with 3.57 million viewers for Davies’s Othello, let alone the 10 million fans of Holby City. Yet 600,000 is still higher than the audience for the BBC’s Richard III 20 years ago and, more importantly, exceeds the 570,000 admissions for the RSC’s entire 2002-03 British season.
There is no better illustration of television’s ability to bring Shakespeare to what, in theatre terms, is a mass audience. It might encourage people to see a staged play, which in turn might boost the audience for the next televised Shakespeare, and so a virtuous circle would turn.
“The lack of will to tackle Shakespeare among commissioning editors is a great shame,” Wyver concludes, “because it’s a fundamental part of our cultural heritage that should be seriously and properly reflected by our most important medium.”