As an introductory overview of the history of stage plays on British television, this chapter locates a wide range of individual broadcasts from 1936 to 2020 within institutional and broader cultural histories. After a brief consideration of these broadcasts as screen adaptations, the chapter first traces the ways in which television presented productions created for the stage prior to any encounter with cameras—as outside broadcasts (OBs) or studio re-workings; it then parallels this with a chronicle of television’s own productions of plays written for the stage. Both strands of the history discuss the extensive output of stage plays from the BBC Television service before the Second World War, including the first broadcasts from theatres in London’s West End. Post-war BBC productions, including those from BBC2 after 1964, are contrasted with the presentations of stage plays by the new ITV companies from 1955 onwards. The decline in stage plays on mainstream television from the late 1960s onwards is outlined, together with their brief revival as theatre recordings in the first years of Channel 4. The chapter also recognises the almost complete absence of stage plays on television in the 1990s and early 2000s, reviewing possible reasons for this, before recognising the modest revival of theatre on television that followed the success of ‘event cinema’ screenings by NT Live and other initiatives in the 2010s. The chapter’s focus throughout is on the reasons why television has sought to adapt and produce both kinds of screen plays, and it concludes with a brief consideration of the value of performance recordings for BBC Television, especially during the pandemic lockdown from March 2020.

In late 1968, Granada Television hired a group of actors—including the young Maureen Lipman, Richard Wilson and John Shrapnel—and converted a former railway building in Manchester into a fringe theatre. The intention was that The Stables Theatre Company would mount a programme of plays, a selection of which would be recorded in the television studio for broadcast, and for the next two years the ITV contractor supported The Stables as it mounted for local audiences an extensive and well-reviewed programme of plays and revues and recorded a number of these productions in the television studio. Apart from a version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, all of these were new plays, the majority of which were commissioned by The Stables. After two years, however, Granada recognised that the venture could not be profitable and cut off its financial support. The Stables mounted a public appeal to continue without the broadcaster’s backing, but by the end of March 1971, the unique experiment was over. On no other occasion in British television history has a broadcaster owned and operated a theatre company. Drawing on an interview with the artistic director of The Stables, Gordon McDougall, press coverage of the relationship between The Stables and Granada, other documentation including company reports and private memos and viewings of three of the television productions preserved in the ITV archive, this chapter explores the aesthetic aspirations of The Stables project and the reasons for its failure. The chapter considers the fit between McDougall’s original idea and the interests of Granada Television and the company’s founder, Sidney Bernstein, who had expressed a wish to set up a theatre as a testing ground for new playwrights and plays. The legacy of The Stables includes support at an early stage in their careers for a number of prominent playwrights, including Arthur Hopcraft, Trevor Griffiths and Peter Ransley. But the problems posed by endeavouring to align the interests and concerns of a small theatre company shaped by a strong artistic vision with the industrial processes of commercial television production, combined with the financial loss incurred by Granada, meant that no comparable experiment was tried elsewhere.

In its early years, drama for television was centrally defined by a range of theatrical relationships. Until well into the 1950s, current and recent stagings as well as the wider theatrical repertoire were the primary sources for television drama, and stage techniques remained the dominant influence on small-screen style and presentation. Fewer such productions were made after the 1960s, although they have continued to have a presence in television’s schedules, and the newer medium has continued to draw in multiple ways on plays written for and staged in theatres. These adaptations have enabled audiences of millions across the generations to access and experience theatre in performance in their homes. This Introduction proposes that the development of a critical focus on stage plays on the small screen is long overdue in both television and theatre studies. This absence was addressed in the University of Westminster research project ‘Screen Plays: Theatre Plays on British Television’ (2011–15), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Explorations undertaken within this project, and specifically those prepared for its two conferences, have been developed for the chapters included in this volume. The content and approach of these chapters are summarised in this Introduction. Collectively, the contributions propose that television’s adaptations of stage plays deserve far greater attention and analysis than they have received to date from scholars of either television or the theatre.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Pierre Boulez collaborated as a commentator and conductor on a series of challenging and distinctive BBC Television programmes about twentieth-century music. This chapter discusses the range of Boulez’s appearances on British television but focuses principally on this group of visually innovative broadcasts that combine musical analysis and performance to illuminate the creative processes of composers including Debussy, Berg, Schoenberg and Webern. Boulez’s own compositions, including ‘Improvisation II sur Mallarmé’ and Le Marteau sans maître, are also imaginatively visualised, with highly distinctive camerawork and cutting-edge graphics. Created initially for the television studio and later as individual film documentaries, these broadcasts often exploit the full potential of the medium of the time. Little seen since their initial transmission, these programmes remain provocative creative resources for all those engaged with combining music and moving images.

In late July 2022, in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon team completed the recording of the project’s thirty-third production. Richard III, which was shown in cinemas from 28 September, brought to a close the company’s Histories Cycle of the past decade. It also marked former artistic director Gregory Doran’s final production before the appointment of Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey as co-artistic directors in September.

The team has also recorded a screen version of Blanche McIntyre’s production of All’s Well That Ends Well, but this was done in a very different mode from the familiar ‘classical’ form employed to date. With the projected screening of All’s Well on Sky Arts in the spring of 2023, the project remained two shows short of completing a First Folio canon for the screen, having adapted neither Henry VIII nor, perhaps more surprisingly, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yet.

At the end of the 1950s both the eminent archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler (1890–1976) and author and secret service veteran Sir Compton Mackenzie (1883–1972) presented film documentary series about ancient Greece for BBC Television. Although aspects of the classical world had been considered in earlier television programmes, Wheeler's Armchair Voyage: Hellenic Cruise (BBC, 1958) and The Glory that was Greece (BBC, 1959) with Mackenzie were the small screen's earliest sustained engagements with the subject. The television critic of The Manchester Guardian described the first episode in Wheeler's series as ‘an instance of television really opening a window upon the world and genuinely giving people a foretaste of something tremendously satisfying that they can go and do for themselves’. For The Listener, K. W. Gransden welcomed Mackenzie's initial offering as ‘a most impressive and enjoyable film, both for classicists like myself and, I should guess, for those to whom it was all new’. Sequences filmed at significant classical sites in Greece feature in both series, although the documentary languages that each develops and their approaches to representing place and space are distinct. Seen almost sixty years on they also reveal contrasting concerns, as Wheeler addresses archaeological questions within a broadly humanist framework while Mackenzie develops a more explicitly political discourse with an embrace of contemporary parallels.

This chapter outlines the precursors of and influences on Wheeler's and Mackenzie's series, exploring within a broad cultural frame the legacies of early modern travellers and of the Grand Tour, the development of sightseeing and popular tourism from the eighteenth century onwards, representations of Greece in literature, painting and photography, technologies for virtual voyages, illustrated lectures and film travelogues as well as the mediation of travel by radio and early television. I argue that elements of each of these antecedents contributed to the formation of the two series, along with the public service understandings of the BBC's mission, the social and educational aspirations of a post-war, middle-class audience and the personal interests of the two presenters. Yet while both series can be seen as pioneering certain techniques that would quickly become established for presenter-led documentary series, the visual language of neither is entirely successful.