Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Westminster
Hamlet
Hamlet is a film adaptation of an acclaimed Royal Shakespeare Company stage production of Shakespeare’s play. John Wyver was the lead co-producer of the film adaptation. The stage production, which was seen in Stratford-upon-Avon and London in 2008-09, was directed by Gregory Doran, with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart in the cast. Wyver’s position as co-producer involved a leading creative role in the film adaptation process, which developed Wyver’s ongoing project of translation of stage productions to the screen. In common with his earlier productions, Hamlet aimed to produce a dynamic screen version utilising the grammar of contemporary television while at the same time preserving essential elements of the original staging.
Please see portfolio for further documentation of research dimensions.
An earlier generation of television producers had adapted RSC productions, including Macbeth (1977) and Nicholas Nickleby (1982), for television. However, from the 1980s onwards television executives believed that such work was constrained by stage conventions with little appeal to modern audiences. Attempts to engage with these questions were hampered by an inability to discover an appropriate affective form to combine theatre and television. Against this background Wyver’s research asks: What is the most productive space in which to film a translation of an existing stage production and what key elements does this space need? What key components of screen language can effectively translate a stage production to the screen? How can the necessary large team of collaborators be most effectively organised to achieve the desired aims? Hamlet was shot in an abandoned seminary in Mill Hill on a single RED digital camera and post-produced to a HD CAM SR master. The original designs and staging were re-worked for the found spaces there, and the screen language combines extended takes of performance with conventional continuity editing. Members of the original stage team worked closely with the film unit to focus on how best to develop what we collectively understood to be an original ‘hybrid’ of theatre and film. No stage translation to television had previously attempted to use these methods and technologies to synthesise the screen language of television to a stage play. As a consequence this hybrid approach was recognised by the production team, by the RSC, and the BBC to have been successful. An exhaustive educational website was produced by BBC Learning, which documented the film production and provided numerous entry points into the play and its meanings.
