Output details

Julius Caesar

A film adaptation for television of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2012 production which set the play in a post-colonial African state. John Wyver was the sole producer on the film. He also produced the accompanying film materials made for The Open University for use on a forthcoming Third Year Shakespeare course and for public dissemination.

Please see portfolio for further documentation of research dimensions.

This film adaptation extended earlier stage translations to screen co-produced by Wyver, including the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet (2009) and Macbeth (2010) (Outputs 1 and 2), but differed in fundamental respects. For the two earlier productions, the staging had been fully realised and the theatrical run completed before the film version went before the cameras. For Julius Caesar, the majority of the film was shot in the middle of the stage rehearsal schedule, with the final scenes being recorded just after the stage production had opened. In addition, Julius Caesar was shot in part on location and in part in the theatre during a performance of the play in front of a live audience. The film version was then completed very rapidly so that BBC Four could broadcast it within a month of the opening of the stage production. As such a number of questions faced Wyver and the production team: What impact does filming a screen adaption in the middle of a stage rehearsal have on the cast, the creative team and the staging? What processes can help to ensure that location-shot sequences and scenes shot in a theatre are successfully combined in a screen adaptation? What are the key differences in the screen language of scenes shot with a single camera on location using the style of conventional continuity editing and scenes recorded using multiple cameras, both fixed and hand-held, during a stage performance? The creative teams of the stage and the film versions working to producer Wyver collaborated during the two distinct stages of the filming to create designs and to achieve performances that would read as consistent and to develop a visual ‘look’ and a screen language that would result in a coherent film.