Giving us the Works

Thoughts on Shakespeare
BBC
The Observer

Starting on BBC2 tonight, a new series called ‘The Complete Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare.’ Independent Television gave you his life; now watch while the BBC gives you the works. I wonder if the theme-tune will be released as a single.

Romeo and Juliet is the starter, so there’s a popular beginning for you. On the two succeeding Sundays will come Richard II and As You Like It. Then in February there’s more: Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, Henry VIII. And so on for six years. He wrote 37 dramatic works so it almost makes a neat sum.

Shakespeare has been a stable of BBC television drama throughout its existence. Some plays (Romeo is one of them) have turned up with almost monotonous regularity; others (Henry VIII is one of them) will receive their TV premieres during this series. The climate has changed though, in the last 15 or so years. There was once a tacit assumption that adapted stage plays had to form the basis of the TV drama output. There is now a far from tacit orthodoxy to the effect that theatre plays are unwelcome intruders on the screen, to be reluctantly tolerated until the audience that enjoys them perishes from anaemia. Such plays, to get on the air at all, must be housed in well-appointed ghettoes bearing such titles as ‘Play of the Month’- and that level is itself revealing. I can remember when there was a stage play on every week.

I do not particularly mourn all this. The purists may conceivably, despite their stridency, be in the right and I myself am hardly starved of theatre. Viewers who do not have my job may possibly feel differently and some of them must surely have noticed that a workmanlike tradition of presenting classics on TV has long since died. It peaked in 1960 with the history series ‘An Age of Kings’ (which perhaps, not coincidentally, was one of the last great flings of live television) and died soon after.

As productions have got less frequent they have also become glossier; where once they took their tone from the Old Vic they know take it from Chichester. They have about them a definite air of classy makeshift. That is the situation that ‘The Complete Works” will inherit, and it is rather well demonstrated by the casting of the leading roles. At the centre, youth and inexperience (Juliet in fact is played by a school-girl); on the periphery as the Chorus (all 28 lines of him) John Gielgud.

It may work beautifully; I merely note it as a sign of the times. The producer of the series Cedric Messina (founding father of ‘Play of the Month’) claims quite rightly that to have Gielgud speak the series opening lines is not merely sound showmanship but symbolically apt: homage is paid to another great tradition- and will be again when Gielgud plays John of Gaunt to the Richard II of Derek Jacobi who played the part excellently on radio last year- though one suspects that it was more his international triumph in I Claudius that prompted the casting here.

Messina is engagingly aware of the slightly anachronistic figure he cuts in fashionable media circles: 'I’m in conflict with the elitists and the television drama pundits all the time. It doesn’t bother me, I’m a populist. When I was a child in South Africa the only way one could hear plays was on the radio.’

He now wants the television to perform the same introductory or enlightening function. May I say that I myself am witness that it can.  My own enthusiasm for Shakespeare - which preceded my enthusiasm for the theatre - was sparked when I was horribly young by a children’s television version of a cut Midsummer Night’s Dream (no lovers, just clowns and fairies) starring Robert Atkins. I have never recovered.

So good luck to Mr Messina (who by the way has produced in his time a Seagull and a School for Scandal finer than any I have seen in the theatre) and to the worldwide marketing operation that has made his project possible. But I shall hope for productions that do not glory too much in not being ‘modern dress versions of eccentric interpretations’ (Mr Messina’s disclaimers) if only because productions so self-denying frequently end up as far from the centre of the play- and therefore as ‘eccentric’ - as any others.

There is no pretence that definitive versions are being attempted (Richard Pasco’s Jaques is the only stage performance to be transcribed for posterity and the export market in the first batch) but considering how MANY MILLIONS ARE GOING TO SEE THEM they will perforce become ‘definitive’. They will corner the Shakespearean market for longer than their six-year span. They had better be good.