The Weekly Play

A weekly classic TV play. Used to be every Wednesdays, but now could be any time, any place and anywhere

The Wednesday Play – The Realm of Never: Moratorium (2001)

23 October 2013 Rob Buckley Post a comment

To a large extent, modern television has turned its back on the play, both here and the US. Does that mean the play is dead? 

Not at all. Public access television in the US, for example, has enabled amateurs and semi-professionals to create their own plays and broadcast them to the masses, and YouTube and Vimeo allow others to do the same. The Realm of Never was a series of plays produced between 1999 and 2008 at Queens Public Television in Flushing, New York. The plays were designed to mimic the likes of Playhouse 90 in look and feel, right down to being videotaped,. Cheap they may have been, but that’s the beauty of the play – it doesn’t matter so much about the budget so much as the performances and end result

Each of the plays had a supernatural theme aimed at exploring the human condition. The 2001 episode, Moratorium, wonders what would happen if a virus were unleashed that had a very interesting side-effect: omniscience. And it’s this week’s Wednesday Play – enjoy!

 

The Wednesday Play: Playhouse 90 – The Comedian (1957)

16 October 2013 Rob Buckley Post a comment

One US anthology series that really did think it was doing a form of theatre was, as its name suggested, was Playhouse 90. Running from 1956 to 1960, these 133 90-minute productions featured some of the best actors of the day in stories of various genres adapted and written by the likes of F Scott Fitzgerald, Rod Serling, Aaron Spelling, Tad Mosel and Frank Gilroy. It was also the source of numerous movies, including Requiem for a Heavyweight, The St Valentine Day’s Massacre, Days of Wine and Roses and Judgement At Nuremberg, which saw Maximilian Schell originating the role he would play in the movie.

One of the show’s most prolific directors was John Frankenheimer, who was responsible for one of the show’s most famous plays: The Comedians. Written by Rod Serling from a novella by Ernest Lehman, the live production starred Mickey Rooney as an egomaniacal television comedian venting his hysterical wrath on his brother (Mel Tormé), with Edmond O’Brien as a writer driven to the brink of insanity by the mayhem. Kim Hunter played Rooney’s wife. And it’s this week’s play – enjoy!

 

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The Wednesday Play:The Come-uppance of Captain Katt (1986)

2 October 2013 Rob Buckley Post a comment

A lot of the plays that have appeared in ‘The Wednesday Play’ have been serious and for adults. Yet, plays are for everyone and needn’t always be so ‘challenging’. We’ve already had one entry from ITV’s Dramarama series, but I think it’s about time we had a look at The Come-uppance of Captain Katt, the opener to the fourth season of the series starring Alfred Marks and written by Peter Grimwade. If that latter name is familiar, it’s probably because you’re a Doctor Who fan and while I’m not saying that this play about the making of a long-running science-fiction TV series and the politics involved has anything to do with Grimwade’s experiences of working on said show, you would be forgiven for thinking that perhaps it has…

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The Wednesday Play: Soft Targets (1982)

25 September 2013 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Soft Targets

When is a play about espionage not about espionage? When it’s a Stephen Poliakoff play, that’s when.

All the elements are here in Soft Targets, one of the BBC’s Plays for Today. It’s got Ian Holm – fantastic, of course, as Bernard in ITV’s later adaptation of Len Deighton’s Game, Set and Match trilogy – here playing a junior Soviet official called Alexei. It’s got Helen Mirren as a mysterious blonde, who appears and disappears mysteriously. It’s got Nigel Havers and Rupert Everett as Brits of various importance. Everything looks set.

But this isn’t a play about spies. It’s about paranoia. It’s about people meeting and misinterpreting things and each other. It’s about the difference between how they perceive the world, how it really is, and how the world perceives them. It has the pace of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy but the final revelation is a very different conclusion.

As always, if you like it, buy it on DVD – it’s one of the Helen Mirren at the BBC collection, which also includes The Apple Cart, Caesar and Claretta, The Philanthropist, The Little Minister, The Country Wife, Blue Remembered Hills, Mrs Reinhardt, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Cymbeline and The Hawk.

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The Wednesday Play: The Changeling (1974)

18 September 2013 Rob Buckley Post a comment

One of the most famous – and best – plays of the English Renaissance is The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley. First performed in 1622, it has two parallel plots, one tragic, one comedic. The main plot involves Beatrice-Joanna, Alonzo (to whom she is betrothed) and Alsemero (whom she loves). To rid herself of Alonzo, Beatrice uses De Flores – who loves her – to murder him. The other plot involves Alibius and his wife Isabella. Franciscus and Antonio are in love with her and pretend to be a madman and a fool, respectively, in order to see her. Lollio also wants her.

To preserve the element of suspense, I won’t tell you which is the comedic plot and which is the tragic one.

In 1974, Anthony Page directed a version of the play for the BBC’s Play of the Month strand that starred Helen Mirren as Beatrice-Joanna, Brian Cox as Alsemero, Stanley Baker as De Flores, Tony Selby as Jasperino and Susan Penhaligon as Isabella. Needless to say, it’s pretty good, and it’s today Wednesday Play.

If you like it, buy it on DVD – it’s one of the Helen Mirren at the BBC collection, which also includes The Apple Cart, Caesar and Claretta, The Philanthropist, The Little Minister, The Country Wife, Blue Remembered Hills, Mrs Reinhardt, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Cymbeline and The Hawk. That’s 17 hours for £12.50, which I reckon’s pretty good…