Screening the Stage

  • Mark Thornton Burnett
Chapter
Part of the Palgrave Shakespeare Studies book series (PASHST)

Abstract

In the period following the Second World War, described by Samuel Crowl as the ‘great international phase’ of ‘Shakespeare’s absorption into film by directors as diverse as Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Grigori Kozintsev and Franco Zeffirelli’, there often obtained a relatively conservative relationship between theatre and film.1 Screen realizations of the plays tended to emerge from or base themselves on previous productions, translating into film a theatrically-oriented methodology. In the wake of mediatization and globalization, and alongside corresponding changes in the performance event, however, the Shakespearean filmic-theatrical relationship has taken on a greater complexity. The last twenty years bear witness not only to an unravelling of the filmic-theatrical connection but also, intriguingly, to the emergence of filmic representations whose narratives prioritize theatrical shows and stagings of Shakespearean texts. Films as different in date and provenance as Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989), which concludes with a school version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Roysten Abel’s In Othello (2003), which explores a Delhi-based English theatre company’s fractured relationship with Shakespeare’s play, typify the tendency and form, and join other works which take as a central premise the mechanics and the processes of Shakespearean performance.

Keywords

Traditional Theatre Village Doctor Global Marketplace Filmic Representation Theatre Practitioner 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

  1. 1.
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Copyright information

© Mark Thornton Burnett 2007

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  • Mark Thornton Burnett

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