Act II: The Shakespeare Job

Synopsis: Three-part television documentary series on the commercial theatre. Episode two records the efforts of Malachi Bogdanov and his colleagues in Cooperesque Productions to bring Mal Bogdanov’s play Bill Shakespeare’s Italian Job to the 2003 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The play, billed as a ‘post-modern comic caper’ takes 5 actors playing ten characters from Shakespeare and re-tells the plot of Michael Caine’s THE ITALIAN JOB (1969). The documentary covers casting, branding, marketing, set design, previews, press night and reviews. Extracts from several scenes from the play are shown. The emphasis is on the precarious day-to-day difficulties of funding the production when for some of the time the actors and production team took no salary. The production eventually played to 70% capacity, a figure known in the business as ‘a nervous hit’. The advice from West End scouts was a major re-write and another testing at the Edinburgh Fringe. One member of the audience in a press night vox pop stated ‘it’s wasted on the middle-classes who like Shakespeare’.
Series: Theatre Biz, The
Language: English
Country: Great Britain
Medium: Television
Technical information: Colour / Sound
Transmission details: 28 Jun 2006 at 01:30 (Channel: BBC4)
Duration: 60 mins