This year the BBC is celebrating 100 years of radio drama. Their first full-length play was an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and since that initial production there have been in excess of 400 others. However, while both Shakespeare and the BBC are cultural titans of the UK, there has been no substantial research into these broadcasts until now.
Andrea’s work challenges assumptions about the nature of the BBC’s radio broadcasts of Shakespeare’s plays, reassessing them as dramatic productions rather than poetry readings, and as entertainment rather than education. It shows they are a unique genre: in terms of Shakespearean performance they are alone in presenting the plays without visuals, while as radio drama they function under different constraints to works written specifically for the medium.
To help illustrate this, Andrea will not only be talking about some of these productions but also playing short extracts from the archive including Hollywood star, Leslie Howard, bringing subtlety to the microphone in the 1938 Hamlet: a schools’ Romeo and Juliet with a young Judi Dench as the female lead; and Doctor Who’s David Tennant as a romantic hero stuck up a tree!