Last night KPBS aired the new adaptation of Shakespeare’s
history play Henry IV, Part 1 produced
as part of a four-episode BBC miniseries called “The Hollow Crown” — a title
deliberately evoking comparison to An Age of Kings, the miniseries the BBC did in 1960 that consisted
of 15 one-hour segments (though some were actually longer than that!) telling
the entire history of England
from 1399 to 1485 as depicted by Shakespeare in eight of his 10 plays about
British history. (Most editions of Shakespeare’s works divide his plays rather
arbitrarily into “comedies,” “tragedies,” and “histories” — though for some
reason there are a few borderline cases like Macbeth that got lumped in with the “tragedies” even though
it’s not only based on an actual incident in Scottish history but Shakespeare’s
source for the story was Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, which was also his source for most of the “history”
plays.) In 1960 the BBC shot the entire cycle; in 2012 they only shot the first
four plays (Richard II, Henry IV
parts 1 and 2, and Henry V) and
they presented each play complete in a TV-movie format of 2 ½ to 3 hours
instead of segmenting it in the middle to spread out the show into more and
shorter episodes.
Also the producers of The Hollow Crown did not
have the same actor play the same character wherever he (or she) appears. I
noticed this almost from the opening credits, in which Jeremy Irons was
prominently featured even though there was no indication of what part he played
— which made me briefly wonder if he were going to play Sir John Falstaff, the
character Shakespeare intended largely as comic relief but who captured the
British imagination of the late 1500’s so much that not only did Henry
IV, Part 1 become Shakespeare’s most
popular play during his lifetime but he wrote two sequelae to it (Henry
IV, Part 2 and The Merry Wives of
Windsor) just to exploit his popular
character. Instead Irons played King Henry IV, taking over the part from Rory
Kinnear, who played him in the series’ adaptation of Richard II. That meant we were deprived of the opportunity to
see a single actor play the entire character arc of Henry IV from bold usurper
through rebellion-wracked monarch to decrepit old man fearful of what’s going
to happen when he croaks and his wastrel son Prince Hal (Tom Hiddleston, Loki
in the Marvel Thor movies and a
quite good actor even if he lacks the almost unearthly charisma of Laurence
Olivier or Robert Hardy, who played this role in An Age of Kings), later King Henry V, takes over. In An
Age of Kings Tom Fleming played Henry IV
throughout and turned in one of the most remarkable acting tours de
force ever put on film, but Rory Kinnear
wasn’t offered a similar opportunity — not that I minded: from the moment the
show depicted Henry IV and his court, Jeremy Irons’ authority as an actor, his
ability to speak Shakespearean dialogue as if he talked that way all the time
(some critic whose name I have long since forgotten said that was the sine
qua non of making Shakespeare work on
stage) and his obvious experience allowed him to create an unforgettable
performance.
It also helped that this show had a different director from Richard
II — Richard Eyre instead of Rupert Goold —
and Eyre managed not only to bring the play badly needed energy but got the
actors in general to behave far more naturalistically and with less of the
deadly “reverence” for Shakespeare’s language (to paraphrase the Bard, too many
actors who play Shakespeare today love him not wisely but too well) that
largely sank Richard II. Where Henry
IV, Part 1 was weakest, oddly, was in the
casting of Falstaff: Simon Russell Beale got the part, and for a moment in his
first scene (oddly Eyre, who did his own script from the play as well as
directing, reversed the order of the first two scenes and had the play open with Falstaff and Hal in the Boar’s Head Tavern, then cut to Henry IV’s court) I thought that Beale might
be agreeing with me that the actor who should have played Falstaff was W. C. Fields (that no
producer ever thought of filming Fields as Falstaff is one of the great
cultural tragedies of the 20th century; whether Fields ever read
Shakespeare or not — he liked to pretend he was a school dropout and a cultural
rube, but when he was offered Micawber in a film of Charles Dickens’ David
Copperfield he said that not only did he
love the book, he loved Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers even better and would like to film it if Copperfield was a hit — he had essentially reinvented the
overweight, alcoholic, braggart Falstaff character for the 20th
century and both he and the rest of us deserved a shot at him playing the
original) because he seemed to be speaking the lines with at least hints of
Fields’ drawling, exaggerated delivery. As things went on, I got tired of
Beale’s relentless humorlessness — made up with a grey but well-kempt beard
that made him look like a slightly more dissolute version of Karl Marx, he
seemed to have taken the hint that Falstaff was a figure of pathos as well as
comedy too much to heart and lost sight of the comedy completely in search of the pathos. (Once again The
Hollow Crown was the reverse of the 1960 An
Age of Kings — the Falstaff in An
Age of Kings, Frank Pettingell, went too
relentlessly for the funnybone and missed the pathos almost completely.)
Eyre
also made some weird changes in the script, eliminating the brilliant ending of
the scene in which Falstaff and Hal take turns pretending to be Hal and Henry
IV confronting each other and putting Falstaff’s speech lampooning the whole
idea of “honor” before, not
after, the Battle of Shrewsbury. It’s to this version’s credit that not only
did they have a bigger budget to stage the actual battle, but Eyre knew what to
do with it (though I still suspect Orson Welles’ staging of the same scene in his Falstaff movie, Chimes at Midnight, is probably the closest of anyone’s to what
medieval war actually looked like), and the final confrontation between Prince
Hal and Hotspur (Joe Armstrong — whose actual father, Alun Armstrong, plays
Hotspur’s father Northumberland) is oddly disappointing. It doesn’t help that
the younger Armstrong, though nice-looking and properly impetuous for the part,
is up against the competition of the young Sean Connery, who played Hotspur in An
Age of Kings — I don’t think Joe Armstrong
is going to launch a franchise that will last decades and make himself a
superstar! I think Charles summed up the difference between An Age of
Kings and This Hollow Crown when he said afterwards that the makers of the 1960
version (producer Peter Dews and director Michael Hayes) were doing something
“educational,” something that would introduce Shakespeare to a mass audience
that hadn’t seen him professionally performed before (even if they’d had to
read him in school!), whereas the makers of The Hollow Crown were going, not for education or entertainment, but
for Prestige with a capital “P.” The message this version is sending out to the
world is, “See what wonderful things we can do with the fabulous British
actors, the words of the greatest English-language writer, and a decent but not
lavish production budget! We can make movies of our natural treasures” — and
embalm them in the process, though in fairness Henry IV, Part 1 in this series is a far better production than Richard
II and doesn’t have the curiously embalmed
quality either of its predecessor in the series or the 1974 film of The
Great Gatsby, which didn’t so much
dramatize Fitzgerald’s novel as encase it in amber.
