Film and Television Versions of The Play
Caesar and Cleopatra was the basis for a lavish 1945 motion picture starring Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh and produced by Gabriel Pascal. Shaw collaborated closely on this production. See Caesar and Cleopatra (1945 film).
After seeing part of the filming of the movie at Denham Studios in London, Shaw remarked, "What scope! What limitless possibilities!... Here you have the whole world to play with!"
There have also been two major television productions of the play. The first was in 1956, produced as part of the anthology series Producers' Showcase, on NBC. It starred Claire Bloom, Cedric Hardwicke, Farley Granger, Jack Hawkins and Judith Anderson. The second version, shown in 1976, was also telecast by NBC, and starred Geneviève Bujold, Alec Guinness, Clive Francis, Margaret Courtenay, and Iain Cuthbertson. It was telecast on the Hallmark Hall of Fame.
There has also been an audio adaptation of the play, produced on Caedmon Records, starring Max Adrian as "Caesar", Claire Bloom as "Cleopatra" and Judith Anderson as "Ftatateeta".
The 2008 Stratford Festival production starring Christopher Plummer in the role of Caesar, and Nikki M. James as Cleopatra was shown in very limited release in cinemas on January 31, 2009. It was subsequently shown on Bravo in Canada and released on a DVD, which is available from the Festival.
Read more about this topic: Caesar And Cleopatra (play)
Famous quotes containing the words film, television, versions and/or play:
“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”
—Ingmar Bergman (b. 1918)
“Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy.... In other countries, the business of laughing is left to the viewers. Here, their laughter is put on the screen, integrated into the show. It is the screen that is laughing and having a good time. You are simply left alone with your consternation.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances.”
—Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)
“Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)