BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

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colinr0380
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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#76 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Jun 07, 2014 7:06 am

Henry VI Part Three

What a mess! By which I mean the action in the play rather than the play itself. Though both of the previous plays have been flirting with abstraction to highlight the pointless interchangability of their conflicts this third play gets as deep as possible into internecine plottings and pragmatic switching of sides based on revenge as all sense of a wider principle gets lost in violent retribution, and all claims to birthrights or legitimate leadership get complicated once the initial claimants to the throne get killed or give up their title, leaving a generation once even further removed to stake their shaky claims on the throne.

There is also the sense that everyone's IQ drops about 100 points as soon as they put the crown on their head! Or perhaps they are just so exhausted at the point of getting to sit on the throne that their judgement lapses?

It is perhaps one of the best works about tit-for-tat violence and how (extremely) short term political pragmatism (either in signing away your title after your reign, or marrying someone on a whim while in the midst of negotiations of a foreign marriage. I love the two scenes in which Margaret is at first taunted simply for being French, and then the other side immediately starts negotiations for their own French marriage, to the very Carry On-film named Lady Bona!) ends up alienating your core supporters. The power of this play is that everyone, no matter what actions they commit, is given their moment to be understood and empathised with - in one scene we feel deeply for a character who had all of their family killed and is now committed to doing the same, ending with them killing a child; in another we feel for three sons who learn that the stability of their father (and his claim) has gone now that he has been killed and beheaded. The emotion is raw for everyone, yet it also leads everyone to committing their own heinous acts in return.

The most abstract scene of this, in which Henry bemoans his treatment as a King, is the key one in this section, as during it he is passed by a battle twice, each time joined by an anonymous soldier who finds that they have killed either their father or son. Henry himself never commits any violence, yet this is the play that underlines his complete ineffectiveness as a ruler as, especially in this scene flanked by mirror images of mutual destruction, he can only bemoan his lot and wish to be a commoner like them. Wishing he could be a simple commoner buffeted by the winds of opinion rather than having to take a stand on anything (very in the vein of King Lear, wishing to abdicate responsibility and wander absent mindedly through the carnage he helped to create through inaction. Keeping up the Lear parallels, the three sons of the Duke of York are very much like Lear's daughters, already squabbling about splitting up their shares even before the current conflict has finished, yet instead of the pure but doomed Cordelia, we have the much more duplicitous Richard starting his ascent to power).

On the other hand Queen Margaret moves from simply being a power-hungry bitch to, well, still being power hungry but motivated by more understandable goals of placing her disinherited son back on the throne and defeating the usurpers now that Henry has proven himself utterly ineffectual as anything more than a figurehead (worse than ineffectual in fact, as his is the first double-dealing of the play, fatally undermining all of his principles that seems to be the catalyst to spark off everyone else feeling able to switch sides too whenever they feel it expedient). There is also much more of a desperate last-stand quality to Margaret here, which turns her into one of Shakespeare's best 'wronged villain' roles - I even felt that there were parallels to be drawn here between Margaret and Joan of Arc from Part One, both women eventually leading their armies into battle. However Margaret is fated to live at the end of the play while Joan kind of had her warrior status acknowledged by having to die. Who cares anymore that children or women are leading armies (lions and lambs metaphors getting thrown about liberally) when everything else is so topsy-turvy?

Lady Grey is perhaps the only sympathetic character in the play, though even she is thoroughly undermined and corrupted in a 'land for sexual favours' bartering scene with the new King Edward which plays like a consumated version of the central relationship in Measure For Measure.

The big question here, which gets back to this being an ultimate statement on tit-for-tat conflicts, is what exactly is there left to fight for? Even at the beginning of this play the playground set is totally blackened and burnt out; the regal carpet tattered and bloodied; the parapets lined with human heads in various stages of decay in a privileged position to watch the action; the throne just a few bare boards of wood. All the characters have destroyed everything around them, physically wrecked everything and morally undermined all of the principles of the state in a series of convulsive, exhausting upheavals that appear to leave everyone craving stability more than long-forgotten principles of who was rightfully intended to take the throne.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#77 Post by Revelator » Sat Jun 07, 2014 5:02 pm

I didn't mention Henry IV Part 3 in my notes on recently viewed BBC Shakespeares since I'd watched it several years ago and didn't have fresh memories, but it might be the strongest version of any Shakespeare play I've seen on the BBC, and your incisive notes call it to mind.

Jane Howell is an excellent director (as her version of The Winter's Tale demonstrates) and she can make the perpetual re-use of one set--as seen in Tale and Henry VI--seem exciting and organic-feeling, rather than a director's conceit. The performances are similarly excellent--Peter Benson is the epitome of a good man but ineffectual king (the Tudor Jimmy Carter?), Julia Foster is an admirably steely "she-wolf of France", Ron Cook emphasizes the human side o the future Richard III by playing him as the runt of the family, possessed with terrier-like determination; and Bernard Hill's York is a tough old soldier who still manages to wring tears "O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide!," the first great speech written by Shakespeare.

The final part of Henry VI is a roundelay of depositions and deaths (like Game of Thrones but with better dialogue) but it's not until the ascension of Richard III that England truly hits rock bottom--Henry VI and Edward IV, whatever their drawbacks, were not evil men. As a play, Richard III doesn't fully make sense when produced separately from the Henry VI plays, since it's really their sequel. Luckily, Howell returned to direct it with the earlier play's cast--the resulting tetralogy came too late to save the BBC Shakespeare series from accusations of stodginess, but it's among the finest achievements in televised Shakespeare.

Incidentally, I'd never before considered Henry VI's parallels with King Lear, and you make some fascinating points. Since my last comment, I caught up with the Peter Brook/Orson Welles Omnibus King Lear, and despite the excision of the Edgar/Edmund subplot it's an excellent production. I was dreading what early 50s TV Shakespeare might be like, but the direction is actually smoother and more inventive than many of the BBC versions. Welles seemed slightly tentative in what was a new medium for him, but he was "every inch a king." All in all, I'd have to rank it above the Miller production, despite the missing plotlines. I also rewatched the Elliot/Olivier version, which was actually less cheesy-looking than I remembered--the old-fashioned druid-settings and realism of the studio set mostly succeed. And Olivier's performance is quicksilver, perpetually responding to the shifting moods of the text. That production might also have the very best Regan--Diana Rigg cloaks sadistic cruelty in the most debonair of hides.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#78 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Jun 07, 2014 8:22 pm

Revelator wrote:The final part of Henry VI is a roundelay of depositions and deaths (like Game of Thrones but with better dialogue) but it's not until the ascension of Richard III that England truly hits rock bottom--Henry VI and Edward IV, whatever their drawbacks, were not evil men. As a play, Richard III doesn't fully make sense when produced separately from the Henry VI plays, since it's really their sequel. Luckily, Howell returned to direct it with the earlier play's cast--the resulting tetralogy came too late to save the BBC Shakespeare series from accusations of stodginess, but it's among the finest achievements in televised Shakespeare.
I think it is very interesting that much is made in this play of the heartless murder of the twelve year old Rutland by Clifford and then taunting of York wih the bloodied handkerchief before he himself dies, yet when Richard III comes to power he will be damned by history for his infamous act of ordering the death of the Princes in the tower. In the light of this previous play, perhaps Richard is not acting out of keeping with the times in which he is living, so in keeping with many of Shakespeare's villians even he can be placed in somewhat of a wider context. Even Richard's murder of Henry VI could be seen as a kind of ironic parallel to the jail cell murder of Richard II at the beginning of this whole cycle (I loved that he quite literally cuts Henry VI off in the middle of yet another kindly but pointless speech, as if bored with it all!)
Revelator wrote:and Bernard Hill's York is a tough old soldier who still manages to wring tears "O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide!," the first great speech written by Shakespeare.
It is a great speech but I must admit that I had the same incredulous "oh come off it!" reaction that Clifford and Margaret had to York's speech causing tears amongst their ranks! But that is a great testament to everyone getting their moment to be heard, even those who get beheaded soon afterwards!

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#79 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Jul 20, 2014 8:17 pm

Richard III

A fascinating play, almost incestual in the way that beyond the clashing clan loyalties of Henry VI, we've moved down to the fundamentals of a single family tearing itself apart. It struck me whilst watching that this play is quite cynical and wryly amused about the power of great speeches and eloquent orations to state a case, yet which also end up concealing underlying corruption. This is also the first play in the cycle where the speeches occasionally are shown to have absolutely no effect whatsoever on the people they are meant to be cajoling! Events have gone much too far for words to sway and people have already made up their minds.

But early on we do get one of the most audacious meet-cutes ever staged, in which Richard woos his potential new wife over the body of the King he has just murdered, whose wounds spontaneously start bleeding again as if in dire warning! Yet he still manages to get his ring on her finger, the sly dog!

In a sense Richard III bears the most relevance to today's political scene. There are the favoured ministers being whipped into doing your bidding, the manufactured and staged public appearances (in this case Richard being 'accidentally' found deep in worship with a couple of Priests; presented to his audience as a theatrical red velvet curtain is pulled back and having his friend in the crowd cajole him into taking on the dreadful burden of being King under threat of revolution if he does not!); the inherent falsity of speeches playing into individual vanities and offering tailored bribes, and so on. There's even a Tony Blair-on-Iraq-esque discussion with the mother of the two murdered princes that what was done (around ten minutes ago) is done and that really we should all just forget about the past and move forward, which incidentally involves marrying the woman's daughter and replacing the dead kids with new ones in a fair one-for-one swap! (That is one hell of an audacious sequence in which the interchangability, or bartering, of lives as a bargaining tool jaw droppingly illustrates the lack of compassion for individuals).

I particularly liked the playing of the Lord Mayor of London in the scenes as Richard ascends to become King, with the Mayor of London moving from an expression of uncomprehending but pained obsequiousness to eventually an expression of almost orgasmic relief at seeing Richard accept being made King!

And I think that a key theme of the play is that idea about the loneliness of power politics. Early in the play there are a number of scenes in which a suddenly doomed character suddenly realises that they are about to be deposed simply by the way that all of the other members of the room suddenly get up and leave them all alone. They've been unceremoniously ejected from the inner circle, although instead of just retiring to the back benches of politics to await a resurgence in favour or to be reshuffled into a new role, they usually get beheaded instead! Which is a certain way of stopping them from coming back again, I suppose! This all comes to a head in the final dream sequence with Richard in which all of the people he has murdered during the course of the play come out of the woodwork, curse him to die, and then place their favours on the new pretender to the throne! Which turns all of those people that Richard has wronged and betrayed for a variety of different non-political reasons into single, reductive traitors betraying him in a very politically-inflected shift of allegiance backstabbing manoeuvre. Something that suggests that Richard, while seeming well aware of other people's virtues and his own manipulations at the beginning of the play, cannot really deal with having wronged people outside of seeing it through political machinations (nothing personal, they were just pawns in his game and they get their revenge by similarly wielding their ghostly powers against him!)

Really the best modern adaptation of Richard III is the House of Cards series (either version) as it captures those political betrayals in a rather blunt manner.

The four main female characters in the play (plus a very young Patsy Kensit in one small scene as the young Elizabeth who gets bartered around in marriage in the final stages of the play) all get their chance to have a 'grief-off' over who is more bitter and desolate over the deaths of their family members. Zoë Wanamaker turns up as Lady Anne, who ends up having to marry her husband's murderer only to get killed off after she is no more use to him and Elizabeth catches his eye (the pragmatism of women, especially if they are to remain within a Court setting, having to accept being quickly swapped between husbands rather than for love, gets raised here and feels reminiscent of the situation of Gertrude in Hamlet or even some of the Shakespearian romances). Then there is Queen Elizabeth, married to the shortlived Edward IV, aware of the precariousness of her position and realising that she is basically in the same situation as Queen Margaret was in Henry VI of having all of her children murdered as soon as the King dies. However Annette Crosbie as the Duchess of York, the mother to all three of our male characters fighting over the throne, gets the meatiest role here, watching Richard kill off his two brothers and his nephews, and a few close advisors, while struggling with her guilt over having brought him into the world.

Henry VI's widow Margaret also makes a reapparance here, turning into a kind of forerunner of the witches in Macbeth, making cackling pronouncements of the downfall of all of the other characters (and briefly uniting everyone who had been squabbling over the kingdom back against her when she first appears in the play, swooping up from behind the usurped throne to threaten everyone with doom filled curses!). While Margaret is magnificent in the first appearance (it really illustrates in her focused hatred on Queen Elizabeth that this is a play showing that two generations of royalty cannot really exist concurrently, as Elizabeth is kind of an echo of Margaret in every way, and almost becomes her doppleganger, just on the York side rather than the Lancastrian one), her second and third appearances around the mid point of the play made me lose all sympathy with her again, as she just screams variations of "serves you right" at the other bereaved women. However she does get the magnificent final shot of this BBC version in which she is shown atop a floor-to-ceiling pile of corpses cradling Richard's speared body laughing maniacally.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Fri Apr 17, 2015 12:31 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#80 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Jul 21, 2014 4:04 am

And a word of advice for the Royal nephew: never tell your creepily 'protective' Uncle that you most admire and wish to emulate the life of Julius Caesar! You are just putting ideas into his head!

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#81 Post by MichaelB » Mon Jul 21, 2014 4:25 am

Had you seen the play before in a standalone version? And if so, do you agree with me that it's far richer when viewed as, essentially, episode four of a far longer four-part miniseries?

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#82 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Jul 21, 2014 1:02 pm

I actually hadn't seen the other standalone versions of Richard III but certainly agree that it would be a much different experience removed from the rest of the plays and presented as a standalone piece. I've got the Olivier version in my to watch pile but as soon as I started on this project I decided to leave it until after, and am looking forward to picking up the Criterion Blu which came out in the interim in order to see the elements that got cut down or left out (presumably Margaret's scenes?), and of course I'm aware of the 90s adaptation starring Ian McKellen updating the material into a kind of Oswald Mosley facist 1930s set parable in which the character meets his end plunging off the top of the Battersea Power Station!

I was previously most familiar with that Al Pacino documentary Looking For Richard which in retrospect is more a whistle-stop tour of an actor's view of, and infatuation with, Shakespearian performance rather than an actual exploration into the play of Richard III itself (although I could definitely see the appeal of Richard III to someone who acted in The Godfather trilogy!). It throws in some 'notes in the margin' style interviews and asides about the context and briefly runs through the War of the Roses (in a "this is all so complicated and convoluted, but you don't really need to know this stuff!!" manner), but doesn't properly place Richard III into its position in the cycle of Shakespeare plays showing many different forms of seizing power, and losing it again, through its many cycles. With repeated sets of advisors, wives and mothers, children, peasants and nobles, all meeting their inevitable ends, just their names and allegiances getting changed.

But I do agree that seeing Richard III as the climactic part of a cycle about the ruling class tearing itself apart, with poor leadership opening the door for opportunists to seize their moment, adds a lot of much needed context. I think you could still appreciate the drama of this individual situation of a plot between members of a family, but the events coming so hard on the heels of the action of the previous plays add all of the rich backstory which all comes to a climax here (plus you get to see Richard steadily becoming more and more physically disabled in the second two parts of Henry VI as the limp gets worse. It might be problematic for modern sensibilities but it does strengthen that sense that Richard is steadily becoming more physically corrupted by his actions). Richard is a villainous character but in the context of all of the upheavals that the country has been through, especially in the Wars of the Roses, I can't really blame him for continuing the violence on past its natural stopping point of supposed peace in order to win the throne for himself. This play contrasts the others in the sense that Richard isn't the noble hero that he keeps creating an image of - no one is really backing him, except those whipped up by Buckingham to support (everyone just seems exhausted and wanting it to stop), and he even gets a moment in his tent on the eve of battle stating that he is going to wander amongst the troops, not to see himself as others see him as Henry V did, but to search out traitors in his (steadily more justifiable!) paranoia! He's really forcing through his Kingship on the flimsiest pretext, barely bothering to conceal the machinations. Yet he should have known by that point that the throne was a poisoned chalice that almost immediately ends up killing the person who sits upon it! Perhaps in some ways that context justifies his ruthlessness of ensuring that he has killed off all pretenders before he claims the throne for himself - were the events of Henry VI OK because it was justified murder in war, and the events of Richard III less justified because it is internal conflict? I suppose at least he seems a more savvy warlord than Richard II was when he is directing his troops!

There is also the way that this adaptation is able to create resonances between all of the plays due to the doubling of actors playing multiple characters. The best example of this is the moment in which Bernard Hill, who was the Duke of York in Henry VI who does not live to see his sons Edward, George and Richard sieze power, turns up playing one of the murderers that Richard hires to kill George in the tower. The father reincarnates as his own son's murderer through the staging of this adaptation, something which seems very apt re-casting when combined with this speech:
"In God's name, what are thou?"
"A man, as you are"
"But not, as I am, Royal"
"Nor you, as we are, loyal"
"Thy voice is thunder but thy looks are humble"
"My voice is now the King's. My looks are my own"
Last edited by colinr0380 on Thu Jul 31, 2014 7:15 pm, edited 5 times in total.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#83 Post by Michael Kerpan » Mon Jul 21, 2014 1:07 pm

For some reason, Josephine Tey's "Daughter of Time" is inextricably cross-linked in my brain with Shaespeare's Richard III. ;-}

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#84 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Jul 21, 2014 1:34 pm

Talking about Shakespeare being applied to politics in Richard III, something compelled me to track down this video, and I was glad to find out that this Newsnight Review discussion of New Labour and Gordon Brown from back in 2009 is up on YouTube. In the debate following the introductory film in particular I liked the idea that you can apply even small sections of Shakespeare's plays to describe some core qualities of a person. And also the danger that you can twist Shakespeare's lessons to mean anything that you want! (I love Germaine Greer, and she perfectly dissects Macbeth and Hamlet, but Gordon Brown was in no way a Timon of Athens, except perhaps for not understanding the value of money!)

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#85 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Sep 12, 2014 9:28 pm

Cymbeline

"The power I have on you is to spare you. The malice towards you, to forgive you. Live, and treat others better"

It is going to be hard to describe the effect that this play had on me, but I think it has perhaps leapt into the spot of my absolute favourite Shakespeare play. It is such a magnificently rich and thematically complex play, and beautifully weaves into its story many themes from the other plays, such as:
  • a scheming 'evil' Queen (as in Macbeth, Titus Andronicus or Henry VI) desperate to secure an inheritance for her son (interestingly the purely bad Queen here is played by Claire Bloom who played the purely wronged Queen in Henry VIII; and Queen Gertrude in Hamlet earlier in the series)
    the silly son himself, acting as a rather fey suitor trying to woo the heroine despite clearly being unsuitable (see similar characters in Othello, Twelfth Night, Taming of the Shrew);
    cross dressing, both a women as a page (as in Twelfth Night and As You Like It) but also low born versus high (Henry IV) and one man taking on the costume of another, to bloody ends;
    a Falstaff-like banished ex-general acting as a surrogate father figure to two youths stupidly excited by the prospect of getting the chance to participate in an apocalyptic war. Though events end happier for him here than in Henry IV!;
    a Romeo & Juliet-esque poisoning that isn't, although the potential tragedy is averted here;
    a prior-to-final-act ghostly visitation on the main character, although in this case the ghosts are working to provide a kindly benediction on Posthumus, rather than blessing all of Richard III's enemies in battle and cursing him!;
    a servant torn between two masters and a sense of duty in Pisanio (in my opinion by far the most likable character in the film!) who is very reminiscent of Kent in King Lear and also Camillo, the adviser caught between a rock and a hard place in The Winter's Tale;
    the duplicitous and conniving Iachimo is much in the same mould as Iago from Othello, with his falsehoods driving a passionately in love couple into despair and a spiral into murderous vengeance for presumed betrayals;
    the use of the ring and bracelet as the our initial loving couple's tokens of affections for each other being an external symbol of their devotion that ends up almost destroying them when they are easily lost or stolen (note to lovers: if you truly love each other, you don't need fancy pieces of jewellery to prove it to the other!) is extremely reminiscent of the rings casually bartered away in The Merchant of Venice and All's Well That Ends Well;
    the (idiotic!) casual bragging and bargaining of women's affections in the early scene between Posthumus and Iachimo is reminiscent of Anthony casually wedding Octavia over a meal with Caesar in Anthony & Cleopatra (the moral of this appears to be that men are idiots, especially in the way that they too casually barter true love away before realising its true cost, and then have the nerve blame their own foolish stupidities on the more constant in their affections women in their lives);
    this play also feels like a twist on The Winter's Tale in the sense that the King himself, Cymbeline, is the one who sets events in motion by parting the true lovers Imogen and Posthumus at the very beginning and brooking no challenge to his authority. Although in this case his (portrayed as scheming) Queen dying is the thing that breaks his madness rather than the (good and purely wronged against) Queen dying breaking his spell in Winter's Tale. Also both Kings in both plays have their children removed from them and brought up amongst the lower orders, and it is the returning of their children to the Kings that proves that they are in some ways 'fit to rule' again. The King's 'test' here being if he can pardon rather than immediately condemn for execution. Or rather the return of their children removes their worries and restores their sanity.
And all of the above is contained within a wider conflict over the future of Britain as either an individual country or as a satellite state of Rome.
SpoilerShow
I think the very final speech of the play that acts as a paen to integration with Rome is perhaps the one problematic moment of the play, as it seems fairly obviously added to make a heavy handed didactic political point to contemporary Shakespearian audiences. I would much have preferred the play ending with the lines I quoted at the start of this post.
Cymbeline doesn't just bring up all of these themes from other plays but it actually deals with them much more powerfully in almost all cases, and the way that all of these themes are interrrelating with each other (and the sheer number of characters, even minor ones who perform small but key functions in the play, such as the Doctor who swaps the poison that the Queen has asked for with the potion that causes a death-like sleep instead) is mindbogglingly complex. No wonder that the final scene neatly wrapping up all of the events of the play takes a full half hour of this BBC production! I wonder if the complex intermeshing of multiple plots is part of what makes the play relatively obscure today compared to some of Shakespeare's simpler plays?

Oh, and if none of that sounds interesting, this adaptation of the play features Helen Mirren's Imogen, after she has apparently died from the poison, getting sung a beautiful mourning song then being laid to rest next to a beheaded corpse, which on waking up next to and wrongly thinking it is the body of her lover Posthumus she ends up cuddling and spreading blood from the stump across her face like war paint all whilst declaring her own wrong-headed emotional plan for revenge!

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#86 Post by ando » Mon Sep 15, 2014 11:45 am

Yes, Cymbeline in is one of the best productions in the series. The blocking in general, is a bit stiff but the ensemble, for the most part, is stellar. The actor who plays Cymbelite elicits no compassion whatsoever, whereas Claire Bloom, as the malicious stepmother and wife of Cymbeline, plays her part with admirable humanity. Not an easy feat with such a part. I don't think the thing would have come off without her modulating influence, caught as she is between characters full of storming passions.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#87 Post by Sloper » Mon Sep 15, 2014 1:35 pm

Lovely review, Colin. Ando, I know what you mean about the 'stiff' blocking, but I think this might have to do with Elijah Moshinsky's style. He directed several of the best instalments in this series: Love's Labour's Lost, All's Well that Ends Well and A Midsummer Night's Dream are other highlights. They all have that rather stately, painterly quality to them, and for me this makes them really compelling and hypnotic. It's quite a daring and unusual way to approach TV drama (at least for the time), but it works beautifully I think. Not only are Moshinsky's compositions genuinely beautiful at times, but they also provide a space in which the actors can really take their time to savour each moment, matching the resonance of the imagery with resonant, carefully poised performances.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#88 Post by Revelator » Mon Sep 15, 2014 3:23 pm

I'll agree that Cymbeline is one of the best BBC productions. That's especially impressive because the play is a dog's breakfast. Characterization is especially woebegone: The Queen is such a stereotypical fairy-tale stepmother that she doesn't even have a name, the title character is an unmemorable idiot of a king, and Posthumus is an even bigger idiot, one of the most repellent heroes in all of Shakespeare. The only really well-drawn character is Imogen. The plotting is similarly hapless--the Roman/British wars are a muddle (and wisely cut to the bone in this production), Zeus makes a very silly appearance (wisely toned down by the BBC) and the climax--featuring the unraveling of several thousand subplots--is a headache. Even the verse is tiresome; Shakespeare at his most tangled, irritating, and labored, though there are a couple of memorable bits ("Fear no more the heat of the sun...", "Think that you are upon a rock; and now/Throw me again...").

The BBC production is played with such conviction, and directed with such care, that it makes the play seem much better than it is (it truly benefited from extensive cutting). The direction and settings were apparently inspired by late-renaissance Dutch paintings, and these add a valuable degree of stylized familiarity to the Roman-era proceedings. As I noted a few pages back, close-ups are deftly employed, as when the camera slowly moves in Posthumous during his savage rant about women. The cast is uniformly excellent, and they speak the knotty verse with much-valued clarity: There will never be another Imogen with the pluck of Helen Mirren, Paul Jesson's Cloten can switch gears from foppish to creepy in micro-seconds, and Robert Lindsay's intense performance turns Iachimo into far more than an Iago-clone. But my favorite performance of all is from Michael Gough as Belarius. He speaks Shakespeare so beautifully you regret he didn't appear in more plays. His delivery of "The benediction of these covering heavens\Fall on their heads like dew" is especially moving.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#89 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Sep 15, 2014 6:02 pm

It was a great discovery to find Claire Bloom becoming one of the key touchstone actors of this BBC series, if just for the variety of Queens she plays during it! I think she's turned up in as diverse a range of roles as Michael Horden has so far!

I completely agree with you whilst still thinking that the play is great Revelator! The Queen here is one dimensional (though I like the way that she moves from seeming kindly during the first scene of Imogen and Posthumus parting, only to turn it around with the poison request after that), the King is responsible for all of his problems (like the King in The Winter's Tale, only not quite such a bastard) and Posthumus is a completely horrible person - a character that everyone talks about as purely good gets involved in stupid bragging games and then blames Imogen for her 'betrayal' in a jaw dropping misogynist rant which continually had me muttering "But it's your fault!" at the screen. Perhaps he's Shakespeare's ultimate comment on the vapidity and over-emotional inconstancy of the insipid yet hotheaded and impetuous young lover archetype - whether Romeo, Antony or Troilus, etc, etc.

But I think they are being kept purposefully undeveloped because we have seen a lot of these themes dealt with in much more detail in the other Shakespeare plays. Here the interest isn't purely in a manipulative Queen, an idiotic King, misunderstandings between lovers and so on but about how they're all interrelating with each other. Also coming out of the intricate attention paid to, yet eventually falling into messy abstraction itself, politicing and warfare of the Henry VI/Richard III cycle, the much more obviously unemphasised and abstract war between Rome and Britain playing out in the far background (itself like the invasion taking place off stage at the end of Hamlet, showing that the entire Kingdom is at stake at the same time as the individual quarrels come to a head. Though we get a happy rather than tragic ending here!) was quite refreshing!

For example Robert Lindsay's Iachimo character is brilliantly manipulative, and his scene prowling around Imogen's bedchamber whilst she is asleep, curling up next to her and then stealing her bracelet trinket of love is a fantastic, and dreadfully uncomfortable, scene (perhaps as well as being like Iago in Othello, Iachimo here is just as much a fantastical and manipulative figure like Puck in Midsummer Night's Dream or Ariel in The Tempest. Although he is much more of a physicial prescence in the bedchamber). Yet after he hands the bracelet over to Posthumus that is the end of his character until the final scene of the play. He's fulfilled his function and we move on to another set of themes with Posthumus's bitter misogynist ranting set against Imogen's constancy and rebuffing of Cloten (which plays like a much better Taming of the Shrew).

I don't know how to recommend this play - should a potential audience member approach it after all of the other plays so that they pick up on all of the various themes packed together inside this one? Or could this work as a primer before watching any other play, so that the audience subsequently gets to see each of the various themes in Cymbeline unpacked and much more thoroughly dealt with one by one in the other plays? Either way, this strikes me as another one of those Shakespearian ur-texts that deserves a much higher profile that it appears to have currently.

All of this does make me curious-nervous about how Michael Almereyda's upcoming adaptation is going to tackle the play - for now it might be best to approach that as more of a piece with Almereyda's modern day updating of Hamlet from 2000, also starring Ethan Hawke.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Sat Feb 28, 2015 4:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#90 Post by ando » Mon Oct 06, 2014 2:35 pm

Undiscovered Masterpiece? I think Almereyda would fare better if he simply tackled the challenge of setting the film in the period in which the Shakespeare play is written instead of exasperating contemporary audiences who either don't care for the original text or eschew sport cars, gunplay and iambic pentameter.

One of the main challenges for contemporary renderings of the 15/16th century text on film is that our lives are, for the most part, increasingly fragmented. Our language reflects it. Even politicians - public rhetoricians who must command the attention of increasingly restless audiences - gage their speeches to the current modulation of public discourse. In comes Shakespeare text on top of our current mode of discourse and (more importantly) behavior and either his text or the accuracy of current discourse and behavior must be altered (often severely). Shakespeare elaborates where we would might quip. He puns where we might sneer or chafe. His culture was not beset with 300 plus years of Puritan heritage, among other things, so the punch of his bawdy sense of sexual realtions, unless explicitly laid out (where often the joke falls flat), is lost on American audiences. It takes a damned-near-genius to pull off a compelling 21st century Shakespearean history or late comedy. The plays from his middle period are a bit easier to do and watch due to their universality. But the undiscovered plays that bookend his oeuvre seem to require - in setting, at least - a complete fidelity to the period in question or a truly radical approach, not some slick, video game version of a 400 year old text.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#91 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Jan 28, 2015 5:10 pm

Macbeth

I'm not too much of a fan of this BBC production, which seems to lose some of the subtlety of the characterisation of Macbeth himself, turning him from a weak man who would be tempted by the witches but would never have had the nerve to do anything about his ambition without the backing of his wife to someone who in this production seems from the very first to be disgruntled about being in such a lowly position, hears just what he wants to hear from the witches and collaborates with his wife before abandoning her when she cannot take the pressure anymore. It is an interesting interpretation and I guess equally valid, but it does seem to end up shortchanging Lady Macbeth in particular by making Macbeth a stronger figure. Lady Macbeth also seems portrayed as much younger than Macbeth here, and therefore her ambition is perhaps portrayed more in the vein of 'follies of youth' than as a 'calculating power grab', which kind of softens the character and lets her off the hook perhaps a little too much!

I wonder if this characterisation of Macbeth himself was actually intentional or whether it is just a result of having Nicol Williamson in the role? I remember feeling the same kind of disturbing, off-key and slightly seedy sense to Williamson's portrayal of Merlin in John Boorman's Excalibur film that came a few years before this. I think Williamson's performance is perfect in Excalibur for dirtying up the image of the kindly old mage with flowing robes and white beard, especially in the early section of bascially using his magical powers to let the King have adulterous sex! Yet in Macbeth, with a character who is already flawed and a fundamental coward at heart, it perhaps underlines the title character's flaws a little too much!

Jane Lapotaire is great as Lady Macbeth although her best scene is her introductory one, before this production damningly seems to loses interest in the (key) character. In the introductory speech as she is getting herself all hot and bothered about the plan for Macbeth to become King, Lapotaire takes girding up her womanly essence quite literally by throwing herself onto a conveniently placed bed, squeezing her breasts whilst shuddering orgasmically over the prospect! I was extremely unsurprised when I suddenly remembered that Lapotaire had previously played Cleopatra in Antony & Cleopatra earlier in the series, which featured a similar scene of eye-openingly risque bedchamber-based dry humping motions! It seems that for this series she was the go-to actor to play the more vividly sexual Shakespearian female leads!

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#92 Post by bottled spider » Wed Jan 28, 2015 10:29 pm

Yes, I think Macbeth is one of the duds in BBC collected works, and the blame lies squarely with Nicol Williams. A shame, because as you noted Lapotaire was excellent.

I did, however, like Nicol Williams in the 1969 Tony Richardson version of Hamlet, a brisk production, with Anthony Hopkins as a swinish Claudius.

The only film version of Macbeth I've really liked is the Trevor Nunn production with McKellen and Dench.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#93 Post by ando » Wed Feb 04, 2015 12:32 am

The BBC Macbeth is up on The Tube now. My favorite is the 1971 Roman Polanski Macbeth followed by the Orson Welles film, but more on those after I've watched this production...

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#94 Post by ando » Wed Feb 04, 2015 7:21 pm

colinr0380 wrote:I wonder if this characterisation of Macbeth himself was actually intentional or whether it is just a result of having Nicol Williamson in the role?.. in Macbeth, with a character who is already flawed and a fundamental coward at heart, it perhaps underlines the title character's flaws a little too much!
Oh, I believe Williamson's characterisation is intentional, however, I have never viewed Macbeth as a weak character. Not only is he a military leader, but a victorious one, with a reputation for valor (or bravery). He is not weak by any means. But he is extremely susceptible to suggestion, particularly of the sinister - or ill-intentioned sort. It's a major character trait (sorry, I don't believe in flaws - you are what you are). Because he is so open to ill suggestion he falls prey to entities like the witches and prophecies, his wife's spur to murder, etc.. As his wife says, Macbeth may be too full of the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way, i.e. too good at heart to dispatch with Duncan directly and take the crown (and, in this case, murder Duncan). But Macbeth is no punk, by any means, as his resolve to fight regardless of the consequences in the final act clearly demonstrates.

Williamson, however, is all over the place, in terms of characterization, playing him almost as a schizophrenic. His vocal and emotional inflections fly from desperate to sullen in one speech! It's almost cartoonish. I rolled on the floor laughing several times in reaction to his wild delivery (That post-murder scene where a bloody-handed Lady Macbeth is pushing him offstage with her forearms had me howling! Of course, the great touch was when she repeated the gesture with an absent Macbeth during her mad scene.). It's true that she really does lend credibility to the couple as a powerful, vital and, later, royal couple.

Another boon that this film has over others is that most of the text is kept in tact. Welles and Polanski made significant cuts in their versions but here you get a fuller sense of the mental process of the characters, particularly Macbeth, and surprisingly, Malcolm. I don't remember watching a spoken language version of the play where the long exchange between Malcolm and MacDuff is featured. Malcolm , here, shows that he is not simply the boy, Malcolm, as Macbeth snickers. The young prince's professed treachery, if given the chance to practice it, even sets MacDuff on edge and nearly upsets the balance of "good and evil" in the play (in fact, the scene halts the momentum of Macbeth's hastening fall, which is probably why it's cut by directors). But Malcolm couches his confession in an equal admission of love and compassion toward his countrymen which lifts the suddenly darkened scene. It's a peculiar passage that I'm not sure is successful, but it's put in a kind of perspective that Macbeth has all but lost by then. Macbeth's simply a blood-thirsty tyrant by the last act and it's where, despite his mangling of the Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow soliloquy, Williamson shines (perhaps because there is far less nuance in characterization and far more straight-ahead villainy).

Lastly, the Carl Davis score is one of the most effective aspects of the production. From the initial strains which commence at the opening credits (a welcome change to the usual fanfare of the series) to the film's close the music creates the atmosphere of dread where the stark, spare studio staging - and its use - often come up short.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#95 Post by shiftyeyes » Mon Feb 23, 2015 1:53 pm

I was somewhat disappointed with the production of Macbeth as well, largely because I've long been fascinated by Williamson as a performer. I think his performance in the Richardson film is the very best on screen Hamlet I've seen.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#96 Post by ando » Wed Feb 25, 2015 6:49 pm

Yes, I admire Williamson's Hamlet as well, but the Kozintsev film version remains my favorite.

Incidentally, the aforementioned production of Macbeth comes as a supplement to the handsomely produced 3 part series by Columbia Professor, James Shapiro, on Shakespeare's Jacobean period, Shakespeare: The King's Man. Funny that it was this film that the BBC chose to accompany Shapiro's set. Measure for Measure is my favorite of the BBC productions originally performed under the patronage of James I.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#97 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Feb 28, 2015 4:36 pm

The Comedy of Errors

This is probably the most extreme Shakespearian exploration of the notions of contrivances and coincidences, as two sets of identical twins get split up by a Twelfth Night/Tempest-like storm and then decades later one pair goes searching for the other in a distant land. The father follows but gets caught up in quarrels between city states and gets condemned to death for trespassing in another state's territory, though he gets a 24-hour pardon after relating his sorry tale. Meanwhile both sets of twins (both called Antipholus and Dromio) keep getting confused with the other set, causing all sorts of complications especially when wives, master-servant instructions and expensive necklaces get thrown into the mix! (The complications over jewellery is the key Shakespeare motif, from Cymbeline to Merchant of Venice to All's Well That Ends Well. If these plays are teaching me anything, it is never to buy jewellery for the one you love!)

I'm not sure that I really like this play too much to watch (though I still like it more than Taming of the Shrew!), but I think it is very interesting to discuss in context with the other Shakespeare plays. I thought that this was perhaps the scrappiest Shakespeare play with plot holes and sketched in plotting almost to abstraction. But I also got the strong impression that the staging, blocking of the actors and non-verbal comic timing was really meant to convey much more than anything on the page (something which the BBC production really plays up to, and perhaps the room that the play appears to be allowing for that theatrical embellishment in staging is perhaps why this feels like one of the more vibrant of the BBC productions, full of life in the background characters or great moments such as during the early tale of woe section the amusing cuts showing members of the audience weeping that ends with a tearful donkey!). However unfortunately I found the almost endless scenes of one of the twins telling his servant to go do something, only for the servant to come back and talk to the wrong master; or the jeweller to give the necklace to one man, then demand payment from the other, who responds that he never received the necklace; or the wife being annoyed at her husband, only to fall in love with him again over a meal, not realising it is the twin; and so on, to get quite exhausting by the end of the play! I get the impression that this was Shakespeare's attempt to see how long he could keep all of the misunderstandings going on for before resolving it in the usual 'authority figures coming in and sorting out the whole mess' final scene of setting the world to rights.

There are some moments that I did like though which feature quite barbed, yet also very veiled satire. This isn't as bludgeoning a critique of authority figures as a play like A Winter's Tale or Measure for Measure, but I did like that near to the end of the play the lighthearted tone of the misunderstandings does a severe swerve into both sets of masters and servants separately getting caught up with religious issues, as one set gets assaulted (with full support of the concerned wife and sister-in-law!) by a caricatured exorcist-figure who attempts to cure them of their seeming insanity whilst the other pair do a kind of Julian Assange avant la lettre by seeking sanctuary from the angry mob inside a nunnery, with the Abbess coming out and berating the wife for having nagged Antipholus so much that it was almost inevitable that he was going to cheat on her, and she should be ashamed of herself! Though the Abbess herself is going to have a Winter's Tale-esque secret to reveal during the final 'setting the world to rights' scene! (The Abbess in this production is played by Wendy Hiller, best known for the 1938 Pygmalion, but she was also in a small role in Richard II earlier in the series)

I also like that there seems to be a slight 'nature or nurture?' theme going on here too, as the Antiophuls and Dromio who come to Ephesus to seek out their siblings are decent, good natured sorts, whilst the Antipholus and Dromio who have been brought up in the bustling urban jungle of Ephesus are not quite so decent! The Ephesus-based Antipholus especially (at least in the staging of this BBC version) has a habit of beating up his poor servant Dromio (including headbutting him as the only violent thing he can do when they get tied together by the exorcist!), cheating on his wife (with a very flamboyantly dressed Countess, who at one point point looks as if she has dressed entirely in a forest, played in this production by buxom Hammer film starlet Ingrid Pitt!), and behaving in a very brusque and entitled manner towards everyone he meets. That particular Antipholus really deserves more of a comeuppance than he gets in the play! But I guess the difference in behaviour between the two Antipholus's is showing how different the upbringings of the twins were and how much of a hardened wheeler and dealer one of them had to become. I guess on a wider level this is replicated by the wry commentary about the separate, yet similar in almost all ways, nation states bearing contrived grudges and fighting against each other for pointless (mostly political) reasons.

Michael Kitchen and Roger Daltry do really well with their dual roles and I think that the acting is great throughout (it is also a play that feels like it benefits from moments of 'big acting' and larking about to bring it to life, more than those where such over-playing could detract from an emotional connection), I think the problems here are more inherent in the play itself, with the contrivances being stretched to beyond their breaking point. It comes as a real relief once the final scene sorting everything out arrives, not quite for the usual Shakespearean reason of caring for the characters and wanting them to be understood and set straight, but really just for the relief that comes from knowing that the misunderstandings slapschtick is going to finally stop!

While I had not seen a performance of the Shakespeare play before I did suddenly realise halfway through that I'd seen the Hollywood version of this material in the Lily Tomlin and Bette Midler-starring Big Business, which exchanges the master-servant relationship between the twins for an urban sophisticate-country rubes one and for the big dramatic hook exchanges the possibility of the father being executed (though Fred Ward is in the equivalent role to the father, as an endearing country bumpkin following his beloved to the big city and getting overwhelmed by the bright lights of New York!) for a much more frightening prospect for the Reagan 1980s: the potential failure of a big land-development business deal!

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#98 Post by Michael Kerpan » Mon Mar 02, 2015 5:31 pm

There was an earlier (mid-1960s) TV version of Comedy of Errors (starring Diana Rigg -- which is why I probably watched it -- probably my first exposure to Shakespeare in performance), which I liked a lot more than the version in the complete BBC series. I don't think this earlier version ever made it to home video.

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#99 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Mar 14, 2015 4:11 pm

colinr0380 wrote:All of this does make me curious-nervous about how Michael Almereyda's upcoming adaptation is going to tackle the play [Cymbeline] - for now it might be best to approach that as more of a piece with Almereyda's modern day updating of Hamlet from 2000, also starring Ethan Hawke.
Some of the first reviews of this are now coming out. Here's Keith Uhlich at the A.V. Club. And here's Mike D'Angelo's less positive take at The Dissolve.

(I've just been struck by a thought that should have been obvious straight away: is Ed Harris being cast as a version of Cymbeline turned into a modern motorcyle gang leader done as a nod towards Harris's similar kind of role in Knightriders?)

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Re: BBC Shakespeare DVD Sets

#100 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Mar 21, 2015 4:16 pm

The Two Gentleman of Verona

This was a fantastic play and is perhaps another harsh comment on insipid young lovelorn men becoming utter monsters by following their heart to the exclusion of all else (even loverlorn women are just as bad if we count the excruciating ten minute long early scene of Julia prevaricating over whether to open or tear up a love note until she does both, abusing her handmaiden all the while!). In this play a young man, Proteus, is forced to leave home to 'explore the world' by his father ( #-o ) but before going swears his love to the woman, Julia, who he has been courting for ages. They swap rings (uh oh!) and then he leaves for Milan to be with his best friend Valentine who has himself just fallen in love with Sylvia. Unfortunately Valentine is not in favour with Sylvia's grouchy father ( #-o ), who instead prefers the rather fey Lionel Blair-lookalike suitor Sir Thurio (who adds to the long list of obviously unsuitable suitors in Shakespeare plays). This all gets shockingly complicated when Proteus takes one look at Sylvia and immediately decides to betray both Julia and Valentine in order to get Sylvia for himself (turning into a scheming Iago figure). Meanwhile Julia has cross-dressed as a lowly page (Twelfth Night and As You Like It again) to travel to Milan herself in order to be with Proteus, but will be in with a horrible surprise when she gets there.

One of the best aspects of this play is that it gets so dark and deals with really shocking obsessive love, all the while playing out more in the romantic comedy vein than in the dark tragedy one. It is doing an amazing balancing act. For example in the scene where Proteus meets Valentine in Milan and sees Sylvia for all of thirty seconds he is then left alone and does a brilliantly dark Iago-esque monologue about whether he has it in him to betray Julia and Valentine or betray himself by not following his heart. It is almost a Macbeth-like speech too in the sense that just considering stealing Sylvia for himself is already an irredeemable act of betrayal. Yet the staging of this speech takes place in an almost comically quick turn from bright sunshine to a tempest of wind and thunder which sends both pageboys and bards alike running for cover!

The situation is also a little like The Comedy of Errors, in that it is showing the naive small town boy going to the 'big city' and immediately being corrupted within minutes of his arrival! (This is also an interesting play in the sense that all of the 'lower class' characters do quite a lot of insolent wordplay banter with the main characters, rather than simply just staying in the background and bantering amongst themselves while letting their betters get on with more important things! I wonder if that in itself is subliminally suggesting the contempt in which Proteus and Valentine, and even Julia and Sylvia, are being held in?)

The best aspect of this is that Proteus has been making all of these plans purely for himself and Sylvia, having been told all about Proteus and his love for Julia in glowing terms by Valentine before they met, is having absolutely none of his declarations of love for her, rightly standing fast and saying that she is betrothed to Valentine and that Proteus himself is betraying Julia! To which Proteus gobsmackingly responds by saying he has heard that they are both dead anyway, so why shouldn't they get together, unfortunately within earshot of the disguised Julia (uh oh!). Sylvia standing fast against the manipulations of a lovelorn meddler assuming they have a say in her lovelife is something that marks this play apart from quite a few of the other Shakespeare plays (Othello and so on), and so makes it quite a refreshing change of pace! The audience isn't shouting at the 'good' and 'noble' characters to wake up to the treachery in this play, so there isn't that level of frustration of seeing horrible events snowballing as in the tragedies.

Julia being cross-dressed as a pageboy also works brilliantly in the sense that Proteus meets her disguised and is stopped in his tracks by how much this boy resembles his abandoned love, almost as if she is a ghost there to torment him with guilty vision of the one he has abandoned. Although, in another usual Shakespeare motif, this doesn't stop Proteus from handing the disguised Julia the ring that they swapped to go and give to Sylvia instead in a desperate plea for her affection! (Uh oh!)

Anyway this also results in Sylvia running away As You Like It-style into the woods. Proteus follows, pursued by Julia in disguise. Proteus catches Sylvia and attempts to rape her, whereupon the banished Valentine, who has somehow come to lead a band of merry outlaws, appears to put a stop to it. Sylvia's father arrives, Julia reveals herself to the tearful Proteus too, there are pardons all around for the outlaws (weren't there some unrepentant murderers in there too? Oh well!), and we end on plans for a double wedding.

This is perhaps the least convincing happy ending wrap up scene yet. Proteus really doesn't deserve for things to go back to the way they were at the beginning of the play. He doesn't deserve either Julia or Sylvia, especially not after being foiled in the middle of an attempted rape! (Although maybe Julia taking him back so 'easily' is meant to remind the audience of the early scene in which she rips up the note, loving Proteus's name and hating her own. Maybe she doesn't think she deserves any better, even after everything Proteus has done. Which is the most upsetting aspect of this play) And this really causes the usual 'happy ending' in which both couples are reconciled and make plans for a double wedding, play completely hollow. That arguably could be seen as the worst flaw of the play, although I ended up thinking that it more undermines all of the other plays that used the happy ending contrivance unquestioningly as well! There are too many irreversible actions carried out in the rest of the play to let the ten minute happy ending play as anything but a barbed satire on the philosophy of love conquers all.

This is one of the best filmed BBC productions. The sets are full of shadows and fog, characters wandering through darkened sets and surrounded by gloriously phony foliage in the woodland section! The very best scene is the one in which Proteus is singing a love song up at Sylvia's (empty during the song) balcony in the middle of the night, as Julia first arrives. She watches from the shadows, at first delighted to see her beloved, but then as Proteus sings about his love for Sylvia we get dissolves back and forth from Proteus's yearning face to a long shot of the scene from which we can see both characters, to Julia shedding quiet tears in the dark. It is a tremendously moving scene and beautifully filmed in this production.

Perhaps one flaw in the staging is that (and it might just have been the BBC production!) it does turn a bit too much into Robin Hood in its woodland set, band of outlaws final section (Valentine even does a rope swing down from the rafters to introduce himself to Sylvia's father, as if to underline the point, so I wonder if the Robin Hood-parallels were intentional!), although just as much of a comparison would be with As You Like It. It is interesting to contrast the shot-in-actual woodland BBC adaptation of As You Like It with this one, which creates an entirely fabricated woodland idyll set for the characters to gambol about in and then similarly process out of hand-in-hand in the final image.

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