Plummer's Prospero to be filmed

If you miss Christopher Plummer's turn as Prospero in The Tempest at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival this summer, then you can catch him on screen.

Stratford officials say the theatre icon's performance will be recorded for broadcast for television and for cinemas.

The play, which launches Friday, will be filmed on July 6 and 7. Details of distribution still have to be worked out.

The Tempest is produced by Des McAnuff, the artistic director of the theatre festival in southwestern Ontario.

Plummer has been on a roll of late. Earlier this year, he garnered his first Oscar nod at age 80 when he got a best actor nomination for The Last Station, portraying Leo Tolstoy.

His acclaimed performance in Stratford's 2008 staging of Caesar and Cleopatra was also shot on film and aired on the Bravo channel as well as screening in several cinemas.

The Tempest, with its themes of love, revenge and greed, is considered one of Shakespeare's greatest plays, and the lead role of Prospero as one of most complicated characters ever written for the stage.

"Prospero is a role of great complexity, richness and paradox, the culmination of Shakespeare's skill as a dramatist," notes McAnuff.

"There are very few actors who can play this part, and we'll have had two of them here within a decade: first William Hutt and now Christopher Plummer."