Charles and I screened “The Hollow Crown,” an intriguing adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard II that appears to be part of a BBC-TV remake of their classic 1960 miniseries An Age of Kings, their edit of eight of the 10 Shakespeare history plays (Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Henry VI parts 1, 2, and 3, and Richard III) into a continuous saga of Britain’s history between the fall of Richard II in 1399 and the death of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. The listing for this on imdb.com has it as a four-part TV miniseries dealing only with the first four plays in the cycle (which Shakespeare actually wrote after the later four) and using “The Hollow Crown,” which the makers of the 1960 An Age of Kings (producer Peter Dews and director Michael Hayes) used as an episode title for the first half of Richard II, as the name of the entire series. This time the director is Rupert Goold (that’s the spelling on his credit), who also did the adaptation, and the story is, of course, familiar. Richard II became King of England in 1377 at the age of 10, after the death of his grandfather Edward III (Edward III had seven sons but none of them actually became King; his oldest son, Edward the Black Prince, actually predeceased him by a year), and though a regent was appointed to handle the day-to-day affairs of state, the Peasants’ Revolt happened four years after Richard II was crowned — and both sides in the revolution thought that the appearance of the King would magically solve everything.
Richard II grew up, like the last Chinese emperor Pu Yi, literally
knowing no other life, and it gave him an otherworldly air; he was a great
patron of art and music (Flint Castle, where he hides out for a while in the
middle of the play to get away from the burgeoning revolution against him, was
actually a major seat of British culture at the time, and the entry on Richard
II on royal.gov.uk mentions that he gave grants to Chaucer) but a weak and
indecisive monarch at a time when, following the death of Edward III after a
50-year reign, Britain really needed a strong hand. It got one in the person of
Henry Hereford a.k.a. Lancaster a.k.a. Bolingbroke (Rory Kinnear) — the
tendency of the Brits to tack titles onto their upper-class men’s names makes
the dramaturgy here confusing at times: just because a character is called
something else than he was in the previous scene does not necessarily mean he isn’t the same person — who in
the opening scene comes before Richard with his rival at court, Thomas Mowbray
(James Purefoy), to accuse Mowbray of treason. Richard (Ben Whishaw) is ready
to let the two knights literally duke it out on the battlefield, but just
before they’re about to have at each other Richard throws his own scepter into
the field, indicating that he’s ordering the combat to stop. He then sentences
both Bolingbroke (I might as well call him that because that’s the name he uses
most often) and Mowbray to exile, Mowbray for life and Bolingbroke for 10 years
— though a tearful plea from Bolingbroke’s father, John of Gaunt (Patrick
Stewart) — fourth son of Edward III and therefore Richard II’s uncle — causes
him to cut Bolingbroke’s sentence from 10 years to six. (It seems odd that
Shakespeare’s dialogue refers to the harsh winters Bolingbroke and Mowbray will
supposedly face when they’re forced to leave England, when noble Brits who were
sent into exile in that period usually went to France, which has a relatively
milder climate.)
The real reason Richard wants Bolingbroke out of the country
is because his father, John of Gaunt, is about to die, and when he croaks
Richard plans to seize John’s estates and all his treasures and use them to
fight a stupid and unwinnable war he’s started in Ireland. (Gee, a member of an
hereditary ruling class getting involved in a stupid and unwinnable imperialist
war that ends up bankrupting his country — where have we seen that one since?) Bolingbroke hears of this in France,
comes home illegally, starts rousing his friends and allies — including the
earl of Northumberland (David Morrissey), who will become quite important in
later parts of the cycle — and before long he’s put together an army strong
enough to defeat the forces still loyal to Richard and force him to give up the
crown. In a series of intense confrontations between the two men, Richard
finally agrees to the inevitable and abdicates — leaving his queen, Isabella
(Clémence Poésy — that’s really her name, though the official credits left off
the accents), rather bereft since it means she will lose her position as well — in the belief that
Bolingbroke will leave him alone and allow him to live out the rest of his life
in seclusion. Instead Bolingbroke throws him in the Tower and a couple of
Richard’s former allies, including the Duke of Aumerle (played by Tom Hughes as
a twink), enter his cell and assassinate him — much to the disgust of the new
king, Henry IV, who (like Elizabeth I, the ruling monarch when Shakespeare
wrote the play, who held off ordering the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots for
20 years) didn’t want to establish the principle that losers in a succession
battle got offed by the winners because that could as easily have happened to him.
Charles and I watched the complete cycle of the
original An Age of Kings four
years ago when it was finally released on DVD after moldering in the BBC’s
vaults for 35 years (and we’re still waiting for the series with which the BBC
followed it up: a similarly cyclical presentation of Shakespeare’s Roman plays,
Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony
and Cleopatra) and were amused by the
cheapness and tackiness of the production (“They were trying to do Shakespeare
on a Doctor Who budget!” Charles
said) but impressed by the speed with which director Hayes paced the plays and
the naturalistic delivery he got from his actors, who answered the challenge of
Shakespearean acting: making people believe you talk that way all the time.
This version was the opposite on both counts: director Goold did a lot of
location shooting (in their aborted duel, Bolingbroke and Mowbray really do
look like they’re about to have a fight to the death) and found some quite
spectacular settings, including a garden where the trees are cropped and pruned
into regular shapes that make them look like giant chess pieces placed in the
middle of the Nazca lines. The costumes are generally more convincing — at
least the women aren’t wearing those bizarre chiffon headdresses they were in
the 1960 version — and the production values all around are far superior. Alas,
the great strengths of An Age of Kings — the zippy pace and the naturalistic acting — are negated here; the
actors deliver their lines with an all too palpable sense that they’re not
playing characters, they’re intoning Deathless
Masterpieces of Literature (and the higher up the socioeconomic scale
their characters, the less naturalistic and more staid their performances are).
I hadn’t heard of any of the people in this before except Patrick Stewart (yes,
I know he was a trained
Shakespearean actor on the British stage long before he starred in Star
Trek: The Next Generation, but he’s still
so totally identified with that role that every time he appeared I couldn’t
help but think, “What’s a nice starship captain like you doing in a place like
this?”) and David Sachet (who plays the Duke of York, Edward III’s third son
and Aumerle’s father) — though James Purefoy’s name sounds familiar even if he
wasn’t billed in the opening credits. But the performances are a bit on the
stiff side and one doesn’t get the impression one did from the 1960 version
that these are real people clashing over the most basic issues: politics,
family, sex. It shouldn’t be terribly surprising that a TV adaptation of Richard
II from 2012 would do more than one from
1960 with the hints of Gayness Shakespeare threw into his text — particularly
involving the commoners Bagot (Samuel Roukin), Bushy (Ferdinand Kingsley) and
Green (Harry Hadden-Paton) whom Richard invites to the court and who seem to be
there as his sex toys. Under Goold’s direction, Ben Whishaw plays Richard
considerably queenier than David William played him in 1960 — and does far less
to suggest that Shakespeare may have intended Richard to be suffering from
what’s now called bipolar disorder (just as in King Lear he gave Lear an almost clinically perfect case of
Alzheimer’s — those conditions may not have had names or been identified as
diseases in Shakespeare’s time, but surely they existed even if people back
then didn’t know what they were!). There’s a bizarre series of scenes in which
Richard is either painting a picture of St. Sebastian with one of his
boyfriends as a model or modeling for one his boyfriend is painting — echoed at
the end in which Richard’s murder is committed, not with daggers (as royally
ordered or sanctioned assassinations usually were at the time) but with arrows,
leaving Richard — who in his incarceration had been stripped naked except for a
loincloth — looking like St. Sebastian.
Indeed, much of Goold’s adaptation
emphasized the parallels between Richard and Jesus Christ; they’re there in the
play (at one point Richard compares Bolingbroke to Judas, and later he says his
disloyal courtiers are behaving like Pontius Pilate) but Goold ramps them up,
making up and costuming Ben Whishaw to look like the standard depictions of
Jesus and even showing him leaving the throne being led on a white mule like
Jesus entering Jerusalem. This Richard II is a decent adaptation of the play, marvelously staged and decently
acted within the limits of the “academic” approach to Shakespeare — Charles
said afterwards that the 1960 An Age of Kings had “turned Shakespeare into television” while this
version sought to turn television into Shakespeare, presenting the play in
exactly the sort of way I praised the makers of the 1960 version for avoiding:
“approach[ing] the language far too reverently — treating it like a dose of
intellectual medicine (‘listen to this, it’s good for you’) and chanting the
lines in an annoying sing-song pattern, as if they’re too frightened of the
iambic pentameter even to try to
utter it like normal speech.” Not surprisingly, the new adaptation is also
considerably gorier than the old one; though some of the killings in 1960 were
shocking by the standards of the day, this one features Bolingbroke’s
executions of Bushy and Green in gruesome detail (we see their severed heads
fall from the cliff where the executioner kills them to the sea below) and when
Henry IV foils an assassination plot and his men bring back the severed heads
of the conspirators, they roll them across the palace floor like bowling balls:
one detail I could have done without — though Shakespeare’s stage was actually
pretty gory, complete with actors wearing bladders filled with pig’s blood so
they could bleed on cue when stabbed.
