The Essential Shakespeare - Live
Royal Shakespeare Company and British Library launch first CD set featuring live recordings
26 October 2005 :: Posted by Catriona Finlayson
A two CD set, The Essential Shakespeare Live, featuring scenes from Royal Shakespeare Company performances from 1959 to 2003, recorded by the British Library Sound Archive and personally selected by RSC Associate Director Gregory Doran, is made commercially available for the first time on Wednesday 26 October 2005.
The CDs cover a period of over four decades of Shakespeare performances including the earliest live Royal Shakespeare Company recording held by the British Library Sound Archive - Peter Hall’s Coriolanus with Laurence Olivier at Stratford-upon-Avon, in April, 1959, recorded by then stage manager Hal Rogers - Paul Scofield in an excerpt from Peter Brook’s King Lear at the Aldwych Theatre in 1964 and Judi Dench in All’s Well that Ends Well in 2002. Other celebrated productions included in the collection are the now legendary Wars of the Roses from 1963 and John Barton’s Richard II with Richard Pasco and Ian Richardson. Actors represented include Peggy Ashcroft, Alan Howard, Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen, Alan Rickman, Antony Sher, Donald Sinden, Robert Stephens, Patrick Stewart, Janet Suzman, David Oyelowo and David Warner.
Gregory Doran enjoyed the challenge of listening to the archive recordings and putting the CDs together: ‘I felt a sense of privilege at being able to listen to performances I had heard so much about, but never imagined would be able to experience. Theatre is a transitory art. That is its essence. It vanishes into thin air. But here it has been snatched back. The British Library has been recording Royal Shakespeare Company productions live in performance for nearly five decades. The ones I have chosen are just a few extracts from some of my personal favourites.’
All of the recordings needed some treatment or processing to make them suitable for publication. In the words of Nigel Bewley, British Library Sound Archive technician, ‘To remove all of the apparent blemishes or unwanted artefacts would be impossible, and even if it were it would be undesirable. When making a recording of a live performance we consider our microphones to be the ears of a member of the audience sitting “in the best seat in the house” and we document the entire event, including the performances of the actors and musicians as well as the audience reaction. To remove or reduce every vestige of an audience’s presence would have resulted in something anodyne or sterile.‘
What the performers think
Dame Judi Dench (Countess Rossillion in Gregory Doran’s All’s Well that Ends Well – 2003).
‘Gregory Doran has put together a simply sensational series of extracts. It's incredibly moving to hear some of our greatest actors performing Shakespeare.’
David Oyelowo (King Henry VI in RSC Artistic Director Michael Boyd’s Henry VI Part 3 - 2001).
‘There is joy and sadness in the fact that, as a theatre actor, your toil on that stage will live on only in people's hearts and minds. Not only do I feel honoured to be heard alongside the actors who inspired me to become an actor, but I am also excited at the prospect of hearing what all the fuss was about.’
Sir Antony Sher (Richard III in Bill Alexander’s Richard III – 1985).
‘They say that part of the magic of Theatre is that it is transitory, it exits in the present, and then it is gone forever. But there is also magic in discovering that we can retrieve some of it, hear some of it again. I have found it amazing to listen to certain extracts from this CD – like Olivier’s Coriolanus and Scofield’s Lear. Performances that I missed and thought would never experience. And now I can. It’s like uncovering hidden treasure. Thrilling.’
For further information please contact:
Nada Zakula on +44 (0)1789 412622 or Jane Ellis on +44(0)1789 412668 in the Royal Shakespeare Company Press Office, email: nada.zakula@rsc.org.uk, or jane.ellis@rsc.org.uk.
Catriona Finlayson at the British Library Press Office, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB. Tel: +44 (0) 20 7412 7115, fax: +44 (0) 20 7412 7168, email: catriona.finlayson@bl.uk
Notes for editors
Gregory Doran and Richard Fairman are available for interview via an ISDN line. Nigel Bewley is also available to talk about the technical challenges in transferring live performances to CD.
- The Essential Shakespeare - Live Price £15.95. Published by the British Library and Royal Shakespeare Company. The CD Sets will be on sale at various UK book stores, the British Library Bookshop and through the Royal Shakespeare Company shops. The Essential Shakespeare CD can also be purchased online at: www.rsc.org.uk or http://shop.bl.uk/.
- The British Library Sound Archive is one of the largest sound archives in the world. It holds over a million discs, 200,000 tapes, and many other sound and video recordings. The collections come from all over the world and cover the entire range of recorded sound from music, drama and literature, to oral history and wildlife sounds. Collection material comes in every conceivable format, from wax cylinder and wire recordings to CD and DVD, and from a wide variety of private, commercial and broadcast sources. And of course, the British Library Sound Archive operates a wide-ranging recording programme of its own. Since 1964, the location recording programme of the Sound Archive's Drama and Literature collection has yielded an almost unbroken sequence of live audio recordings of RSC productions given in London. This recording programme was sustained till the end of the Barbican era when a partnership agreement was developed between the British Library and the RSC whereby the RSC records performances at Stratford-upon-Avon , the Sound Archive studio processes the material, and both the Sound Archive and the Shakespeare Centre Library at Stratford receive a copy on CD format.
- The Royal Shakespeare Company is one of the world's best-known theatre companies and plays to over 500,000 theatregoers each year world wide. The RSC plays throughout the year at its home in Stratford-upon-Avon, the town where Shakespeare was born and died. The Company also performs regularly in London and at an annual RSC residency in Newcastle upon Tyne. In addition, the Company tours throughout the UK and internationally.
The Company’s mission is to keep in touch with Shakespeare as a contemporary, but also to keep modern audiences, artists and writers in touch with Shakespeare. The Company's repertoire also includes other Renaissance dramatists, and the work of international and contemporary writers. The aim is to give as many people as possible, from all walks of life, a richer and fuller understanding of theatre. Through events, education and outreach programmes the RSC continually strives to engage people with the experience of live performance.
The RSC today is still at the heart an ensemble company. Everyone in the Company, from directors, actors and writers to production, administrative, technical and workshop staff, all collaborate in the RSC distinctive and unmistakable approach to theatre.