by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was a really bizarre choice for a
Christmas telecast: PBS’s broadcast (under the Great Performances rubric) of a BBC version of Shakespeare’s
Richard III, originally shot as part of a
seven-episode miniseries called The Hollow Crown that started in 2012 with productions of the first
four plays in Shakespeare’s cycle about the Wars of the Roses and the tumult
they caused in 15th century British royal history. The BBC had
originally done this in 1960 as a 15-part miniseries called An Age of
Kings, not only a touchstone in the history
of Shakespeare on film but an important career boost for the young Scottish
actor Sean Connery, who played Hotspur in Henry IV, Part 1 and became an international star and icon of “cool”
playing James Bond in the first Bond theatrical film, Dr. No, in 1962. Part of the problem with the eight-play
cycle is that Shakespeare wrote the first four plays (Richard II,
Henry IV parts 1 and 2, and Henry
V) after he wrote the second four (the three parts of Henry
VI and Richard III), and it’s clear he’d dramatically improved as a
playwright — indeed, there’s legitimate question (as opposed to the
illegitimate conspiracy-mongering that “Shakespeare” was really the Earl of
Oxford or Christopher Marlowe or Queen Elizabeth or whoever) as to how much of
the Henry VI plays are actually
Shakespeare’s work. Henry VI, Part 1
exists in printed versions before Shakespeare’s emergence as a theatre manager
and playwright in 1580’s London, and when I read it I concluded that only one
scene — the one in which the rival claimants of the throne from the houses of
Lancaster and York are in a garden and pick red and white roses, respectively,
as their symbols — is Shakespeare’s work. (Not only does it not appear in pre-Shakespeare versions of the play, but
the writing is far better than anything else in the script and has the quiet
dignity and strength that are Shakespeare’s hallmark.)
Apparently the BBC
conflated the three Henry VI
plays into two episodes and then did Richard III as an episode of its own — but PBS went straight
into Richard III and ignored the Henry
VI material even though there’s a
“Previously, on … ” segment at
the beginning of Richard III
showing bits of the two previous episodes. I had problems with some of the
earlier episodes of The Hollow Crown
— particularly an overly stiff mode of presentation (the sort of thing that
treats Shakespeare as High Literature
and thereby gives him a bad name) and some tastelessly gory visuals — but the
gory visuals aren’t so much of a problem here — Richard III is about a psychopathic killer, after all — and the
line delivery by most of the cast is naturalistic and credible. Basically it’s
a tour de force for the two
best-known actors in the cast, Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role (he’s now
played two roles associated with
Basil Rathbone, Sherlock Holmes and Richard III) and Judi Dench as Cecily,
widow of Richard, Duke of York and mother of Richard III, his predecessor
Edward IV (Geoffrey Streatfield) and the hapless George, Duke of Clarence (Sam
Troughton, whose grandfather Patrick Troughton played murderer James Tyrrell in
Laurence Olivier’s 1955 film of Richard III). Dench played Princess Catherine of France, wife of
Henry V, in An Age of Kings and
is therefore the only actor I know of, of either gender, who appeared in both
these BBC miniseries based on Shakespeare’s history plays. Cumberbatch is
introduced by director Dominic Cooke in a chilling scene in which we see him
naked from the waist up as he delivers the famous opening soliloquy (“Now is
the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this son of York) and we
get to see his hunchback (CGI, I suspect, since an appliance would have been
too obvious without clothes to cover it up). Cumberbatch is everything you’d
want in an actor playing Richard III: oily, smarmy, able to keep up (for the
most part) the appearance of sanity and sagacity but really seething with
homicidal rage inside and all too eager to order the killing of anyone who
crosses him, including former allies like the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Daniels),
who helps mastermind Richard’s rise to the throne and helps get Edward IV’s
children and the presumed royal heirs, Edward V and Richard, Duke of York,
declared illegitimate so Richard can leapfrog over them and become king — but
balks at killing the kids and is therefore executed himself on Richard’s order.
Cooke gives the play an excellent Gothic atmosphere and Ben Power delivers a
quite good script — though for some odd reason he suggests that the nighttime
visitations Richard has before the climactic Battle of Bosworth Field, in which
the ghosts of all the people he killed reappear before him in his dream and
tell him to “despair and die,” were actually illusions engineered by Margaret
of Anjou (Sophie Okonedo), widow of Lancastrian King Henry VI, with a little
hand mirror that seems to freak out Richard every time he sees it. What’s more,
while he depicts Henry Tudor, second Earl of Richmond and eventually Richard’s
killer and successor as King Henry VII, as the unambiguous hero Shakespeare
wrote (while Henry VII’s granddaughter Elizabeth was on the throne), Power
denies him the speech in which he says the ghosts of Richard’s victims visited him on the eve of the battle and wished him a speedy
victory. (One major inaccuracy in Shakespeare’s script has Henry declaring a
general amnesty after he defeats Richard and wins the crown at Bosworth Field;
instead he back-dated his reign to begin the day before the battle so he could hold anyone who had fought
for Richard to have been a traitor — which in practice meant they had to appeal
to him on a case-by-case basis and beg for forgiveness.) Power’s script
emphasizes the role of the avenging women — Cecily, Margaret and Edward IV’s
widow Elizabeth Woodville (Keeley Hawes) — not only in organizing the
resistance to Richard but going out of their way to confront him and freak him
out. Charles said that after the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election Richard
III played quite differently than it would
have before the election (or if Hillary Clinton had won); though no one (at
least as far as I know) has claimed that Donald Trump had any of his political
or business opponents murdered, he’s certainly an unscrupulous opportunist with
a questionable claim on sanity and he’s surrounded himself with people whose
main qualification seems to be blind loyalty rather than talent. The last time
Charles and I watched Richard III
(as the last two episodes of An Age of Kings, with Paul Daneman as a superb Richard) I wrote,
“[W]hat makes Richard III as
Shakespeare wrote it a fitting end to the eight-play cycle is, once again,
Shakespeare’s greatest strength as a dramatist: not his genius as a poet nor
his talent for dramatic structure, but his understanding of human nature and
his ability to depict common human ‘types’ that have hardly changed from his
day to ours; though both the real Richard III’s life and Shakespeare’s
depiction of it came long before Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler or Saddam
Hussein lived, there were parts of this play that reminded me of all of them!”
