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This essay examines the proliferation of visual representations of Robert Louis Stevenson‘s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), considering the question of what links contemporary (Scottish?) Gothic to its problematic origins. After a survey of cinematic and graphic adaptations, the essay focuses on Steven Moffatt‘s Jekyll (BBC, 2007), which combines the post-Darwinian anxieties surrounding Stevensons tale of human regression with a much more contemporary interrogation of the ‘human’ against the backdrop of complex globalised scientific conspiracies. Significantly, the production draws on the Scottish origin of the text, re-proposing the question of (national) identity and authenticity against the threat of globalisation.
Tatiana Eichenberger Introduction: ‘Noises on the Air’ or even ‘Horror on the Third’ 1 ‘You may detest this programme, but I hope you won’t dismiss it. Certainly nothing quite like it has come out of your loudspeaker before; every single sound in it has been specially manufactured for the occasion’ (McWhinnie, 1957a : 27). With these thoughtful words in the Radio Times issue from Friday, 4 October 1957, BBC producer Donald McWhinnie introduced the upcoming first broadcast of his new experimental production, the radiophonic poem Private Dreams and
add greatly to their number.1 As the voice of BBC Radio’s The Buggins Family, Mabel Constanduros was among a new generation of performers to make her name on the ‘wireless’ in the safety of the studio broadcast, where her audience was imagined but unseen. Broadcasting fame soon led to the demand for live stage appearances where, at the London Coliseum, her very visible audience were arranged over three vast tiers of seating and could number anything up to 2,500 people. The ‘nervousness in her new environment’, picked up here by the Stage reviewer, is hardly
least because it aptly and acutely topicalises the institutional tensions that both Bürger and Foster highlight. In this respect, and particularly in the British postwar context, the creation of the BBC Third Programme – later Radio 3 – as an institutional platform sympathetic to more ‘highbrow’ and ‘experimental’ productions is a significant factor. 1 What binds playwrights such as Churchill to Beckett, Pinter and Stoppard, who were together largely responsible for the revolutions that shook up the theatrical landscape of postwar Britain, is that they came to it
1977). It was this remarkable performance that, four years after the RSC’s European tour, made Howard the obvious choice for the BBC television production (Fenwick 22). While the television programme was emotionally and visually toned down compared to the RSC production and lacked both the sustained flair that Hands created with lighting effects and some of Howard’s wilder vocal fluctuations, it was
According to Cedric Messina, the initiator of the BBC/Time-Life Television Shakespeare and producer of its first and second series, As You Like It has the distinction of being the play that served as inspiration for the entire enterprise. In 1975 Messina was location shooting at Glamis Castle for a Play of the Month production of James Barrie’s The Little Minister ; he decided that it was ‘the perfect
transmitted live into various cinemas across the country as part of the National Theatre Live (NT Live) initiative. The other production was televised on BBC3, a channel associated with popular, experimental, and, at times, rather subversive entertainment directed at its target audience of ‘16–34 year olds’ (BBC Trust 1). This was an open-air performance, transmitted live at Kirkstall Abbey in Yorkshire, entitled Frankenstein’s Wedding: Live in Leeds (written by Chloe Moss and directed by Colin Teague and Trevor Hampton). It was intended as an interactive performance
made the shift into colour and had become a genuinely mass medium. In Britain, which would generate the single most important Shakespeare series, the stuffy news and light entertainment programming which the BBC had first offered was undergoing a shift, introducing postmodern comedy like Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–74). Homey crime shows like Dixon of Dock Green (1955–76) were gradually
each of the plays were produced by different international companies at the London Globe theatre; the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) produced a special series of performances that included new international productions; the BBC launched a Shakespeare season that included new films of the second tetralogy of history plays and broadcast the new Royal Shakespeare Company production of Julius Caesar
David MacDonald’s at Glasgow Citizens Theatre (1978); Michael Bogdanov’s for the National Theatre (Cottesloe 1982; Lyttelton transfer 1984); Alan Drury’s BBC Radio 3 version (1994); Michael Boyd’s at the RSC’s Swan Theatre (1997) – and touches on the play’s surprising reappearances since then, from an actual performance in a disused factory in London’s main Turkish district to a fictional