Meanwhile, In The Left Field

Remember Ben “left of centre” Stephenson, the BBC’s Controller of Drama? Last week he was a panellist at a BFI discussion on “the theatre’s relationship to television drama.”

Here’s one guy, writing on his production company’s blog, who wasn’t impressed with Stephenson’s attitude to the classics (emphasis added) :

‘I just worry that they are not going to be that stimulating on screen,’ he said.
With which words the central creative figure in BBC drama wrote off — as far as television goes — not only the theatrical tradition outlined above but also pretty much everything stretching from Harold Pinter back to the Greek tragedies. The only way that the drama canon could work for television, he suggested, was if the plays were treated in a radical way, and most especially if significant cuts were made to their texts. And this, he was worried, wouldn’t be appropriate.