Screen productions of Shakespeare plays by John Wyver, Professor of Arts on Screen at the University of Westminster, have been broadcast in cinemas and on the BBC.
Professor Wyver was the screen producer for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Richard III, which was broadcast across cinemas in the UK this September. The play is about deceit, jealousy, and manipulation. It charts Richard of Gloucester’s bid to win and keep the English crown.
Professor Wyver was also the screen producer for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Much Ado About Nothing, which was broadcast on BBC Four in April and is available to watch on BBC iPlayer. The play is a romantic comedy on mistaken identity. It is about love, trickery and marriage.
He spoke to Westminster’s Centre for Research and Education in Media (CREAM) about his career in both the media and academia, the relationship between theatre and television and how the mediums can continue to adapt to welcome new audiences.
Professor Wyver said: “Ever since I was Television Editor at Time Out at the end of the 1970s, I have been interested in bringing together the media industry and academia and working at the border between them… when Channel 4 started in 1982 it was possible, for maybe a decade, to work as an independent producer and explore how to bring critical analysis to innovating with the form and content of programmes.”
“Much Ado… was the first RSC Shakespeare production on the company’s main stage directed by a Black theatre-maker, the brilliant Roy Alexander Weise. Roy conjured up a kind of Afro-futurist world that looked amazing on stage – and which I think we were able to translate to the screen to good effect…as Roy said, ‘By setting this production in an imagined future reality, we have the opportunity to see our own world through new eyes. What has the potential to be different? What capacity do we have for change? What attitudes remain the same? And are we ok with that?’”
Read the full article on CREAM’s website.
