Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company

A Critical History

John Wyver

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350006591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

No theatre company has been involved in such a broad range of adaptations for television and cinema as the Royal Shakespeare Company. Starting with Richard III filmed in the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre before World War One, the RSC's accomplishments continue today with highly successful live cinema broadcasts. The Wars of the Roses (BBC, 1965), Peter Brook's film of King Lear (1971), Channel 4's epic version of Nicholas Nickleby (1982) and Hamlet with David Tennant (BBC, 2009) are among their most iconic adaptations. Many other RSC productions live on as extracts in documentaries, as archival recordings, in trailers and in other fragmentary forms. Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company explores this remarkable history of collaborations between stage and screen and considers key questions about adaptation that concern all those involved in theatre, film and television. John Wyver is a broadcasting historian and the producer of RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon, and is uniquely well-placed to provide a vivid account of the company's television and film productions. He contributes an award-winning practitioner's insight into screen adaptation's numerous challenges and rich potential.

1

Beginners, 1910–59

In early April 1910 Frank Benson’s celebrated acting company was filmed performing Richard III on the stage of Stratford-upon-Avon’s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. The version we marvel at today is disfigured by damage and decay throughout its twenty-two-minute length. Titles and credits are missing, as are what were once its climactic frames. For many years the film was slighted as an example of a ‘primitive’ cinema in which an unimaginative screen treatment had failed to compensate for theatrical origins. More recently early cinema has been radically reassessed, and audiences as well as scholars have begun to recognize and celebrate the film’s pleasures and peculiarities.¹ A precious trace of the Edwardian theatre, Benson’s Richard III begins the screen adaptation history of the organization that five decades later would be incorporated in 1961 as the Royal Shakespeare Company. During those years, the Memorial Theatre, which reopened in 1932 after the original burned down in 1926, had occasional, opportunistic engagements with film and later with television. Newsreel companies came from time to time, and then in the 1950s first BBC Television and subsequently a small-screen producer from the United States arrived to broadcast a production from the stage. Yet none of these encounters resulted in a sustained engagement with the moving image, and throughout the central decades of the twentieth century it was only radio that returned time and again to Stratford’s productions.

The first Memorial Theatre was funded and built as an initiative of local brewer Charles Flower. In 1864, Charles, with his father Edward Fordham Flower, organized a season of six plays in a temporary pavilion to mark the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth. A decade later, with an awareness of what Richard Wagner was bringing to completion with his opera house in Bayreuth, Charles Flower decided to build a permanent theatre for Stratford for the performance of Shakespeare’s plays. His vision was mocked by many, as was the eclectic architecture of the building.² But the theatre opened on schedule in 1879, when three plays were given by a company led by the classical actor Barry Sullivan. Short spring seasons in the first years gave little indication of future successes, until in 1885 Charles met the ambitious young actor Frank Benson. Three years earlier at the age of 23, Benson, with his father’s financial support, had taken over an ailing touring company. Now he was to lead all but five of the Stratford seasons from 1886 to 1916, as well as making a final appearance in 1919. Benson guaranteed consistency, as Sally Beauman has written: ‘Had it continued to present short annual seasons by companies of varying ability, Stratford would undoubtedly have degenerated into little more than a small provincial theatre, fitted in on touring dates, with no aims, no policies, no identity of its own.’³ The company appears to have done their best work in Stratford during the 1890s, although the productions were resolutely traditional, even as they often took considerable liberties with Shakespeare’s texts. At first the seasons lasted for no more than two weeks, with a different play being given each night. During the rest of the year the theatre was dark for long periods. By 1910, Charles’s brother Archibald (‘Archie’) Flower had taken over as chairman of the theatre’s governors, and he was to dominate the company until the end of the Second World War.

The cinematograph comes to Stratford

At the end of March 1910, having just enjoyed a week’s holiday, Frank Benson’s troupe assembled once again in Stratford-upon-Avon. Earlier in the month they had been at the Theatre Royal Bournemouth for six days performing seven different Shakespeare productions along with a version of the medieval Mystery Plays. Now they were to spend a fortnight on the stage of the Memorial Theatre facing not the familiar and forgiving local audience but an unresponsive camera eye. The newly established Co-operative Cinematograph Company had elected to start its production slate with a group of Benson company films. Over two weeks they filmed truncated versions of Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew and Richard III, and possibly also Twelfth Night and The Merry Wives of Windsor.⁴ In her diary Eleanor Elder recorded her amusement at participating in the filming of Julius Caesar:

Of course, everything had to be changed: business quickened, and a lot of talk left out altogether. Our instructions are to put plenty of movement into it – to keep within certain lines drawn on the stage; to do as we are told, and to obey orders shouted at us without being disturbed, or letting it affect our acting.⁵

Richard III was shot with a single, static camera placed in the centre of the stalls, and each of the fifteen scenes unfolds without camera movement or cuts.⁶ As the company’s 1910 ledger details, Benson received an initial payment of £200, then at the end of each of the two weeks an additional sum of £250.⁷ The total of £700 for a fortnight’s work compared very favourably with net receipts of £243 4s. 3d. from the engagement in Bournemouth, which had not quite covered the week’s outgoings. All of this was especially welcome since Benson was a poor manager and the company’s accumulating debts were becoming an embarrassment to the Memorial Theatre, which eventually had to bail out the operation. Yet his professional reputation as an actor remained high and he was knighted in 1916. That year his son Eric was killed in action, and after the war his fortunes declined. He retired in 1932 and died seven years later.

The Benson films, released in 1911, were among the approximately 300 silent Shakespeare adaptations estimated by Judith Buchanan to have been made by the British, American, French, Italian, German and Danish film industries between 1899 and 1927.⁸ In the first years of the century, short films showcasing familiar scenes from Shakespeare’s plays often drew on visual conventions from nineteenth-century media including paintings, engravings and lantern slides. But after around 1907 producers were increasingly concerned to develop sustained and self-contained stories.⁹ Historian Rachel Low records that at least twenty Shakespeare productions were released in Britain between 1906 and 1914, including versions by London-based producers of Romeo and Juliet (1908) and King Henry VIII (1911) as well as Hamlet (1913) with Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson.¹⁰ The adaptations made with the Benson company followed the dominant British model in the years before 1914 of memorializing existing stagings, although films made in continental Europe and the USA were increasingly shot on location and had no connection to a theatre production. The decision to shoot Richard III on the stage of the Memorial Theatre, rather than in a film studio, where the management of lighting and other logistics would have been easier, is likely to have been motivated by the additional prestige that the older, culturally respectable medium, actualized by the stage itself, was thought to bestow on a cinema struggling to establish its legitimacy.

Richard III opens with a crowded and complex tableau, including a real-life horse, from the aftermath of the Battle of Tewkesbury, with the defeated Henry VI ceding the crown to Edward IV. What follows is a significantly reduced version of the play, with dialogue featured only in a small number of prefatory quotations on title cards before key scenes. The scenes are also only a selection, including Clarence’s murder and an invented section of Hastings visiting the Tower to see the princes (played by young women, Kathleen Yorke and Hetty Kenyon). Each sequence is enacted before a detailed painted backcloth, including one of the throne room in front of which Hastings is sent for execution, the Lord Mayor persuades Richard to accept the crown, and the Coronation takes place. Scene 9 realizes the scene described by Tyrrell in the opening lines of 4.3; in the film he is revealed holding a pillow over the faces of figures on a bed, who he then uncovers to show the princes ‘girdling one another / Within their alabaster-innocent arms’ (4.3.10–11). Buchanan has noted that this murder was not usually part of Benson’s production and seems to have been invented for the film. ‘When we talk about this film as a compressed record of a stage production’, she has warned, ‘we need to be aware that there was a little more elasticity in the system and a willingness to adapt than that would imply.’¹¹ Later, in Richard’s dream before the Battle of Bosworth stop-motion effects and dissolves between the figures conjure up the ghosts of those he has killed. On their release in the spring of 1911, Rachel Low notes that the Benson films ‘received courteous, if not over-enthusiastic, appreciation’.¹² In a detailed and richly illustrated study of the Memorial Theatre’s stage, Benson’s scenery and Richard III, Russell Jackson reflected that, ‘The production also exemplifies the lowly standing of film in its time. First, no mention was made of it or of the other films in the local newspapers, in the minutes of the theatre’s governors, or in their published annual reports. This was a non-event as far as Stratford-upon-Avon was concerned.’¹³ Writing nearly forty years after the film’s release, before early cinema had begun to be reassessed, Rachel Low dismissed the film as ‘a mistake’. ‘It shows not the slightest appreciation of the possibilities of film making,’ she wrote.¹⁴

Judith Buchanan has proposed that in the later years of the silent cinema ‘For cineastes … Shakespeare came to epitomise the theatrical burden that was inhibiting the cinema from realising its own potential.’¹⁵ But rather than define Benson’s film and the other riches of silent Shakespeare in terms of lack, whether of words or of ‘the cinematic’, she celebrated ‘the things that these maverick films delightfully and tellingly are, both as film industry products and as performance readings of Shakespeare’.¹⁶ As a relic from the Stratford stage of more than a century ago there is something wondrous about Richard III. My most memorable viewing of it was on a late summer evening huddled with my family in a blanket amidst the ruined, spotlit Great Hall of Yorkshire’s Middleham Castle, where the historical figure of Richard III lived, both as a boy and later in his married life with Anne Neville. The occasion was a presentation by the University of York project Silents Now, which is dedicated to exploring new ways of bringing audiences to films made before the coming of sound.¹⁷ Accompanying a projection of the film was a live piano accompaniment played by John Sweeney and a group of actors speaking Shakespeare’s verse, as well as creating vivid sound effects, in perfect synchronicity with the flickering images. Judith Buchanan realized that during the filming Benson’s actors were actually speaking extracts from the play and so by careful study of their lips she was able to construct a script. The Middleham presentation was, like all performance, unique to that moment, and it brought together a hundred-plus witnesses for each presentation in the manner of the best theatre. Yet this was also cinema, as both artefact and social occasion, mysteriously and magically bringing back the past. Here crowding around us were Shakespeare’s ghosts, the ghosts of Benson and his company – all of course long dead – and the ghosts of both mythical and real-life Richards, Lady Annes and Tyrells. I remain delighted that ‘the remembrance of so fair a dream’ (5.3.233) stays with me.

‘Words, words, words’

While he will forever remain silent as Richard III, Frank Benson speaks in a 1933 radio broadcast that is one of the earliest recordings of a BBC programme.¹⁸ You can sit in a listening booth at the British Library and hear the critic James Agate introduce him performing speeches by Richard II, by Mark Antony from Julius Caesar and by Cardinal Wolsey in King Henry VIII. Although we have no recordings that pre-date this, Benson had appeared on radio as early as Christmas Eve in 1923, and his other aural appearances included a broadcast on 23 April 1932 of his toast to ‘The Immortal Memory’ at the luncheon in honour of the poet’s birthday. Throughout the twentieth century and beyond, as is evidenced by the transmission date in 2016 of Shakespeare Live! From the RSC, 23 April remained the preeminent moment in the year for newsreels, and then radio and later television, to focus on the town and the theatre. The conjunction of the presumed birthday and ‘death day’ with the saint’s day of St George has been a potent focus for patriotic commemoration in both secular and sacred spheres.¹⁹ Celebrations in the town began with David Garrick’s Jubilee in September 1769,²⁰ but it was only in 1816, in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars that a group of Stratford citizens first put together a programme of locally organized events on the day. Festivities were assembled with mixed fortunes during the remainder of the century.²¹ By 1905, however, with the added fillip of a national revival of interest in folklore and dancing, the birthday celebrations included a Ben Jonson masque with music by Ralph Vaughan Williams and a procession, which rapidly became traditional, from the Town Hall to Holy Trinity Church. Association of the observances with the Shakespeare Festival, as the season of plays at the theatre was known, developed gradually after 1879, but as Susan Brock and Sylvia Morris noted, ‘In 1907 the Theatre’s influence became overt when F.R. Benson … addressed himself to the birthday celebrations in a campaign to make the festival bigger, better and more prestigious.’²² The Birthday (as it was by then known) events began to be noticed well beyond Stratford, and in the years after the war they increasingly attracted media attention. But as Brock and Morris have detailed, this was a mixed blessing, since the celebrations started to accrue political significance: ‘The Union Jack and the Flag of St George had traditionally been central to the celebrations, providing an obvious opportunity for national and patriotic pride. Politicians found it useful to be seen at the celebrations: as early as 1907 the presence of the local Member of Parliament was noted.’²³ Newsreels and television subsequently extended the patriotic feelings associated with the Birthday, at times embracing the theatre and its companies more closely.

William Bridges-Adams had taken over in 1919 as director of the Stratford Festival. He was committed to developing an ensemble for what by 1926 was a season of twelve weeks of performances, yet he struggled to secure funds and to attract attention. In the early 1920s there was an attempt to convert the theatre into a cinema for the winter months, but when this failed the sophisticated projection equipment was sold to the Stratford-upon-Avon Picture House in which the theatre acquired a significant share-holding. When the Festival was made homeless by the 1926 fire, the cinema became the venue for that year’s stage productions, as it continued to be until 1931 while Archie Flower and Bridges-Adams oversaw the construction of the new building. But after the new theatre open...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Text
• Introduction
• 1. Beginners, 1910–59
• 2. Television Times, 1961–68
• 3. Making Movies, 1964–73
• 4. Intimate Spaces, 1972–82
• 5. Toil and Troubles, 1982–2012
• 6. Now-ness: 2000–18
• Notes
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint