Sunday News TV WEEK
April 8 - 14, 1979
Kate Nelligan:
TV Acting is Hardest
NEW YORK -- "If you can act on
television," says Kate Nelligan, "you can act on water."
Miss Nelligan has just finished proving she can act on television,
starring as Isabella in "The Shakespeare Plays" production of the
great dark comedy, "Measure For Measure." Her performance as the
religious novice who refuses to sacrifice her virginity to save her brother's
life is already causing comment, both here and in England.
Tim Pigott-Smith, Kenneth Colley and John McEnery also star
in the production, which airs
Wednesday, April 11, at 8p.m., on WITF-TV.
The difficulty with television is that technical considerations come first," Miss Nelligan says. "It's no good the actor being excellent if the cameras or lights are wrong. And you've really got only once or twice to get it right; if you do badly, you can't go back and do it again as you do in film. For me, it's the most difficult medium of all."
Miss Nelligan's concern with the limitations of television as an actor's medium were at least partially assuaged by the unique production techniques created by the BBC to bring "The Shakespeare Plays" to the small screen. First, the play was rehearsed straight through as it would have been for a stage production - for five full weeks. Then, in six days, the entire five-act play was committed to videotape, using extremely long takes to enable the actors, most of whom were stage-trained, to build the internal rhythm of the scenes just as they would in front of a live audience.
One thing that didn't worry Miss Nelligan was finding the key to Isabella's character, even though there's a great deal of controversy over the role. "The school of thought that considers Isabella sexual al hysteric is absolute nonsense to me. Shakespeare is not interested in the sexual psychology of one woman; ‘Measure For Measure’ is a much bigger play than that. It seems to me to be a play about authority and the corruption of power and the relationship of the individual to the state, not about some woman's sexual problems."
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