BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

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colinr0380
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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#51 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Sep 30, 2013 1:46 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:Have you seen Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra -- which (in some respects) is a prequel to Shakespeare's play?
I haven't, though that sounds as if it would be exactly the companion or 'prequel' piece that I'm looking for! I do have the "George Bernard Shaw on Film" Eclipse set somewhere in my to watch pile, which I think features an adaptation of that play, so I will try and look it out.
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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#52 Post by knives » Mon Sep 30, 2013 1:48 pm

It does. Not the best adaptation in the world, but good enough.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#53 Post by Michael Kerpan » Mon Sep 30, 2013 1:52 pm

knives wrote:It does. Not the best adaptation in the world, but good enough.
Shaw was upset about the expense of this production, rightly believing it would wind up killing off any chance of a film adaptation (while he was alive) of his beloved "Saint Joan". That said, there are a lot of wonderful performances in that production of "Caesar and Cleopatra". And, I must say, after first seeing this (eons ag) I found it hard (perhaps impossible) to think of anyone other than Claude Rains as Caesar.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#54 Post by knives » Mon Sep 30, 2013 2:10 pm

I agree that for all of the adequateness of the production Rains really pushes it into very good territory on occasion.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#55 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Oct 14, 2013 1:16 pm

The BBC version of Othello was certainly a harrowing experience! I've had to take multiple runs at it over the last couple of weeks just to get through the thing, and even yesterday I had to watch to the beginning of "Part Two" and then go for a relaxing bath followed by a walk just to prepare myself for the final hour and a half of it!

I cannot really believe that this has a "U" certificate - there might not be much explicit physical violence but there is a heck of a lot of psychological torture going on, and there is something extremely upsetting about the tone of the play and the main characters being driven to (entirely avoidable, but still bleakly inevitable for all that) mania and ruination, that left me wishing that I was watching that Evil Dead remake again for a bit of light relief! Plus there is the shock of seeing the lovely Desdemona (and especially Penelope Wilton doing a wonderful performance in that role) being slapped around and called a whore numerous times!

Perhaps it is the drawn out nature of this 205 minute adaptation that emphasises the inevitable descent into wrong-minded horror more than even the much more cut down 100-or-so minute film versions do not capture (even the Orson Welles version), as they can power through the horror a little more quickly. It is a much more harrowing experience to see events inch along at a snail's pace as the pure love between Desdemona and Othello gets slowly corrupted by Iago's machinations. Even the characters of Roderigo (who I see as the tragic equivalent of the goofy lovelorn Sir Toby Belch from Twelfth Night) and Cassio are quite upsettingly manipulated too.

Before watching this version I was veering slightly towards the opinion that Iago, while cruel, was not quite as evil or irredeemable a character as Aaron the Moor from Titus Andronicus, who similarly manipulates characters while seeming to be their friend but eventually for a much more purely nihilistic purpose compared to Iago's toxic mix of thwarted ambition and sexual jealousy. But in some ways Aaron's purpose is much more motivated by his nature than Iago's frighteningly personalised two-faced dealings, leaving me feeling that Iago is much more the crueller for his individual targeting of Othello, Desdemona and Cassio from his perceived slight, while Aaron is more a continuance of the arbitrary cruelties of war on a much wider scale and continuing the conflicts in the face of those who are exhausted and trying to draw the bloodshed to a close.

Othello is also a play about hypocrisy, presumption and the frightening way (as in The Winter's Tale) that even a true, pure love can be corrupted into jealousy and murder entirely through the workings of the mind rather than physical deed. Is it simply that Othello got bad counsel, or even that there was some character flaw in Othello himself to make him susceptible to Iago's manipulations? Or, perhaps even more frightening, is the play questioning the entire idea of passionate feelings as false and prone to manipulation? (Of either love or hate, and the final scenes seem to be suggesting that idea of a 'crime of passion' where you can only feel such strong feelings of hate and betrayal towards someone if you have previously loved or committed to them to a similar extreme. Desdemona, in her preparations in her bedchamber/for the inevitable death appears to be sadly accepting Othello's blinding hatred as an twisted offshoot of the strength of his love for her).

In some way I was also left feeling that the racial tension aspect to the play is kind of a red herring (in some ways more modern adaptations of the play are perhaps slightly on the wrong track in emphasising this, albeit understandably so). Racism does not seem to factor into the main plotline at all as motivation for Iago, who is much more about thwarted ambition. Roderigo is also lovelorn for Desdemona more than anything, but apart from the opening scenes where he and Iago play on racial fears (and Roderigo expresses upset that he wasn't chosen as a more available suitor - to make a Simpsons reference, he is the Millhouse, always hanging around and continually lovelorn for Lisa, while she herself doesn't seem at all interested!) to goad Desdemona's father into action against Othello, even he does not have any particular fixation on skin colour, and indeed gets soon diverted by Iago into carrying out a conflict against Cassio anyway!

Though I wonder if the race (or perhaps more appropriately, the 'foreigner with different ways') aspect is there to sort of mitigate some of Othello's reactions. Not only so that he can be hotblooded and suggestible, but also so that Iago can get Cassio drunk and fighting with the anticipation that Othello, who seems to not be familiar with drinking to excess, will overreact to Cassio's drunken antics and strip him of his title. Similarly there could maybe be the suggestion that Othello feels apart from the mores of Italian society and court life, and places more value on particular objects and trinkets such as handkerchiefs, that wider Italian society would generally not. So he is more prone to being manipulated and it just becomes a question of Iago pushing the right buttons. But even bringing up these ideas is perhaps reading too many 'foreigner in a strange land' issues into the play and Othello's character.

Bob Hoskins is magnificent as Iago, able to switch effortlessly from the pretence of kind affection and best friend 'home truths' to declaring undying hatred in the next breath. Some of the monologues where Iago is thinking through the next step of his plan are amazing, and Hoskins really gets across that feeling of malicious glee in what he hopes to accomplish, and then seeing his machinations come together better than he could have imagined (there is an amazing moment at the very end of the play where in the background of the scene where Othello kills himself, Iago breaks out in delighted laughter as if ecstatic that every aspect of his plans worked out for him, despite his being captured).

I'm a little more ambivalent about Anthony Hopkins as Othello - on the one hand he certainly gives a committed performance, but ont he other it makes Hannibal Lecter look withdrawn! All of the rolling eyes, hand to brow, spittle flying, whirling around, trembling hands until an eventual collapse into an epileptic fit certainly gets across the way that Othello seems to be entirely unable to function as an individual with the loss of his soulmate (and unfortunately only has Iago to fulfil the role of confidant once he has been 'betrayed' by everyone else). It is certainly a scenery chewing performance, and in some ways Hopkins' over the top performance allowed me to enjoy the later sections of the play more than perhaps I would have been able to if the sense of betrayal was more low key, internalised and brooding.

In this production I feel less involved with the harrowing thought processes of someone whose mind has been turned every which way by gossip and hatemongering which eventually leads to a total loss of moorings (pun not intended!), than by the chance to see Hopkins bouncing his way around the room shouting at the top of his voice. I think the problem is that once Hopkins reaches maximum peak (during the first scene where Iago sets to work on him), there is no higher to go to in order to display mania (other than the epilepsy scene of course!), and that pitch has to be maintained for the final two thirds of the play.

In terms of the set, I did like that, aside from the opening couple of scenes and the late scene where Roderigo tries to murder Cassio (a jarring shift but one which works in context), almost the entirety of the play is set in one large room, and really one side of that large room at that, with benches under the windows being the setting for much of the action. It effectively turns the large room more into a kind of corridor, with the closed door to the bedchamber beckoning at one end throughout, a door that will be off limits until the final scenes. It also creates a feeling of unsettled tension - that everything is suspended without resolution (the only resolution of course being Iago's plottings being revealed, or death) and the characters are stuck bouncing back and forth in a kind of antechamber, separated by unknown reasons and being tormented by their stasis, or inability to change anything.

Something that I only stumbled upon while clicking through the menu screens is there is a kind of easter egg on the disc. While the play itself does not feature it, the scene selection menu features a chapter for Act II Scene II which features two screens, one saying that the scene was not filmed for the BBC production because it was more a 'transitional' scene for the theatre giving time for the scenery to be changed, and then a second screen with the text from the cut scene. I've not seen this occur in any of the discs up to this point, but I thought it was a very nice touch, although one likely to be overlooked if the viewer doesn't check the scene selection menus!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Wed Oct 30, 2013 4:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#56 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Oct 30, 2013 4:46 pm

Troilus and Cressida is a difficult but very interesting play, and kind of a 'demythologised', down to Earth version of the Greek myth. As I was first going into it I was preparing myself for another experience similar to the other “&” plays. Yet unlike Romeo & Juliet and especially Antony & Cleopatra the problems of the central couple, while important, are fascinatingly sidelined. And the obligatory wailing scene as the lovers are parted is confined to a ten minute section in the middle of the story!

I think part of what makes this play difficult is the way that the story doesn’t really have any fixed through narrative, rather a number of separate ones which more or less coalesce at the end. Even the lovers don't really meet until over half way through this television production (well into "Part Two" of the programme, over 90 minutes in). There is Trojan Troilus falling in love with Cressida, wooing her by proxy through her Uncle Pandarus, then losing her as she is bargained over to the Greeks and then on sneaking out to visit her seeing her bartering her love with a Greek general, which drives him to impulsive, murderous vengeance in the final battle.

Yet from this main branch of the story lots of the more interesting subplots sprout (this is a great example of a piece of work where the main characters are the least interesting roles, more the boring anchors that everyone else revolves around!). So during the Troilus and Cressida sections we focus much more on Pandarus, his reaction to young love, his manipulation of the wooing scene between them (a comment on how manipulative, or boringly rote love scenes have become?), his pain on their parting and eventual Lear-esque mad wandering through the last scene of carnage, intoning the final lines of the play to nobody in particular (not even the audience).

This leads to some ironic distancing from the title couple, which only reinforces their callowness when we briefly see Troilus and Cressida without Pandarus in the morning after their love scene, and subliminally anticipates the pragmatism of love that this play deals with (the way it can be manipulated, and the way that all the weeping over a parting changes into a drier, more pragmatic use of sexuality as a bargaining tool. Is Cressida a cruel liar about the depth of her previous love, or just using the only tool that she has to survive having been thrust into a new world? I have a lot of sympathy for Cressida, and the play makes her attitude in her final scene nicely ambivalent. I guess that it makes a change from despairingly committing suicide at least!)

Pandarus the Trojan also has his companion in Thersites in the Greek camp, acting as an ironic chorus to the manipulations towards war, rather than love, going on there. It is reminiscent of the split in Antony & Cleopatra between the bedroom politicking and the actual war scenes, suggesting their equivalence at least as a motivator. Though here the split between the two worlds is much more detached by taking place on either side of the conflict (as in Romeo & Juliet)

Amusingly in this BBC production Pandarus is played by Charles Gray and Thersites by Jack Birkett aka Orlando (perhaps best known as the cackling record producer Borga Ginz from Derek Jarman’s Jubilee or Caliban in Jarman’s film of The Tempest from just before this production. He will later play the role of Titania in a version of Midsummer Night’s Dream too! Orlando gets credited as “The Amazing Orlando” in the end credits!), who despite sharing no scenes together seem to be locked in a contest to out-camp each other throughout the play, which only serves to highlight their equivalence.
SpoilerShow
Thersites wins the ‘camp off’ battle by a mile, simply for the hand slapping fight he is the middle of against Ajax when we are first introduced to his character!
Then we have Paris (brother to Troilus) and Helen, whose story (Helen being bartered over from the Greeks, with an entire scene early on in the play dedicated to the ramifications of this issue under the watchful eye of Priam (played by Powell and Pressburger regular Esmond Knight), with the appropriate doomsayer breaking in on the proceedings, followed by Pandarus later ironically serenading them) contrasts with Cressida’s eventual fate of being bartered out of love, rather than into it.

Troilus himself gets contrasted with fellow Trojan Hector in the final section of the play, with Hector’s flowery threats to the opposition of holding a fight but at the moment of truth always reneging, calling the other man brother and mending the bonds between them comparing to Troilus who just before the final battle is full of bloodlust after witnessing Cressida ‘giving her love’ to one of the Greeks (interestingly suggesting that truly felt love can be blinding to the truth of a situation and allow for a lot of the violence that is to occur later in the play). Hector is also contrasted with the Greek Achilles, who goes through a similar character arc to Troilus on the opposing side of being goaded into fury by the other Greek generals (again emphasising the Antony & Cleopatra-style parallels between politicking in love and war) who are angry that Achilles is sitting back and letting the others do all of the fighting for him. Achilles ends up losing his ‘companion’ Patroclus in the final battle and then furiously seeks Hector down and (ironically) ignores Hector’s usual attempts at non-violently defusing the confrontation, instead pointing the man out to his companions and getting them to spear Hector to death!

Speaking of Hector, after my previous posts where I was shocked at the “U” certificates given to earlier and more harrowing Shakespeare plays such as Othello, here is an example of the opposite situation. Troilus and Cressida has been given a “12” BBFC rating and is much, much less brutally upsetting than anything that goes on in Othello! I can only think that the couple of brief shots of Hector’s bloodied body (including the couple of seconds of Achilles using his boot to push Hector’s bloody head face down into the mud to finish him off) in the final scenes contributed to the rating. Which just goes to show that I have different conception of what is acceptable to expose children to I guess! (some bloodied bodies versus three hours of treachery, misconception and murder. Hmmm… :-k )

The staging of the BBC production is great too. I especially like the Prologue sequence which takes the form of a lot of slow zooms outs from the corridors of the Trojan forum set that much of the early action (and final scene) will take place in, with many slow overlapping fading dissolves to new zooming out shots of different sections of the set, which creates a wonderfully eerie sense of exploring the stage before the characters appear, along with a sense of events and locations slipping away into the past. The rest of the play is not quite as abstract as that opening but there are a few nice moments of characters walking out of, or into focus from, the far reaches of the set.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#57 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Dec 06, 2013 7:58 pm

A Midsummer Night's Dream was a very pleasant surprise. I don't know if this is just because I've never really paid much attention to the play, only half-remembering it from school discussions, but I was surprised by just how dark this production was, with as much of an emphasis placed on the sexual as on the comic elements. The whole play feels about frustrated or thwarted desires and the fickleness of 'true love' where affections can be so easily interchangeable (making me think a little of the 'forced into marriage' plays such as Measure For Measure, Taming of the Shrew or All's Well That Ends Well, albeit Midsummer Night's Dream brings in the fathers and forces of law who caused all the trouble in the first place to arbitrate only to find out that the situation has been resolved without them needing to force through a resolution!).

The play also seemed like a companion to the rural set love stories of As You Like It, although that might just because Helen Mirren reappears here after dancing off into the forest with the rest of the cast at the end of that play! A play where the God of Marriage himself slightly incongruously appears to marry the couples off in the end. Here in A Midsummer's Night Dream the supernatural has been given licence to take over.

Along with amped-up sexuality there is also a heavy element of class divisions running through the play too, with the earthier and more plain spoken characters with regional accents such as Puck (kind of Ariel and Caliban from The Tempest combined into one character, and played by Phil Daniels, the lead in Quadrophenia) or Bottom (played by Brian Glover) getting entwined with the more flowery and slightly more duplicitous couples and members of royalty. I was amused at the way that Oberon and Titania seem to be trapped in a kind of loveless and bickering marriage, using those around them as ammunition to fight their battles against each other (fighting over who gets to receive the attention of the fairy children, or Puck!) and needing the use of drugs as a kind of marital aid to add some spark back into their relationship!

I found the misunderstandings between the two couples interesting for the way that once Demetrius and Lysander have been drugged into passing over Hermia for Helena the scene where all four of them meet has Hermia kind of uncomprehendingly going along with both Demetrius and Lysander's declarations of love, as if she is of the same mind as Helena that they are playing a kind of cruel trick on Helena by pretending to be enamoured with her. That kind of puts the beginning of that scene into the same territory as the 'good, pure' characters who get caught up in the malicious pleasure of teasing the 'bad' guys in Merchant of Venice and Titus Andronicus, with Hermia seeming smug in knowing that this is all just an act, until she realises that the tables have been turned for real and that both of her suitors have suddenly rebuffed her!

The whole production does have a very dark, weighty feel to it that I was quite surprised by. The ramped-up sexuality especially comes to a head in the scene where Puck is drugging the two sets of couples into submission in order to set all of the confusions to right. It is filmed in such a manner as to almost suggest a sexual assault of each of the four characters by Puck, as he creeps up on them, presses into them or towers over them as they fearfully look around or crawl through the mud before he knocks them unconscious. Are these moments very early examples of 'date rape'? Are the flowers just a proto-version of Rohypnol?!? In the final scene in the leafy glade it looks almost like the end result of a slasher film except instead of dead bodies there are comatose lovers lying about the place!

Then that disturbingly sexualised scene segues into the donkey-headed Bottom in bed with Titania, bucking against her begging to be scratched, which immediately throws a dash of bestiality into the mix too!

Some moments of this play, that I had always assumed to be a quite light trifle, come across like a horror film in this production! There are some very brutally abrupt and jarring transitions between scenes that I'm not sure are meant to be intentional or not. Early on they just feel like clumsily hard edits that are not allowing one scene to end before the next begins. Later on though once the fairies show up, their scenes get used like disruptive breaks in the narrative, intruding onto the action. And then by the end we are getting short quick-cut segments showing Puck gleefully breaking the flow with cheeky comments on the action, adding an extra element of violence to the drama.

I also find the ending quite audacious too as, once all of the sexual shenanigans is over and everyone has been correctly paired off, we get the final banquet in which the (common) actors get to perform their (earnest but unpolished) play for the benefit of the nobility. We're back deep in the class division satire, yet there is also the amusement of seeing Shakespeare doing a meta-commentary on overblown tragedy-plays (is he critiquing himself, or others who might not have the class to pull off a double suicide tragic play to the standard that he could?), and even more interestingly the idea that even a terrible, or terribly performed, play can engage an audience to interact with it. Perhaps an audience might even interact more knowing that they need to help the performers along a bit!

And then we get the turn back into sexuality with the fairies-gambolling-through-the-palace coda, describing how all of the couples are about to consummate their match-ups and are immediately going to create perfect children as a consequence. Because sex is, in the end, about procreation!

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#58 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Feb 10, 2014 3:18 pm

What can I say about King Lear, the key Shakespeare play? Just that it is absolutely magnificent with many meanings and nuances that can be played in subtly different ways in various productions to emphasise the 'wrongdoer' in the play, or even if there is a particularly terrible wrongdoer at all! I suspect it depends on how much fault is placed on those angling for power!

It is also a play full of beautiful contradictions - that only by going mad, getting disinherited or banished, wrongly accused or being blinded that you are reduced to a base state from which you can truly begin to understand others. Yet of course true understanding and empathy comes along with a complete powerlessness to change anything. In some ways I end up feeling more pity than hatred for the two oldest daughters Goneril and Regan as, along with Edmund upset at being the bastard son over Edgar's favoured 'real' son, they're all caught up in jockeying for more and more. Once the material goods and titles have been split up they start cannibalising themselves, creating conflicts that can bring them more status. I guess it makes sense that just before the climax puts an end to their plans Goneril and Regan are even fighting over who is going to take Edmund as their new husband, something that would lead to yet more bloodshed.

The whole play seems set up to get the audience thinking about how much is predestined (such as by the stars, which Edmund scoffs at early on and then immediately uses to start seeding doubts about Edgar; or simply the rules of drama, which inevitably has to resolve in a neat ending) and how much is down to in the moment manoeuvring. Or to put it another way, how inevitable were the conflicts in the play? How much power do the characters have over their own destiny? Did Lear actually kick off the whole conflict or just add fuel to the fire? Could anyone have stopped it at any point?

How much responsibility does Cordelia have to take for not providing empty platitudes like her sisters, even if she is proved to be entirely right in her predictions and cannot have been responsible for Lear going overboard? Surely she knew that he would have that reaction, or perhaps she was so cosseted as the favoured daughter that she felt comfortable in speaking truth to power? And presumably the favouritism that Lear shows to Cordelia is why he can shift to such blind hatred of her when he feels he hasn't had his love returned? I guess we can also presume that Goneril and Regan saw Lear doting on Cordelia and that stoked up their own hatred for him, or at least their resolution to not bow to him once he gave his power away, making their jealousy just like Edmund's for Edgar.

The play is also about 'abdication of responsibility' (which I think is still extremely current in the 21st century, as people want the accolades of a position without doing anything to merit it) and the way that the older generation almost will the present to be worse than their halcyon past. (It's also about elderly parents being jostled about amongst their busy children, and issues of caring) And I think the overarching theme is one of 'presumption': presuming that everyone is going to react the way you expect them to, and therefore getting upset when they say something slightly different; presuming that everyone is simply out for advancement, so deciding that any act is justified to do the same for yourself; presuming that you are the only person going through hellish trials instead of recognising that others are also facing their own tough times.

This BBC production is another abstract one, all done on a stage and featuring a beautiful colour palette of deep blacks, whites and greys, creating an almost monochrome look and a funereal tone from the outset, only emphasising Lear dividing his kingdom being the first of many deaths. The lack of any sets does mean that the blasted heath has to rely on huge close ups of the actors throughout the scene that moves away from one of the best aspects of the production, the contrast between foreground and background action (especially when the Edmund, Edgar and Gloucester plot shares the same space with the Lear and his daughters plot), but the emphasis on huge close ups helps to show the characters losing all relationship to reality as they fall into madness.

In terms of the cast, after talking about my shock at Penelope Wilton being cruelly treated in Othello, she gets a bit of retribution here as the middle daughter Regan, showing a surprising talent for premeditated callousness, especially in her delighted reaction during the original 'torture porn' scene of the blinding of Gloucester. An extremely young Brenda Blethyn also turns up as Cordelia, and it was also great to see Anton Lesser (previously Troilus in Troilus and Cressida) as the wronged Edgar. This series is very valuable for the way that the plays are resonating together with other productions, and this is especially on display in the casting here, especially in Michael Hordern's powerful performance that is so different from his dotty father in Romeo & Juliet and his vengeful Prospero in The Tempest.

One of the best things I can say about this adaptation of the play is that instead of focusing on the dialogue I often found myself focusing more on the reactions of the other characters in the scene to fully understand the implications. That I think is the mark of a sensitively staged adaptation of Shakespeare, when the other characters are so invested in their roles that they can support the primary performer through genuine reactions, which is perhaps worth more than any particularly beautiful Shakespearian speech.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#59 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Mar 09, 2014 7:29 pm

It is quite hard for me to judge The Merry Wives of Windsor, as for the majority of this production (around 2 hours of the 2 hour 50 minute running time), I was left pretty cold by the antics going on. The plot involves Falstaff (returning from his Henry IV roles, though much more played like a buffoon here by Richard Griffiths rather than a particularly devious and calculating character as portrayed in the history plays) deciding to woo two married women simultaneously in order to get money from them. Unfortunately he doesn't really count on them comparing letters (a big theme of this play seems to be people sharing information with others, wisely or unwisely) and deciding on a convoluted plan to teach Falstaff a lesson by asking him to approach for a liaison and then having him get bundled away in laundry or beaten up when one of their husbands arrives! It also allows at the same time for one of the wives to teach her husband a lesson about unfounded fears of being cuckolded by his wife, although I kept thinking it was a pretty cruel thing to do to drive a husband to the brink of madness by suggesting all of his fears of infidelity were actually true!

There is the suggestion for the majority of the play that men are rather dim and should really leave all of the plotting and duplicitousness up to the women, as whenever they get involved they usually end up almost screwing things up! It also feels like man's strength comes from supporting the plans of the women, not formulating any of his own, which are usually wrongheaded or doomed to failure! (Or they just act plain silly as in all of the suitors for Master Page's daughter, and the rivalry between the Welshman and Frenchman which seems there mostly to allow for some tiresome accent comedy!)

The play feels like a megamix of familiar elements from other Shakespeare plays - the returning Falstaff and his entourage of course, but also the idea of a husband ever more hysterically accusing his wife of infidelity is reminiscent of The Winter's Tale (albeit I felt a lot more sympathy for Master Ford than I ever did for the King in Winter's Tale. Although Ben Kingsley playing the character does take the opportunity of doing an 'Anthony Hopkins in Othello' of chewing the scenery with gusto to suggest his mania!). In this subplot of the husband's jealousy and wife encouraging it to show him the error of his ways there is also the All's Well That Ends Well or Taming of the Shrew sense of having to bully someone into realising that they truly love you, which I found a little iffy here too!

Anyway all of the above was leaving me feeling a bit cool towards the play. Then the final act happened (or the final 40 minutes of this production, from the point at which the two wives reveal their teasing of Falstaff to their husbands) which was absolutely magnificent. If the above description seems needlessly convoluted but within the realms of a standard Shakespearian comedy of mistaken identities and lovemaking hijinks, suddenly with the ostensible resolving of the issues between the two wives and their husbands all of the other minor subplots suddenly explode into plots and double crossings! At the height of all of these small scenes where a couple of characters cook up a plan to screw over everyone else (I think that I counted at least five separate plots without the knowledge of the rest of the characters going on simultaneously at one point!), I was seriously considering having to get a flow chart out to map the connections!

That doesn't last too long before the final scene but it was very invigorating as an audience member to really be the only person in a privileged position to know all of the various plans!

Talking about the play seeming to be reminiscent of other Shakespeare plays, that final scene felt like a wonderful parody of As You Like It mixed with Midsummer Night's Dream, with the gambolling fairies dancing about in a rural setting. Yet I also got a strange Wicker Man-kind of feel from the staging of this scene as Falstaff, lured for the third and fateful time by the wives into meeting them at midnight in a glade dressed in a deer costume, gets set upon by the fairies who dance around him singing, as if celebrating a sacrifice! (Alan Bennett is obviously in the Christopher Lee role here! :wink: ) Then the whole fairy business is revealed to Falstaff as being a fake, and it is just the entire town in costume there to teach him a lesson! After everyone gets their chance to verbally humiliate Falstaff (in a sort of Shylock style comeuppance scene), he has served his purpose and let go exposed as a laughing stock, his power taken from him.

Yet, wonderfully the play undercuts all of our 'heroic' husbands and wives. Throughout the play there has been the usual insipid, callow pair of young lovers wanting to go off together, but the girl's father wants her to marry one suitor, and her mother wants to marry another one! This is very standard stuff, but this subplot is really pushed into the background for the majority of the play, making these young lover characters the most peripheral to the 'main action' than they have ever been. Yet suddenly in the final section of the play, as the parents triumphant over their impending pulling one over on Falstaff decide their daughter is to be married at the same time (both putting plots into motion to marry her to one or other of their chosen suitors), the young couple play a trick, marry both of the other suitors off to young boys dressed in the girls clothes(!) and go off and get married whilst everyone else is distracted by Falstaff! This ending I think entirely justifies the rest of the play, as it undercuts so much of the smug superiority of being totally in control of events shown by Master and Mistress Page, and suggests that they needed to learn their own lessons too!

It also shows beautifully that the younger generation have themselves learnt how to be duplicitous from the elders, and put their knowledge to better use! Which all paves the way for a procession off into the woods ending similar to the one from As You Like It (or, if you want a darker comparison, in imagery similar to that in The Seventh Seal!)
Last edited by colinr0380 on Mon Mar 10, 2014 12:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#60 Post by Michael Kerpan » Mon Mar 10, 2014 12:16 pm

Verdi and Boito streamlined Merry Wives a bit -- but captured most of the best elements -- and created possibly the greatest comic opera ever. (Have you ever seen this?)

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#61 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Mar 10, 2014 12:50 pm

By gar! I'm afraid that I haven't, but this material seems tailor made for an operatic treatment full of comic hijinks!

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#62 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Mar 23, 2014 4:53 pm

Henry VI Part I

I can better understand what the previous posters meant about the abstract 'child's playground' set now, and this is much more abstract than any of the previous plays had been, even those such as The Winter's Tale that used the same set for every scene. A lot of the action in this play seems to be pitched at that kind of 'childish' level, which helps to add an extra level of comic antics to the back and forth of the opposing armies winning and then losing ground over and over. I particularly liked the way that there is the regular scene of the armies raring for battle charging through a pair of saloon-like double doors and then either immediately charging back through in broadly played terror or cowardice, or the routed opposing army themselves quickly stumbling through the doors (such as the half dressed French nobles, including the Dauphin and Joan of Arc having been scared out of their bed together!). There is also a skirmish between various factions in the English camp taking the form of a kind of playground scuffle, and this scene even has someone running through the scene ringing a handbell, as if to try and call an end to playtime games and restore some order!

One of the best early scenes for that kind of 'childishness' is the one where one general charges into battle on a hobby horse, dancing it around in front of his army shouting at the French to open the gates of their city, which kind of plays like a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail! Especially when the opposing French general appears on his own hobby horse and the two proceed to prance about each other in a ridiculous and undermining manner!

That undermining is likely to show the deterioration from Henry V's heights of patriotic fervour and nobility (although interestingly Henry V itself wasn't entirely patriotic and noble, more showing a man troubled about his rise to power learning how he was perceived by his troops and learning the art of image management!) With the death of Henry V there seems like a whole age of 'honourable heroism' is dying too, and this first play is really all about that slow decimation of all of Henry V's previous 'old guard', as they all get swept away.

I think that also in a strange way ends up emphasising the tragedy of Joan of Arc too. Whereas in the previous plays the Welsh or the French in opposition were seen as equals to the English, here the French side are pretty broadly played for laughs and I couldn't help getting the feeling that Joan has just turned up too late on to be allowed the dignity of being seen as a true enemy. I thought it was very interesting that Brenda Blethyn played Joan of Arc herself with a broad Yorkshire accent, as if to emphasise her 'simple country girl' background for the very English audience, and I think this is tying it in with the idea of class and emphasising that all of the petty War of the Roses bickering going on in the similar-accented English camp is being done amongst a very small group of the ruling class over tiny details that are going to end up killing a whole lot of people outside their class.

Blethyn seems to be having a ball with her role, especially happily charging into battle in the first sections of the play (really emphasising the child's playground fighting quality of it all) and proving handy both with the sword and also a well placed knee to the groin! She (along with Talbot, the other sympathetic character of the play) also gets to do some highly amusing incredulous fourth-wall breaking glances to camera!

Talbot's end is a magnificent one, and I like the way that the play handles it - the run up to the inevitable battle then cutting to a scene of news of the lack of reinforcements (down to the War of the Roses opposing sides situation), then cutting back to the battle itself, then a lull to introduce Talbot's son arriving supposedly to witness Talbot's triumph but now just to die with him and all of the issues that causes of father and son having to die nobly together, and then the final death scene of the son in his arms. It all emphasises the full stop on the heroic generation as they are betrayed by their naïve or literally childish ruling class. (This also has perhaps the most violent moment next to the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear as, surprisingly for the PG certificate that this BBC production was given, there is a lingering close up of Talbot's son having a sword slowly drawn down his face as he screams, with blood spraying)

I also like the way that Brenda Blethyn plays Joan of Arc seeing the death scene of father and son and seeming moved by it while still mouthing over-masculine phrases about getting rid of the bodies. Less perhaps for seeing death but perhaps it works as a premonition of her own end, that purity and heroism cannot save someone from a dark end.

One of the most interesting aspect of the treatment of the French and Joan of Arc in particular is the way that their childishness turns to pure comedy and then black tragedy without any real particular change in attitude of the play towards them, more the events around them darkening. At the beginning Joan is a blustering, 'one of the lads' tomboy and the Dauphin a fey young chap who, like the rest of his army, has gone all dewey-eyed over a woman. At the mid-point a lot of the comedy comes from Joan and the Dauphin getting roused out of bed together during a midnight raid by the English (their minds not entirely being on the job at hand!), and then Joan is pressed into service to make all of the appealing speeches to bring the French forces together again because the Dauphin is too weak to be able to manage his various factions on his own. At the end Joan is turned into a completely tragi-comic figure as the court laughs at her, and she destroys her own virginal image by trying to save herself from the stake by saying she is pregnant and that a number of different men are the father (trying one name after another as the Duke rejects each one), and the Dauphin is too busy bargaining with the English victors for some rights to some of his lands to bother saving her.

In a way Joan of Arc as portrayed in this play is not only another example of Shakespeare's 'masculine women' (Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, etc) who come to a sticky end, but also of the 'wronged villain' - the main antagonist of a play who the audience is left feeling slightly ambivalent about entirely sharing the joy of their end. While Joan of Arc is perhaps less 'evil' than either Shylock from Merchant of Venice or Tamora in Titus Andronicus, she also faces a final scene similar to Falstaff's of facing a humiliation in front of our victorious heroes before she is dragged off to be burnt, and also gets turned into a kind of laughing stock by the play as if to neutralise her power and impudent attempts to rise above her station in front of the 'real', entitled figures of the play.

Of course it sounds as if those characters are going to be tearing each other apart in the next two parts of the play, so they'll likely get their comeuppance as well!

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#63 Post by shiftyeyes » Sun Mar 30, 2014 11:53 pm

colinr0380, thanks for taking the time to write about these productions! I stumbled across this thread a year or two ago and imported the box set. While I haven't had time to watch too many of them, I think it's a great set with some terrific productions.

I watched the Richard II to Richard III cycle a few months ago. I really enjoyed Henry VI, Parts 1-3 and surprised that they're rarely staged. I didn't care much for Part 1, but Parts 2&3 are gripping and very interesting depictions of a fascinating era in English history. In regards to Shakespeare's depiction of Joan of Arc in Part 1, I feel that he more or less portrays her as a monster. As a playwright appealing to the audience, there's a lot of Anti-French sentiment in the play and I imagine he was giving the audience what they wanted by vilifying this French martyr as something of a hypocritical slut. But that is likely a very surface-level reaction to it.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#64 Post by MichaelB » Mon Mar 31, 2014 5:23 am

The take on the history behind the Henry VI/Richard III cycle is basically Tudor propaganda - that was the official party line at the time, and it wouldn't have been in Shakespeare's interests to deviate too noticeably from it. Since they're very early works, can you imagine what we'd have lost if he'd been tried for writing seditious anti-Government propaganda, convicted and, if not hanged outright, banned from writing?

And anti-French sentiment was pretty much the dominant mode at the time - although Spain had been more of an actual physical threat in recent years, the French had long been England's traditional enemy.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#65 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Mar 31, 2014 12:44 pm

I certainly agree about the portrayal of Joan of Arc here Michael and shiftyeyes. It would be impossible (even if Shakespeare may have wanted to!) to treat her sympathetically at that time, let alone deify Joan as modern productions do, although I think that the play seems to only really get truly nasty in the final trial scene in which Joan is uncompromisingly 'exposed' as being promiscuous and willing to do anything to save her own skin, whereas for the majority before this the play is just mocking of these silly Frenchmen being led by a woman. In a way this makes this production valuable as a 'true to period' cruel treatment of Joan that goes against the grain, of current orthodoxy in cinema treatment or even feminist readings of texts (which I guess even these early 80s BBC productions would not have to have taken too much into account anyway? I wonder how it would have played in the Thatcher era though!) in order to bring across some of the jingoistic fevour of a play aimed at an English audience, and convey the simple humour that seems to be acting as a counterpoint to the much darker plottings.

The play does seem just as scathing about the English factions though, just in a different, and more privileged, way as there is more time spent focused on the simmering internal tensions and pettinesses that cannot come to any good compared to the French just being treated as the nebulous 'big baddy' of the play to motivate on a wide scale but not really be engaged with on much of a deeper level than that (apart from the key scene where the two 'warriors' of the play, soon to be destroyed, Joan and Talbot, clash as equals). Even the French marriage that climaxes this play comes across as a kind of pale, fatally compromising echo of the French marriage creating a stable union at the end of Henry V.

And of course in this BBC production everyone on both sides are portrayed as overgrown Dennis Potter, Blue Remembered Hills-esque children playing war games throughout!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Wed Apr 23, 2014 5:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#66 Post by shiftyeyes » Tue Apr 01, 2014 3:35 pm

Henry V's final lines do a great job of setting the stage for all the childish squabbling in Henry VI, Part 1 (which was written a decade earlier):
Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crown'd King
Of France and England, did this king succeed;
Whose state so many had the managing,
That they lost France and made his England bleed
While Shakespeare's history plays can be seen as Tudor propoganda (especially with Richard III), I can't help but root for the Yorkists thoughout the Henry VI plays. Or had the Tudors distanced themselves from the Lancastrians by the time the plays were written? King Henry VI is portrayed as an inept and easily manipulated king and his nobles are all petty assholes (with one or two exceptions). They lose France and run things into the ground. Meanwhile, York is a total badass who understands this and takes the opportunity to take it all. :D

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#67 Post by shiftyeyes » Sun Apr 06, 2014 6:15 pm

As I have nowhere else to post Shakespeare-on-film related news, I'm gonna post these two items here. :D

The BBC will follow up their "The Hollow Crown" series from 2012 (an adaptation of Richard II, Henry IV Pts 1 & 2, and Henry V) with a new set of adaptations of Shakespeare's history plays. These include Henry VI in two parts and Benedict Cumberbatch has come on board to star in Richard III. I'm excited to see new films of Henry VI considering how rarely they're staged. Will be interesting to see them mounted outside of the limited sets Jane Howell used for the 80s adaptations. Also, Cumberbatch as Richard III is rather exciting. Wonder if he'll be in the Henry VI films as well. Source: http://variety.com/2014/tv/news/benedic ... 201153203/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

In addition, the Kickstarter for the project "Enemy of Man" has been completely funded as of this morning. This is a lower budget, independent adaptation of Macbeth set to star Sean Bean and Charles Dance. This project isn't to be confused with Justin Kurzel's upcoming film of Macbeth starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/vi ... ef=popular" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#68 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Apr 27, 2014 4:16 pm

Henry VI Part Two

This really amps up the drama from Part One, as all of the squabbles are starting to affect the King himself now. I knew that French marriage of convenience wasn't going to do him any good!

In a way the first half of this play prototypes out all of the themes that would later be focused on in Macbeth. The subplot of the King's Protector Lord Humphrey and his wife, Nell, is almost a draft for the play as Humphrey is torn between his duty to his King while his wife is angling to keep their position at the court (a position that has caused much resentment amongst the other nobles and the Queen herself). The wife then gets told that she is going to become a new Queen by a shifty advisor (with the suggestion that the advisor is a set up from the other factions in the court to play to her vanities), then goes along with him and is unfortunately caught doing a black magic ritual in order to foresee the future!

I particularly like that the foretellings of the future end up giving away the end of the play, though not in as beautifully detailed a manner as it gets done in Macbeth later on (with all of the "Burnham Wood come to Dunsinane" and "man not of woman born" extra twists). And I particularly like that while the commoners actually doing the ritual or getting possessed by demons in a circle of flames, get dragged off to be hung or burnt at the stake, that the fate of the noblewoman Nell is more simply to be banished to the Isle of Man! (Actually presented as a fate worse than death here! I suppose in the days long before its status as a tax haven for film productions or the annual TT motorbike race there wasn't that much to do on the Isle of Man except reflect upon being banished there?)

I also like the way that in the decisions about what to do with Humphrey and Nell that all of the different factions in the court wanting them removed for their own individual reasons all suddenly come together in agreement and jump onto small quarrels about the pair to make them seem bigger.

While Nell and Humphrey are kind of a proto-Macbeth pair, Julia Foster as the French Queen Margaret astonishingly manages to be one of Shakespeare's most villainous female characters! She plays a magnificent bitch here, plotting behind the scenes to get rid of Humphrey and Nell due to her jealousies of Nell lording it around the court and Humphrey having Henry's ear, then smooching with the Duke of Suffolk (who had arranged the marriage between herself and Henry), then when Humphrey is 'surprisingly' killed taking Henry's grief over the death as a cue for an amazing rant in which she suggests that he absolutely despises her and that Henry is being completely selfish and just feeling sorry for himself! This contrasts beautifully to her own reaction to being presented with Suffolk's decapitated head later on, where she grumpily rebuff's Henry's own attempts to help her out in the same way, when he tells her to cheer up!

I particularly liked Henry's fainting reaction to hearing about Humphrey's death, as it not only suggests his fey nature but also seems to anticipate Othello's seizures at moments of greatest stress. Although Henry's faint is also more thematically important as in falling to the ground he loses his crown for the first time.

I actually end up feeling more sorry for Henry VI in this play as he is forcibly removed for the parental Protector figure of Humphrey just to be put under the control of his wife Margaret! He doesn't seem to have ever been given a chance (or maybe even been taught) to rule for himself, and the mid-point of this play is where he makes his first, faltering but admirable, attempts to do so. I think Henry's fault is not so much that he is weak and fey (everyone else around him is showing how badly strong leaders are faring), but that he is just been left as a powerless figurehead with no experience of life from which to make decisions (so he can come out with a pat managerial cod-philosophical statement that "everyone is sinful" to both the good and bad characters alike, when is it pretty obvious that there are a few pretty blatant sinners in his inner circle that he cannot recognise!) Something which suggests the young Prince Hal fooling around with Falstaff for a bit of youthful hijinks and experience outside the court perhaps wasn't such a bad idea!

There are a lot of great scenes in this play, and a lot of interesting doublings too. The play really gets into class tensions between high and low, with a few subplots of peasant brawls being paired up with brawls between the nobles themselves. A few of the roles in the play are doubled, so an actor plays both a peasant character and a nobleman character as well. Perhaps the most extreme example of this is in Trevor Peacock's roles - he was in Henry VI Part One as the noble Lord Talbot, leading the army in France and then betrayed by politics back home to die on the battlefield. In Part Two Peacock plays both a Sheriff (on the side of law and order) and then the key role of Jack Cade, a man who leads a peasant uprising against Henry, a crude, shifty and aimless leader making for a great contrast against the loyal and betrayed Talbot.

I amused myself in the second part of the play by imaging Cade as kind of the equivalent to Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader! Like Farage Cade whips up a popular class based anti-intellectualist rebellion by taking on popular characteristics of speaking incoherent truth to power and having pints in the pub with the lads. And he also has that great line about Henry that "whatsmore he can speak French, therefore he is a traitor!". Although I did think I'd probably end up voting for Cade when one of his proclamations was to kill all lawyers!

A lot of this uprising is played for laughs (there are a number of likely intentional Monty Python and the Holy Grail-type moments here, and in the witch scene earlier on), with his utterly bizarre edicts thought up off the top of his head, yet things do turn dark quite quickly, as the uprising actually gains traction and Henry is really threatened. There is a great montage here of Cade cackling insanely while his loutish army drunkenly cheers and we see his face superimposed over book burning bonfires, soldiers having their throats cut and monks getting thrown onto the bonfire before catching light and running around in flames!

I particularly like the imagery in the scene where Lord Say has his mock trial in front of Cade, where the audience keeps showering him in pieces of torn up books, which kind of feels an ironic inverse of the shower of confetti greeting Margaret meeting Henry for the first time at the beginning of the play!

This uprising more than anything shows Henry's lack of authority, as it only takes an organised army coming up against the rabble to make them proclaim Henry their King again!

Then we get the real threat of York coming back from war in Ireland to reclaim his title from the embattled Henry. After having spent much of the previous two plays plotting from the sidelines, this is where Bernard Hill really starts to shine, able to face down a King and seem more in control of the situation than he is, even whilst leading a coup! We get another big battle scene here (with some Peckinpah-esque slow motion inserts of sword fighting within the final showdown) and then see Henry and Margaret running for their lives before a victorious York.

But the play beautifully reminds us of the cost of all of these power struggles with the pan over a pile of bloodied bodies as its final shot.

A really great play, with a very dark edge. The child's playground elements seem a lot more muted here than in the first one, as the games are having more dire consequences, and eventually the whole playground set is blackened and burnt out. I can also understand the 12 rating for this one, as there are a lot of shots of people getting slashed or stabbed by swords, or having their throats cut. There are also quite a lot of severed heads knocking around the place, from being cradled like a baby, to hauled around in a sack, to a couple being stuck on pikes and made to kiss each other!

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#69 Post by jindianajonz » Mon May 05, 2014 1:28 pm

Just an FYI, I ordered the big Shakespeare box from Amazon UK and it arrived in California in pretty terrible condition. 3 of the corners were pretty deeply dented, and most surprising of all the lid was torn halfway off despite still being sealed in shrinkwrap.

The outer packaging was in decent shape, so I'm wondering if the box was already damaged when it was shipped- I certainly don't see any way the lid could get torn like it did just from shipping damage.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#70 Post by Revelator » Tue May 20, 2014 4:14 pm

I've been re-reading a few plays and watching the BBC adaptations afterward. Notes on four, in order of viewing:

The Tempest. Ugly settings, flat lighting, unimaginative direction, and an irritatingly fey Ariel, but Michael Hordern is a magnificent Prospero--I doubt I'll see better. Not a cuddly, magical Prospero either, but an angry and embittered one, though very moving when renouncing magic and farewelling the audience. Nigel Hawthorne and Anthony Sachs also succeed in giving life to the otherwise tiresome drunks. A production redeemed by the actors.

Cymbeline. Often considered a dog's breakfast of a play, but one of the stronger BBC adaptations. The Jacobean dress and Dutch-painting settings both ground and emphasize the strangeness of the Roman-era proceedings. Excellent use is made of close-ups--the camera slowly moves in on Posthumous's face during his rant about women to savage effect. Given how tangled and irritating the play's verse can be, the actors deftly speak with rhythmic clarity. Helen Mirren is a definitive Imogen and plucky to the end, Paul Jesson's Cloten is scarily foppish, Robert Lindsay is an intense Iachimo, and the biggest surprise is Belarius, played by Michael Gough, who speaks Shakespeare beautifully, almost bringing tears to my eyes with "The benediction of these covering heavens\Fall on their heads like dew."

The Winter's Tale: An even stronger adaptation than Cymbeline. Famous as one of the one-set productions, and the gimmick works remarkably well (though it's least effective standing in for the coast of Bohemia). The set is incredibly important, because it sets the tone of the entire production--wintry white and glacial during the first half, golden-hued in the second--and establishes a unifying dramatic space. Jeremy Kemp is perhaps too ogreish as Leontes (whose rage is more neurotic) but it's fun seeing Dr. Watson as Camillo (David Burke excels at conscientiousness). The bear suit is pathetic and the Bohemia scenes drag after a while, but the staging of the statue scene (very difficult to bring off) is understated and still magical.

King Lear. I was greatly looking forward to seeing what Hordern would do, but it turns out his Prospero was a better Lear than his Lear. Miller's production is drab and washed-out--those are intentional choices, but they're not balanced by the direction or performances. Hordern gets too caught up in portraying Lear as a doddering old bastard, and shows less emotional range than in his Prospero (it should be the other way around). Miller over-relies on triangular compositions of talking heads, and the effect is monotonous and reductive--cheap TV. The storm scene is pathetic (close-ups with light drizzle). Aside from the irritatingly silly Edgar, the other performances are fine, especially Michael Kitchen's lizard-like Edmund. An excessively dry production.

Up next: King John and Pericles.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#71 Post by colinr0380 » Fri May 23, 2014 6:12 am

I think that is the most interesting aspect of King Lear though - that Lear is the key figure but almost entirely peripheral from taking part in the action following his decision to abdicate responsibility for ruling the kingdom at the beginning of the play. He is the key but not the most interesting character. Instead all of those around him thrown into disarray by his decision are more important. In a way Lear is a 'doddering old bastard', especially by the blasted heath scene, and willingly so (while I agree that the BBC production is not particularly expansive in scope, that loss of background space as the faces dominate the screen really works as the moment when the character is totally lost in mad introspection).

The tragedy of Lear himself is that he gets pulled partially back to taking an interest in life and others after he has lost everything only to be immediately dealt the killing blow of having that ripped from him again just as he had begun to feel. He planned to divide up his kingdom to avoid problems and pain of upheaval, and perhaps selfishly to have a quiet retirement by getting past the difficult division of spoils sooner rather than later (and perhaps retreating into madness is another form of selfish 'abdication'. It is interesting that this is an issue that a King now must face - not being killed gloriously in battle but being ignominiously backstabbed by his extended family), but cannot, or rather is not allowed, to divorce himself from the emotional buffeting around that life deals everyone.
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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#72 Post by Michael Kerpan » Fri May 23, 2014 12:16 pm

I've been totally spoiled by Kozintsev's (and Shostakovich's) Lear. Even if it is in the language of Boris Pasternak rather than Shakespeare's own.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#73 Post by bottled spider » Fri May 23, 2014 5:21 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:I've been totally spoiled by Kozintsev's (and Shostakovich's) Lear. Even if it is in the language of Boris Pasternak rather than Shakespeare's own.
As I remember it, on the disc I watched (must have been Facets), the English subtitles were not Pasternak's adaptation translated back into English, but the original Shakespeare. Am I remembering wrong, or have different labels handled the subtitles differently?

The Kozintsev is indeed superb.

One quality I remember appreciating about the BBC production is its pacing, making this full text production shorter than many substantially abridged ones.

The later BBC production with McKellan is my next favourite after the Kozinstev.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#74 Post by Revelator » Fri May 23, 2014 5:59 pm

colinr0380 wrote:I think that is the most interesting aspect of King Lear though - that Lear is the key figure but almost entirely peripheral from taking part in the action following his decision to abdicate responsibility for ruling the kingdom at the beginning of the play. He is the key but not the most interesting character. Instead all of those around him thrown into disarray by his decision are more important. In a way Lear is a 'doddering old bastard'
My issue is more with Hordern's performance than with Lear's position in the play (though I would say he is indeed the most interesting character in the play, since he goes through the largest mental transformation and gains the most insight, though tragically too late). As noted earlier, I thought Hordern's magnificent Prospero was a better Lear than his Lear. As the latter, Hordern was very good at being doddering and surly, to the point of monotony, but in the mad scenes he looked distracted, rather than illuminated by radical knowledge. I like Jonathan Miller, but his work often has a dry and shrunken quality, and that applies to his direction of the actors here. And though casting a Fool as old as Lear was a fine idea, Frank Middlemass tended to shout his lines into incoherence. Overall, out of the four version of Lear that I've seen, this is the least impressive, though it's by no means bad.
Michael Kerpan wrote:I've been totally spoiled by Kozintsev's (and Shostakovich's) Lear. Even if it is in the language of Boris Pasternak rather than Shakespeare's own.
I recently watched the Russian Lear for the first time (as Bottled Spider correctly notes, the Facets DVD uses Shakespeare for the subtitles) and will leave a comment in the Kozintsev thread. Overall a very impressive film, despite some areas of disappointment. Still, my nomination for the best film of Lear is Peter Brook's, though I like the performances in the Elliot-Olivier production.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#75 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sat May 24, 2014 12:57 am

So far as I know, there has never been a version of either Kozintsev's Hamlet or his Lear that actually translated Pastenak's Russian dialogue -- it's always been snippets of the original Shakespeare texts.

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