Making its debut with Romeo and Juliet on 3 December 1978, and concluding nearly seven years later with Titus Andronicus on 27 April 1985, the BBC Television Shakespeare project was the single most ambitious attempt at bringing the Bard of Avon to the small screen, both at the time and to date.
Producer Cedric Messina was already an experienced producer of one-off television Shakespeare presentations, and was thus ideally qualified to present the BBC with a daunting but nonetheless enticingly simple proposition: a series of adaptations, staged specifically for television, of all 36 First Folio plays, plus Pericles (The Two Noble Kinsmen was considered primarily John Fletcher's work, and the legitimacy of Edward III was still being debated).
The scale of Messina's proposal, far greater than that of previous multi-part Shakespeare series such as An Age of Kings (BBC, 1960) and Spread of the Eagle (BBC, 1963), required an American partner in order to guarantee access to the US market, deemed essential for the series to recoup its costs. Time-Life Television agreed to participate, but under certain controversial conditions - that the productions be traditional interpretations of the plays in appropriately Shakespearean period costumes and sets, designed to fit a two-and-a-half-hour time slot.
The running-time requirement was swiftly jettisoned when it became clear that the major tragedies in particular would have suffered severely, but other artistic restrictions remained largely in place throughout. Although later productions under Messina's successors Jonathan Miller and Shaun Sutton would be more experimental, Miller was unable to persuade first-choice directors such as Peter Brook and Ingmar Bergman to take part, and Michael Bogdanov resigned from Timon of Athens (eventually tx, 4/16/1981, with Miller himself directing) after his modern-dress interpretation was considered too radical a departure.
This gave the BBC Television Shakespeare cycle the reputation of being overly staid and conventional, which was not always deserved. Though Messina's own productions (1978-80) were largely conservative, Jonathan Miller (1980-82) revamped things both visually (thanks to a design policy of sourcing sets and costumes from great paintings of the era in which the play was set) and in terms of direction and casting, in some cases using popular actors with little or no Shakespeare experience (John Cleese as Petruchio, Bob Hoskins as Iago) to attract new and younger audiences.
Under Miller, directors such as Jack Gold, Jane Howell and Elijah Moshinsky were encouraged to be more adventurous, with Howell in particular adopting such a stylised approach for The Winter's Tale (tx. 8/2/1981) and the Henry VI/Richard III cycle (tx. 2-23/1/1983) that they pushed the definition of "traditional" to the limit, but also garnered the series some of its best reviews. Miller's aesthetic policies continued under Shaun Sutton (1982-85), who brought the project to a belated close.
Whatever its artistic reputation, there was no doubt that the BBC Television Shakespeare was a commercial triumph, breaking even financially by 1982 (ahead of expectations) and fully justifying Messina's gamble. Its success was helped by the rapid growth of video recorders in schools, creating a secondary market that was much bigger than initially predicted - though the initial decision to sell the plays only as a complete set provoked complaints from people who baulked at paying the substantial asking price because they were after a smaller selection or individual titles. The BBC eventually released some of the more popular titles separately, but it was not until late in 2005 that the entire series was available individually on DVD at a competitive price.
Although the BBC Television Shakespeare project as a whole met with a mixed reception, it had several positive virtues. Chief among them was the fact that its completist remit meant that several of the more obscure plays received their first television adaptation, and in most cases the BBC version remains the only one. Happily, such productions as Henry VIII (tx. 25/2/1979), Cymbeline (tx. 10/7/1983), Pericles (tx. 11/6/1984) and Titus Andronicus were considered amongst the cycle's most impressive achievements, with Henry VIII subsequently voted the best production of all by the Shakespeare Association of America.
For the BBC Television Shakespeare, tx. 8/5/1981, 170 mins, colour
Director Jonathan Miller
Production Companies BBC Television, Time-Life Television
Producer Jonathan Miller
Script Editor David Snodin
Designer Colin Lowrey
Music by Stephen Oliver
Cast: Colin Blakely (Antony); Jane Lapotaire (Cleopatra); Ian Charleson (Octavius Caesar); Emrys James (Enobarbus); Janet Key (Charmian); Esmond Knight (Lepidus); Donald Sumpter (Pompeius); Lynn Farleigh (Octavia)
The decline and fall of Egyptian queen Cleopatra and Roman general Mark Antony, whose fateful romance has huge implications at a time of great political uncertainty.
The first of Jonathan Miller's productions for the BBC Television Shakespeare project to be recorded (although not the first to be broadcast), this took a typically individual approach to Shakespeare's elegiac Roman-Egyptian tragedy, with design, casting and interpretation consciously breaking with tradition. Unlike the cycle's earlier Julius Caesar (tx. 11/2/1979), no attempt was made at recreating even a token impression of ancient Rome: the look favoured by Miller and designer Colin Lowrey being inspired instead by the work of sixteenth-century Italian Mannerist painter Paolo Veronese.
Both title roles were cast decisively against both physical and temperamental type. The stocky, balding Colin Blakely is far from a traditional Mark Antony (Miller described his interpretation as "a rugby forward in one of those Midlands sporting clubs who's just beginning to fail"). He stomps around palaces and army tents like a sore-headed bear, dimly conscious that he is the architect of his own downfall but too impassioned with Cleopatra and the lure of an alternative to military life to pay heed to countless warnings.
Similarly, Jane Lapotaire makes no attempt to resemble the sensual, jet-coiffed Cleopatra of legend, preferring to chime with the known historical record, which would have established her as a middle-aged woman whose power came from her regal status rather than her built-in allure. This approach serves to emphasise Cleopatra's underlying emotional fragility, and even goes some way towards justifying her notorious capriciousness.
The supporting cast took a similarly unconventional approach, with Ian Charleson's Octavius Caesar presented as a stern moralist instead of the usual power-mad imperialist warrior, while Emrys James' Enobarbus challenges the usual view of the character as an essentially upright man brought down by unfortunate circumstances beyond his control: instead, Miller saw him as "a sleazy braggart who's corrupted by hanging on to the skirts of a great man and living vicariously off his prestige".
But this production as a whole is less satisfying than its two television predecessors, lacking both the self-conscious monumentality of The Spread of the Eagle (BBC, 1963) or the hyper-stylised abstraction of ITV's 1974 version of Trevor Nunn's Royal Shakespeare Company production. By playing down the spectacle (the Battle of Actium is deleted in its entirety, replaced by scrolling text sourced from Thomas North's translation of Plutarch, Shakespeare's main source), Miller domesticates the tragedy - his Antony and Cleopatra works on the human level, but the epic dimension is missing.
Michael Brooke
http://rapidshare.com/files/113368107/ANTONY_AND_CLEOPATRA_BBC.part01.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/113368620/ANTONY_AND_CLEOPATRA_BBC.part02.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/113369089/ANTONY_AND_CLEOPATRA_BBC.part03.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/113369483/ANTONY_AND_CLEOPATRA_BBC.part04.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/113370027/ANTONY_AND_CLEOPATRA_BBC.part05.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/113370454/ANTONY_AND_CLEOPATRA_BBC.part06.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/113370928/ANTONY_AND_CLEOPATRA_BBC.part07.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/113371374/ANTONY_AND_CLEOPATRA_BBC.part08.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/113371878/ANTONY_AND_CLEOPATRA_BBC.part09.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/113372421/ANTONY_AND_CLEOPATRA_BBC.part10.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/113372879/ANTONY_AND_CLEOPATRA_BBC.part11.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/113373350/ANTONY_AND_CLEOPATRA_BBC.part12.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/113373421/ANTONY_AND_CLEOPATRA_BBC.part13.rar
no pass
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