Although my discussion works with a pragmatic distinction between the two forms, I want to argue that both television’s own productions of texts written for the stage and the medium’s presentation of pre-existing productions of these texts should be considered to be adaptations. In both forms, television contributes specific kinds of embodiment and performance to an original text, and this process is framed by spatial and temporal possibilities that are distinct from those of the stage—in a way directly comparable to the cinematic adaptations of stage plays explored by Victoria Lowe (2021). As a consequence of the mediating processes of cameras and recording technology, as well as of the choices made by the screen director working with camera operators, a sound team and many others, the presentation of a pre-existing stage production is perhaps more obviously an adaptation, even if on occasion such broadcasts are designated by the seemingly neutral terms of ‘relay’ or ‘capture’. But an original production by television, however simple or straightforward, shifts a stage text into a form for which it was not originally conceived. Linda Hutcheon (2006), Margaret Jane Kidnie and others have fruitfully explored the ‘definitional problem’ of ‘when speaking specifically of drama, what constitutes adaptation as distinct from production?’ (Kidnie 2009: 7). But in the case of television productions, it is clear that all presentations of stage plays must be regarded as adaptations.

As the following discussion outlines, television’s adaptation history of stage plays began as early as 1930, six years before the BBC started its regular television service from Alexandra Palace. The process by which an emerging medium, as television was then, takes an established one and its components as a subject has been theorised as ‘remediation’ by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1998), who argue that all emerging media forms refashion earlier forms in the same way that photography remediated painting and film remediated stage production and photography. From the very beginning, the advantages for television of remediating stage plays, and more generally drawing in and adapting the approaches and ideas of theatre, have included the availability of proven (and often out of copyright) scripts, access to high-profile productions and their casts and ease of adaptation to the studio, often with only minimal explicit changes, of developed and proven stagings. More generally, theatre plays conferred cultural credibility on the new medium, were central to the fulfilment of its cultural public service responsibilities and contributed—although this was rarely made explicit—to the shaping by the broadcasting institutions of our conceptions of national identity.

Throughout this history, television has almost always been the proactive partner in engagements with theatre, and with specific theatre companies, thanks to its significantly more substantial funding for screen projects and, until the recent introduction of live cinema broadcasts, its monopoly of distribution channels to broad audiences. Theatre has often responded cautiously to the younger medium’s approaches, welcoming the attention but remaining suspicious that the rigour and integrity of live performance may not be respected by a form perceived to be more interested in audience numbers than art. Television’s attention has been recognised for its assistance in marketing, for the facilitation of access and the enhancement of awareness and for archiving notable productions, but theatre has invariably accepted television’s terms both commercially and creatively, believing it had little option to do otherwise. This has rarely been a relationship of equals. Only very recently, as theatre companies (in common with other cultural organisations) have become media producers themselves, has the balance of influence begun to change.

Just as the theatre was to be central to, and extensively remediated by, television drama in its first years, so in earlier decades the beginnings of both cinema and radio had similarly drawn significantly on the stage. In 1896, Esmé Collings filmed a short scene from the play The Broken Melody, and just over a decade later Gaumont’s Romeo and Juliet (1908) was, as Jon Burrows has written, ‘the first British film which celebrated and foregrounded its named theatrical cast and their screen performances as part of an identity for the film’ (Burrows 2003: 21).¹ Throughout the 1910s, major stage stars appeared in film adaptations of theatrical productions, including Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, who received £2,000 for three weeks of filming for the 1913 Hamlet (ibid.: 10). Seven modern dramas by Arthur Wing Pinero were filmed between 1915 and 1921 and, as Geoff Brown notes, after the arrival of sound reinforced the British cinema’s interest in theatrical properties, Basil Dean’s film of John Galsworthy’s Loyalties in 1933 was ‘just one of [that year’s] forty-nine British feature films with stage antecedents’ (Brown 1986: 154).

Radio drama began with a BBC transmission of an extract from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in February 1923, and there were broadcasts of extracts from West End productions before theatre managers stopped the practice in April that year (Briggs 1961: 280). A decade on, the BBC’s former director of talks, Hilda Matheson, wrote, ‘It was at first taken for granted that the microphone offered a natural medium for the great plays of the world’. She further detailed the three types of radio drama that drew on the stage, effectively predicting the forms that television drama would come to adopt: ‘microphones have been slung in theatre wings to enable plays to be heard from an actual theatre; professional companies have given theatre plays in studios, or they have been given by specially selected players’ (Matheson 1933: 110). There were also the beginnings of drama written especially for radio, with The White Chateau by Reginald Berkeley, broadcast on Armistice Day 1925, being the medium’s first full-length play.² Just as would be the case with television, such commissions were driven by a desire for radio, and radio drama specifically, to move on from a dependence on the theatre and in so doing establish its medium-specific autonomy. John Drakakis has noted that, two years after the start of broadcasting, Director-General John Reith was irritated by the excessive ‘theatre effect’ of much radio drama: there was, Drakakis wrote, ‘a firmly held conviction from the outset that radio had its own “proper form” distinct from the theatre or from film’ (Drakakis 1981: 2, 3). Television, and specifically drama for television, would be critiqued in a comparable way as the understandings of its own medium specificity emerged.

Television drama’s originary moment came in the summer of 1930, soon after John Logie Baird started experimental transmissions of low-definition images with synchronous sound. His first broadcasts offered songs and sketches, and on 14 July the service featured, as a simultaneous broadcast with BBC Radio’s National Programme, Britain’s first television play.³ In the broadcast of this tale of a man with a facial tumour conversing in a cafe, only a single head could be shown at a time. The image was far from perfect: the Daily Mail reported that it appeared as if the characters ‘moved and had their being in a heavy and persistent shower of rain’ (Anon. 1930). This inauspicious start began a tradition of adapting theatre plays for television that remained active ninety years later when a recorded performance of the Almeida Theatre’s production of Mike Bartlett’s play Albion was broadcast in the summer of 2020.

The service’s first drama transmission on 6 November 1936 consisted of minimally re-blocked extracts from a current West End staging of the slight Scottish comedy Marigold (Wyver 2011c). A more substantial presentation a month later transmitted thirty-eight minutes of scenes from T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral from E. Martin Browne’s London production. For these early broadcasts, producers at Alexandra Palace carried across stage procedures to the studio. ‘The only technique I knew was of the stage’, Madden wrote, ‘so I divided up the studio into three stages behind one another, separated by curtains. The three cameras were placed roughly in line but at different heights … We played an act on stage one, then the curtains parted and cameras moved on to stage two, and then again to stage three’ (in J. Madden 2007: 11, 15). West End productions were readily available, and the theatre was a world from which a number of the early producers came, including Madden himself and Stephen Thomas, who had worked with the theatre manager Sir Nigel Playfair. Studio style developed gradually, so that when in November 1937 actors from André van Gyseghem’s Embassy Theatre production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline presented forty-five minutes of scenes, the camera script indicates that there were just twenty-five shot transitions in the broadcast, and half of these were to and from captions (see Wyver 2017b). Shots of extended duration, which may have been combined with camera moves, suggest the broadcast employed a frontal, ‘theatrical’ visual style distinct from the continuity editing of contemporary cinema. An extreme form of the ‘theatrical’ style was practised by another early studio producer, Fred O’Donovan, who was celebrated for choreographing scenes lasting twenty minutes or more for a single developing camera shot (see Wyver 2017a). Having overseen the early broadcast of Murder in the Cathedral, producer George More O’Ferrall wrote one of the first detailed reflections by a practitioner on the craft of small-screen drama. Even at this early stage, O’Ferrall was concerned to distinguish his approach from both stage and cinema, writing that: