Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History by John Wyver, and: Shakespeare on Screen: King Lear ed. by Victoria Bladen, Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, and : "Hamlet" and World Cinema by Mark Thornton Burnett

Abstract

Reviewed by: Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History by John Wyver, and: Shakespeare on Screen: King Lear ed. by Victoria Bladen, Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, and : "Hamlet" and World Cinema by Mark Thornton Burnett Sally Barnden Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History. By John Wyver. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Pp. 268. $100. Shakespeare on Screen: King Lear. Edited by Victoria Bladen, Sarah Hatchuel, and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 254. $99.99. "Hamlet" and World Cinema. By Mark Thornton Burnett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 291. $99.99. This trio of new books demonstrates the breadth and variety of screen Shakespeares across territories and media, arguing for a flexible understanding of adaptation and for nuanced analysis of the relationship between screen and stage. Collectively, they address a huge number of works, many of which have received very little critical attention to date, and offer reflections on the developing role of screen Shakespeares in a global, networked media market. Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History has the narrowest focus of the three, and is presented for the most part as narrative history. John Wyver traces the chronological story of the Royal Shakespeare Company's various experiments with screen media over more than a century. The RSC's first onscreen work was a silent film of Frank Benson's company in Richard III (1910); today, the company's screen output has been accelerated by the global pandemic since the publication of Wyver's book, and RSC productions can be accessed in filmed versions via three different streaming services. Since 2013, several productions a year have been broadcast as complex, multi-camera hybrid products, screened both live and belatedly as "event cinema." Rather than becoming embroiled in the difficult question of how far screen adaptations are capable of communicating and preserving live performance, Wyver focuses on the contexts, makers, and audiences of the screen outputs. In this respect, the book offers both an institutional history of the RSC and a history of screen media across the twentieth century. This screen history resists giving undue weight to influential film adaptations such as Peter Brook's King Lear. Wyver's willingness to discuss snippets of [End Page 181] performance woven into TV documentaries, promotional YouTube shorts, and archival recordings makes clear that the RSC's engagement with screen media has been varied and decidedly mixed in its success. The book is at its most engaging when discussing the history of suspicion between the theater and cinema. A series of RSC directors adopted the orthodox position that theatrical work takes its value in part from its ephemerality—a moment in a shared space between performers and audience that would only be cheapened by reproducibility. Some of them also worried about a fundamental tension between theater's allegiance to text and screen media's emphasis on visual storytelling. Trevor Nunn's stated policy in adapting Antony and Cleopatra (1974) was of "photographing a text," focusing in tightly on his actors' verse-speaking (109). But several RSC directors later regretted that their work had not been preserved. Michael Boyd, stepping down from leading the company in 2012, reflected that he may have been "a bit absolutist" in his resistance to screen versions of his productions (156). Wyver discusses the fragmentary remnants left by Peter Brook's A Midsummer Night's Dream (the most canonical production of its generation, and emblematic of the "I was there" tendency in theater criticism). The production was captured by the Japanese TV network NHK with "three or four cameras" and a "functional but unadorned" visual style (98). After the broadcast, according to the agreement the network had struck with Brook, the negative was burned even though Brook, having seen that the recording was of a higher-than-expected quality, tried to rescind his order at the last minute. Wyver nonetheless gained access to a recording during his research for Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company, taped from the broadcast "with an early domestic U-matic system" (98). Wyver is a generous viewer of the RSC's screen archive, finding merit in some of their maligned early experiments such as the "elegant miscellany...