N.Z. Producer Helps To Bring Elizabethan Age To Life

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31316, 11 March 1967, Page 23

N.Z. Producer Helps To Bring Elizabethan Age To Life

tßy the London correspondent of “The Press”)

LONDON, March 1.

Robert Stead, formerly of Wellington, producer for London’s Rediffusion television company, has been helping put some television lights on to the “Golden Age” recently.

Between April and December this year a total of 16 programmes on life in the Elizabethan Age will be transmitted to secondary schools all over the United Kingdom. The summer term consists of six programmes on the general background to the period, covering the Renaissance; the Reformation; Henry VUI; Elizabeth I; the advance of learning and the discovery of new lands. In the autumn term the remaining 10 programmes examine the every-day life of people in various social positions. It was hoped to give some idea of the life in London and in a provincial town, said Mr Stead; the importance of skilled craftsmen; the life of a nobleman; the education available; the position of women in society; the attitude to criminals and law breakers; how leisure time

was used and what could be seen in the theatre of the day. The last programme will be devoted to Shakespeare. It continues the account of the Elizabethan theatre while also summarising some of the material in the earlier programmes. “As the main aim of the series is not to teach facts but to bring alive the atmosphere and attitudes of the age of Elizabeth I, dramatised episodes reflecting the life of individual people will form a major part of the presentation,” said Mr Stead. One of the programmes Mr Stead has been concerned with looks at the golden glow of the Elizabethan Age’s Sir Philip Sydney. He took a Rediffusion team down to the Sydney home, now occupied by his descendant Lord De L’lsle, a former GovernorGeneral of Australia. ■ Penhurst Place in Kent, hibernating between tourist seasons, found itself being examined by men dragging cameras across lawns—shooting the bits that really were Tudor without modern drain pipes, shining lights in the faces of rows of Sydney ancestors in the portrait galleries, and taking notes so that

they can build a studio set to look like a room in Penshurst. Mr Stead came to the Old Vic Theatre School in London in 1949 to take a production course. He has been an announcer and actor for the N.Z.8.C., and managed an Australian tour of the Canterbury University Players under the direction of Dame Ngaio Marsh. For the Festival of Britain he helped prepare a number of plays which Sir Tyrone Guthrie directed. In 1951 he was again associated with Dame Ngaio Marsh when he toured New Zealand and Australia with the British Commonwealth Theatre Company under her direction. He joined Rediffusion in 1955 (when Independent Television began in the United Kingdom) as a studio floor manager but his chief interest has always lain in production rather than administration. He became a programme director five years ago.

The photograph shows Lord De L’lsle, photographed at the fourteenth Century Great Hall at Penhurst, part of bls ancestral home, with Mr Stead.