Indeed, given this load of characters, and how many will switch sides (and sometimes back again) in the course of the story, and how quickly it moves along, it can feel a little dizzying - here one scene, gone the next. The rest of the cast - with Michael Gambon and Judi Dench the most notable names - is excellent, familiar and too numerous to enumerate. Hugh Bonneville, Lord Crawley of “Downton Abbey,” is the heroic center of the “Henry VI” plays as the regent Duke of Gloucester as Henry’s Queen Margaret, a kind of run-through for Lady Macbeth, Sophie Okonedo is the other locus of power, the negative pole. He’s at his best when Richard is happiest, hacking away in battle, or plotting, dissembling and spreading rumors - “fake news” we call that now - as he works his way up.Īs the weak and religious Henry VI, Tom Sturridge comes into his own as he loses his crown, wandering the fields in his underwear, unkempt and unshaven. It’s a more extravagant performance than one might have expected from him, but also an intimate one. As Richard, Benedict Cumberbatch seems built for the role in looks and bearing - a little aristocratic, a little disquieting. )Īnd when, toward the end of the second installment, Richard begins to address the audience directly, sharing the dark intentions he hides from other characters, it’s as if everything that had come before was just a vehicle to arrive at the moment. (Robert Viglasky / Carnival Film & Television Ltd. (Indeed, the cycle begins with lines from another Shakespeare play entirely, “Troilus and Cressida.”) The whole Jack Cade’s Rebellion subplot has been excised, taking with it the line, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” (I thought it best to prepare you.) Their aim, said Cooke, was to examine “how many bad decisions does it take to put a psychopath in power, and anything that didn’t relate to that we got rid of.” The text has been cut and rearranged characters have been conflated, the odd line of dialogue reassigned, the boundaries between the original plays erased.
They’ve compressed four plays into three, combining the less-staged “Henry VI” plays, parts 1 through 3, with the popular “Richard III.” Indeed, such combinations seem historically to have been the rule, “Part 1” having rarely been staged on its own.
BBC HENRY IV PART 1 SERIES
The new series settles for one, Dominic Cooke, with the text adapted by Cooke and Ben Power (who co-wrote the screenplay for the earlier “Richard II”). The earlier “Hollow Crown” assigned its four plays to three different directors and came in a variety of styles. It recounts the history of the houses of Lancaster and York as they vie for control of England across much of the 15th century, and if you’re a viewer whose conception of warring houses comes mostly from “Game of Thrones,” these films seem to have been made, in part, with you in mind. Three years after the BBC filmed the four Elizabethan docudramas known as “The Henriad” - “Richard II,” “Henry IV” (parts 1 and 2) and “Henry V” - as “The Hollow Crown,” it picks up the history with “The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses,” which premieres in the U.S. Four centuries on, we’re still stealing from and staging him. Shakespeare is the guy, your one-stop author for every sort of person and condition and situation - everything you need to comprehend the strange, messy richness of human life is encompassed within his collected works.
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