Donald McWhinnie

Donald McWhinnie (16 October 1920 – 8 October 1987) was a British BBC executive and later a radio, television, and stage director.

Educated at Rotherham Grammar School, McWhinnie worked for the BBC in administrative roles in the 1940s and 1950s and was drama Script Editor from 1951 to 1953. In the later 1950s, he became a radio director, and from the 1960s to the 1980s he was a director of television drama.^[1]

McWhinnie, Frederick Bradnum, and Desmond Briscoe together established the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.^[2] In 1959, McWhinnie directed a production of Embers, a radio play by Samuel Beckett. First broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 24 June 1959, the play won the RAI prize at the Prix Italia awards later that year.^[3]^[4] McWhinnie wrote about his approach to radio drama in The art of radio.^[5]

In 1962, McWhinnie was nominated for a Tony Award for his screen version of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker.^[1]

In 1965, he directed the first Broadway theatre production of the Bill Naughton comedy All in Good Time, which opened at the Royale Theatre, New York, on 18 February 1965 and closed on 27 March 1965. It starred Donald Wolfit, Marjorie Rhodes, and Richard Dysart.^[6]

The inaugural episode of the BBC Television Shakespeare in December 1978 was announced to be Much Ado About Nothing, directed by McWhinnie and starring Penelope Keith and Michael York.^[7] The episode was shot at a cost of £250,000, edited, and announced as the first of the series, but then was suddenly pulled from the schedule and replaced with Romeo and Juliet. No reasons were given by the BBC, although newspaper reports suggested the episode had been postponed for re-shoots, due to worries that an actor's "very heavy accent" would be a problem for US audiences.^[8] However, there were no reshoots, the episode was abandoned and was later replaced by a new adaptation.^[9] It appears that the BBC management regarded the production as a failure.^[10]

In 1981, McWhinnie was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Director for Translations.

Selected credits as director

BBC television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour (1967)
Moll Flanders (ITV TV series, 1975)
Wings (BBC TV series, 1978)
Tales of the Unexpected, episode "William and Mary" (1979)
Love in a Cold Climate (Thames Television serial, 1980)
Mapp and Lucia (Original and best TV series 1985-1986)

Radio Plays

18.06.56 Giles Cooper -Mathry Beacon
13.01.57 Samuel Beckett - All That Fall
15.08.57 Giles Cooper - The Disagreeable Oyster
14.12.57 Samuel Beckett - From an Adandoned Work
13.01.58 Giles Cooper - Without the Grail
03.08.58 Giles Cooper - Under the Loofah Tree
23.11.58 Giles Cooper - Unman, Wittering and Zigo
09.02.59 James Hanley, Leo McKern, Jack MacGowran - The Ocean
24.06.59 Samuel Beckett - Embers
??.07.59 Harold Pinter - A Slight Ache
06.10.59 James Hanley - Gobbet
25.02.60 Harold Pinter - A Night Out
1960s Robert Bolt - The Drunken Sailor
06.10.64 Samuel Beckett - Cascando
1973 McWhinnie/Hilda Lawrence - The Hands

Stage

1960 The Duchess of Malfi (RSC)
1961 The Caretaker (Samuel Beckett) - Broadway
1962 A Passage to India - Broadway
1963 Rattle of a Simple Man - Broadway
1965 All in Good Time - Broadway
1967 The Astrakhan Coat (Pauline Macaulay) - Broadway
1983 Lovers Dancing, Starring Paul Eddington, Colin Blakely, Georgina Hale, Jane Carr - The Albery Theatre

Notes

^ ^a ^b Jerry Roberts, Encyclopedia of Television Film Directors, p. 382
^ John Tydeman, "Frederick Bradnum, Master dramatist whose prolific output sustained radio's great era" in The Guardian dated 22 February 2002
^ Prix Italia "PAST EDITIONS — WINNERS 1949 - 2007" Archived 3 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine
^ D. Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Vintage, 1990), p. 588
^ Donald McWhinnie, The art of radio (London: Faber, 1959)
^ All in Good Time at IBDB.com (The Broadway League)
^ Shakespeare in Performance: Film – Much Ado about Nothing (1978, Donald McWhinnie) Archived 6 February 2012 at the Wayback Machine at Internet Shakespeare Editions archived 11 September 2014
^ Randy Sue Coburn, "Shakespeare Comes to the Colonies" in The Washington Star dated 25 January 1979
^ "BBC scrap £1/4m Much Ado" in The Daily Telegraph dated 29 March 1979, p. 15
^ Mark Lawson, The Hollow Crown: as good as TV Shakespeare can get? in The Guardian dated 29 June 2012, archived 11 September 2014