TSI 2010 - Some Thoughts on the BBC Shakespeare

As part of the TSI 2010 first week, tonight we watched the BBC production of 1 Henry IV (1979) with Jon Finch (who also played Macbeth in Roman Polanski’s 1971 film) as Henry IV, David Gwillim as Hal, Anthony Quayle as Falstaff, and Tim Piggott-Smith as Hotspur. The BBC films tend to provoke a fairly tepid response from both critics and students. It’s great to have an available version of each of Shakespeare’s plays, especially those that rarely see time on film, but that benefit is not always followed up by an entertaining or, in some cases, even a completely watchable production.

I remember watching these as a junior high and high school student when they originally aired and being struck by an unfortunate sameness to them. Look at the costumes in Midsummer Night’s Dream (directed by Elijah Moshinsky) and Othello (directed by Jonathan Miller), for example; it’s as if the actors from Act 1, scene 1 of the former walked right into the senate scene of the latter.

After watching a number of these, you should get a pretty clear sense of the BBC’s goal. They wanted to get an archival production committed to video without any directorial flourishes that might have “dated” the production for viewers far into the future. The costumes are distinctly renaissance-y, the character interpretations straightforward, and the direction focused primarily on presenting the language rather than creating a context for the language; it’s museum theater on videotape.

David Giles’ 1 Henry IV, which coasts along on some very strong acting by its principals, particularly Quayle, is among the better productions. But I still felt it had a certain static quality that would give me a little concern if I were showing the entire 155 minutes to a high school class. I don’t mean that it lacks action and fails to satisfy the Braveheart and Gladiator standards for battle violence (that’s apples to oranges), but that Giles, like many of the other BBC Shakespeare directors, hasn’t given the play’s narrative much shape. Competent scenes follows competent scene without much sense of where it’s all going.

Take Quayle’s Falstaff. His scenes with Gwillim through the first part of the play are wonderful and his Falstaff is a man who has settled into his braggadocio and deceits, both of self and others, like comfortable old clothes. There is also a vulnerability about him, which Quayle ties to his age more than his overindulgences, that evokes a fair amount of sympathy no matter what outrageousness he’s perpetrating.

Then, in Act 4, when the play turns to battle scenes, his Falstaff begins rather abruptly to speak directly to the camera. Yes, these are his first scenes alone (4.2, 5.2, 5.3, and 5.4) and his speeches are necessarily monologues, though they tend to be directed to dead bodies. Looking into the camera, though, makes the viewer a participant in the action. It’s as if we’ve replaced Hal as his audience, and Falstaff needs an audience. But breaking the fourth wall here also shifts an arrangement Giles has previously made with the audience, that we are watching these characters in some far off world populated primarily by Shakespeare’s language. Quayle’s looking at the camera is jarring, in part because it shifts our relationship to Falstaff’s character, deviating from both the tone of the production and the direction this Falstaff has established.

One could argue that such a shift is appropriate because, as Gail Kern Paster suggested earlier this week, Falstaff’s actions during the battle have consequences in the way that his shenanigans in Eastcheap do not. But how does breaking the fourth wall amplify this? How does the winking “you’re in on this” involvement of audience bring the character to some logical conclusion in this production? The Falstaff who looks at us knows himself more completely, knows his villainy and shortcomings more casually, lacks our sympathy, betrays more of a calculating nature. The choice may serve to best present the speeches he’s making in the play’s latter part, but it disconnects Falstaff a bit from the character established prior.

I was also struck by another aspect to the BBC’s museum theater approach that amplifies the static feeling of their productions. The films are what Shakespeare-on-film critic Samuel Crowl would refer to as “theatrical,” that is they are films of stage productions. The BBC has removed the literal theatrical stage, but the physical sense of it is still there – the shots are confined to cramped locations, there are no landscapes or depictions of the world without characters (no establishing shots for example), the camera is limited to a theatrical audience’s viewpoint, and nearly all the camera movement (pans, tilts, tracking shots) and perspective (high and low angle, long shots) we associate with movies is absent.

But in a theater there is sound. Not necessarily music or even the constant voices of acting, but the sound of an audience experiencing live theater – laughing, shifting in their seats, gasping, coughing, breathing. The air in a theater is alive, vital. Film cannot capture this organic symbiosis of actor and audience. It replaces it, in fact, with relentless soundtrack noise – orchestrated music that swells and ebbs with the story’s emotional fluctuations, life sounds associated with the setting, popular music inserted into the narrative. When you watch the BBC productions, what you get is an absence of both. Essentially you get the actors speaking their lines into dead air. It’s disconcerting and, for me, it has the effect of sucking a lot of life out of some of the most beautiful poetry ever put to action.

The medium does make a difference. And that’s something I think the BBC Shakespeare never understood.

Randall

photo credit: Anthony Quayle as Falstaff in the BBC Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1.

RE: Henry V - Beware the Babakitis

Film Buffs, indeed,

What a sprightly re-view of the Henry V films. When Randall first announced "Monday Night Shakepeare," I was reading Henry V and my eye fell on the perfect motto: "Therefore, my lords, omit no happy hour" (I.ii.300). Indeed, apparently Randall and Derek got all the way to act four of Peter Babakitis before the Rogue Ales (that's Ashland, Oregon) Shakespeare Stout ran out.

But Randall's conclusion, that Babakitis is "the worst version of Shakespeare on screen" is a challenge to us all. Surely … I have not seen Babakitis yet, so I'll have to stick to the comparative "rilly bad" rather than worst. I'm going to leave out Prospero's Books because I may just be too dim-witted for it, whereas some people I know and (used to) respect have proclaimed its greatness. Except for the novel concept that The Tempest's deserted island, apart from Caliban and Ariel, is inhabited by 500 to 600 nudists, heretofore overlooked, I find the film unwatchable.

Randall's comment that Olivier yells a lot in Henry V is fair, though the single most scenery-chewing "great" actor in Shakespeare film is John Barrymore as Mercutio in George Cukor's Romeo and Juliet (1936), but then he really must raise his voice to be heard over the swelling score. But the worst…

Think of Hamlet, directed by Clestino Coronado (1977), "a triumph…extraordinary visceral appeal…raw life, style and sense of imagination…stunning immediacy which often has the hair crawling on the back of the neck." Helen Mirren as Gertrude and Ophelia and Quentin Crisp, that gay icon of the seventies, author of The Naked Civil Servant, as Polonius. Anthony Meyer and David Meyer play Hamlet. What? Mirren doubles while the identical Meyer twins halve themselves (?!?) in order to emphasize Hamlet's "split personality." Oh, and they play him in the nude. In the buff. Not one nude twin for the inner Hamlet and the other in "too too sullied" dress, the "nighted color" of mourning. No. They are both naked. If you can film in 16mm, this one may be in 7 1/2mm. Color by Crayola (the pre-school beginner's box). The only redeeming feature is Mirren able to keep a straight face for all 67 minutes.

So the razzberry goes to … "The Naked Hamlet."

Gil

Henry V - Beware the Babakitis

Shakespeare Film Buffs,

Derek and I have been participating in something we call "Monday Night Shakespeare," an attempt to watch a different Shakespeare film every Monday night. We've been going through productions of Henry V because that's what we're teaching right now and also it's what the William Shakespeare Experience is discussing. As Hannibal Smith used to say on The A-Team, "I love it when a plan comes together."

We started with the Olivier, the first notable Henry V on film. It was the second time I've seen it, but the first time I really understood its propagandistic qualities. I still think they're easy to overlook; Olivier chooses a pretty straight line through the play, and funding from the British Ministry of Information or not, I'll never be able to see the vain and idle and senile French as analogs for the Nazi threat. I also tire of Olivier's declamatory style a bit, although this may be largely due to the empathetic experience I have when I show scenes to my high school students who, reared in a more realistic film culture, struggle with Olivier's cartoonish colors, circus atmosphere, and persistent yelling of his lines. (One student compared Olivier's Henry to Errol Flynn's Robin Hood.)

Their discomfort grows when we juxtapose Olivier's yelling with Branagh's quiet intensity (watch both "tennis balls, my liege" scenes back-to-back). In many ways, I find Branagh's Henry V to be not only the best of Branagh's Shakespeare films but also one of the best Shakespeare films, period. (Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing might take the honor if it didn't feature the unfortunate Keanu Reeves.)

If you type "Henry V" into YouTube's search field, almost every result will be a scene from the Branagh: the tennis balls scene, the French court, and mostly the St. Crispin's Day speech. Branagh's eye throughout the film is firmly fixed on Shakespeare; he's not yet overwhelmed by his love of film and its history and the fanciful visions it can realize as he is with Love's Labor's Lost and As You Like It. Even his Hamlet, which I love, is largely homage to the power of film ― that palace hall with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, Polonius's antechamber with his curtained bed in which hides his mistress, the padded room for the crazy Ophelia (there's a padded room at Blenheim?), the vasty fields of Denmark where Hamlet watches Fortinbras's troops pass, the actual graveyard (not one, but five skulls!), Fortinbras's troops surrounding Elsinore. Such vistas! Such scope! Such cinematography! It's like Dr. Zhivago in iambic pentameter!

Branagh's Henry V is quieter, understated, heroic but full of complex character. He should watch it every week before he makes his next movie. And I'd ask Peter Babakitis to do the same. Peter: watch the Branagh! Learn a little something about both film-making and Shakespeare.

You probably haven't heard of Peter Babakitis. I hadn't either until last fall when I was doing my annual scope for new Shakespeare films. As a completist, I try to keep my collection up to date. So the presence of a new Shakespearean history play on DVD was intriguing. I found a comment from Babakitis, who wanted to promote his film through a series of school visits and discussions and sent out a statement about his vision for the play, writing: "I was attracted by this play because I thought it would be fascinating to get into the mind of this rather cold-blooded killer who believes he's doing God's work … Shakespeare gives us a sinister underside to the glory of conquest; an aspect of the play that I thought was lacking in other productions that I've seen."

This places the Babakitis at a far end of Derek's dichotomous scale, occupied at the other end by Olivier's hero king. Branagh lives in the middle with his more nuanced, realistic portrayal. Babakitis seeks to round out the portrayals, telling us he envisions Henry as a "cold-blooded killer" and subtitling his DVD with the tagline, "Warrior. Champion. Terrorist. King."

Terrorist? Really? Derek and I watched with great anticipation. Would this interpretation be imposed on the text? Or would Babakitis have unearthed lines and readings that would reveal the darker side of warcraft and Henry's character?

Well, it turns out that what Babakitis means by "terrorist" is that he will take you, the viewer, and subject you to probably unlawful acts of interpretive violence and so-called film-making. It's not Henry who's the terrorist; it's Babakitis.

For one, it's difficult to articulate fully the great talent actors bring to Shakespeare's language and to creating consistent characters until you're face to face with those who don't. All those words! They're really important! People might not get it. Babakitis attempts to add significance to Shakespeare's language (because most of the actors don't) by recording all of it in an echo chamber. Or his basement. Not sure which. The result for us was a stupefying effect, first characterized by stunned disbelief, then eventually drowned out by both Derek and I intoning "please, make it stop!"

In addition, at some point Babakitis must have worried that his audience would be bored by simply watching these characters stand around and talk, even with their echo-y voices. So he applied some super neat computer digital effects. Scenes change color as the camera cuts from speaker to speaker. The echo effect drops out and/or intensifies within scenes. Occasionally he throws in a weird posterizing effect. Add a punk girl playing Chorus who seems to drift randomly through geographic regions and structures that have nothing to do with the play. And salt with relentless close-ups of Babakitis's seemingly disembodied head speaking lines, lines, lines that must have serious meaning, meaning, meaning about something, thing, thing.

Finally, the interpretation meant to reveal the "sinister underside to the glory of conquest" never really materializes. Instead the film reveals the sinister effect of shooting a film at your local park, enjoining your friends to play major characters, and then spending hours at your computer gluing the whole thing together in iMovie. O brave new world that has such creatures in it!

On the back of my DVD, Sarah Hatchuel is quoted as saying "Peter Babakitis's Henry V … occupies a distinctive place in Shakespearean film-making." Yes it does; it is the worst version of Shakespeare on screen I have ever seen. And to put that in some context, I actually possess a number of Shakespeare porn films ― Hotel O, A Midsummer Night's Cream, Hamlet: For the Love of Ophelia. Not one of them is as unwatchable as Babakitis's Henry V.

O, for a muse of fire, with which to purge this film from my collection,
Randall

The Tragedy of Shylock, the Merchant of Venice

Team Shakespeare Awesome,

Ernst credits me with e-mails I haven't written yet. Either he's got a time machine, or he wishes I were writing about Shylock instead of Antonio. So do I. So …

One last foray into the world of Merchant of Venice productions. I've mentioned the Michael Radford film, which stars Jeremy Irons (Antonio), Joseph Fiennes (Bassanio), Al Pacino (Shylock), and Lynn Collins (Portia). I saw it on the big screen when it first ran in 2004, and didn't like it. At the time I thought Radford fell into the common trap of putting Shakespeare on a pedestal – too much reverence and solemnity – putting together the kind of thing that might be made if Merchant-Ivory decided to do Shakespeare. Coming out of the theater I remember complaining that Radford had removed anything from the text that might have been considered remotely funny. In the opening scene, for example, Gratiano's lines are drastically reduced, and emphasis is placed on Antonio's melancholy throughout. Later Lancelet Gobbo is reduced to a transient character. And Morocco and Arragon are but brief amuses bouches to the heavy meal to follow between Portia and Shylock.

Albeit beautifully shot and acted, the movie felt, as I remember it, leaden and slow and self-consciously portentous. Isn't Merchant of Venice supposed to be a "comedy"?

Seeing it again this month (we showed it at my school as a Film Club screening to benefit the ninth graders who were reading it – seven showed up), I came away with an entirely different impression. Radford opens the film with the hurlyburly of the Rialto – large crowd, red-hatted Jews mixed with jeering Christians, bare-breasted prostitutes, religious zealots declaiming from a boat below the bridge. An altercation. A Jewish man is thrown off the bridge. Shylock acknowledges Antonio. Antonio spits on him. So from the get-go we have Shylock the mistreated, caught in an anti-semitic, unjust community. Later, when Bassanio comes to ask for money, you can see Pacino's Shylock almost amused at the irony. His little spate of forgetfulness about the terms of the bond – "I had forgot … three months … you told me so" – is his way of forcing Antonio to consider his ironic/hypocritical request, but not much more than that. Gone is the brief aside: "I hate him for he is a Christian." The anger, when it comes, is personal, not cultural. Pacino's Shylock is a man of great pride and self-assurance. His choices, like the "merry bond," are his assertion of that pride, but one does not get the sense that either man takes it seriously on a legal level.

So how do we get to that awful moment in the court scene where Shylock is going to hack off a chunk of Antonio? For Radford it comes, as I'm sure it does for many directors, with the loss of Jessica. Radford creates a scene, somewhere between Act 2, scene 6 and Act 3, scene 1, where Shylock returns home to an empty house. He realizes she's gone, moans "Jessica" and slumps into a corner, weeping. When next we see him, it's the "What news from the Rialto" scene, in an establishment of public dalliance which features Salarino with his face buried between some prostitute's ample breasts. It's not like Sal and Sol happened to cross paths with Shylock. Pacino's Shylock has clearly sought them out, and his first words to them, as they are in the text, are:

"You knew, none so well, none so well as you, of my daughter's flight."

I learned something about the play at this point. It doesn't take an enlightened director, cutting and pasting, to create a complex, heart-rending Shylock with whom the audience can sympathize and side. It's in the lines. If Shakespeare was an anti-semite, then he couldn't help himself when it came to writing real characters. Biases evaporate. Ernst suggests that he's taking a cue from Marlowe. I don't see it. I reread The Jew of Malta when we did Titus Andronicus, and Barabas, even at the beginning, pales in comparison to Shylock. Barabas is eloquent in defense of his Jewishness, but it's still a stereotype. Compare:

BARABAS
What more may Heaven do for earthly man
Than thus to pour out plenty in their laps,
Ripping the bowels of the earth for them,
Making the seas their servants, and the winds
To drive their substance with successful blasts?
Who hateth me but for my happiness?
Or who is honoured now but for his wealth?
Rather had I a Jew be hated thus,
Than pitied in a Christian poverty:
For I can see no fruits in all their faith,
But malice, falsehood, and excessive pride,
Which methinks fits not their profession.
Haply some hapless man hath conscience,
And for his conscience lives in beggary.
They say we are a scattered nation:
I cannot tell, but we have scrambled up
More wealth by far than those that brag of faith. (Act 1, sc. 1)

SHYLOCK
I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affectations, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. (Act 3, scene 1)

Marlowe's Jew is defending Jewishness by separating himself and holding himself above the "malice, falsehood, and excessive pride" of Christians. Shylock, on the other hand, establishes his argument on common human ground, not what makes him different but what makes him the same. I will commit a sin of assumption here, and wonder what effect the two speeches might have had on a Renaissance play-goer. Eloquence in the mouth of one who says he's better than you may elicit animosity, perhaps boos commensurate with the joy of rejecting the proud villain. But how to react, if you live in a country that has expelled Jews, if maybe you attended Marlowe's play a few years ago, if you're a groundling and likely to believe the worst (don't they use human blood in their strange sacrifices?) of the Jews? Even then, Shakespeare's lines must give one pause. One may not, in the end, sympathize with the Jew, but one must acknowledge that if he is treated badly, he may respond in kind. Thus, even without sympathy, Shakespeare establishes the interconnectedness and responsibility one group has for another, even disrespected group, and he establishes it by appealing to each character's common humanity.

I had thought of Shylock in more stereotypical terms, and I worried about having to defend Shakespeare, to explain away anti-semitism. You know, the "my daughter, my ducats" kind of thing. Ah, that Shylock. Can't tell his money from his daughter. But here again, Shakespeare has us fooled. The "my daughter, my ducats" line does not come from Shylock. It's Solanio, not the most trustworthy reporter, mocking Shylock. Notice how many times he uses "ducats" in the speech (2.8.12-23). Six! This is caricature. And when Shylock catches up with Solanio and Salarino in Radford's vision, it's all about Jessica. That's his real pain.

Yes, when Tubal shows up they talk money, specifically Jessica's expenditures. Shylock talks of wishing Jessica dead. Pacino does it with a weariness, so that the coffin is less about revenge than burying the pain. The key moment is Tubal's account of Jessica's unloading the cherished ring for a monkey. Radford cuts away, depicting the moment. Cute monkey. (But he's setting you up for a later moment.)

This gets us to the court scene. Pacino's Shylock here is not mad, not histrionic, just determined that in this world where he is spit upon, where Christians steal the only family he has left, where he is mocked in the streets by hypocrites, he will have a moment of justice -- his bond. He has taken refuge in the letter of the law, the only effective weapon against a double-dealing community. I like the moment when Portia asks him if he has brought a physician to attend to Antonio. Pacino just shrugs and says quietly "is it so nominated in the bond?" For Pacino the bond is not his revenge, it is merely a weapon with which he can hold Christians accountable for their own actions.

And it is his downfall. Live by the letter of the law, die by the letter of the law. Pacino's Shylock is a smart man and knows immediately that he has overstepped when Portia notes "there is something else." And then it is all crumbling, backpedaling, retreat through "I am content" to "I am not well." In the Radford this is a powerful scene, played to its tragic fullness by Pacino. What we are asked to realize is that Shylock's struggle against injustice and hypocrisy is heroic, but that he succumbs to the flaw of not knowing when to quit, of mistaking the value of the ends for the value of the means. Antonio dead is vengeance, not justice. And thus, Radford and Pacino's Shylock is a tragic hero. The Merchant of Venice, in their hands, is not comedy but tragedy, which explains the absence of the play's more persistent levity, and the relative flatness of Act 5's return to Belmont.

Maybe this is how, after WWII, you have to play it, but I very much liked the impact the play had on me when I saw it in this light. What's more, it's far more amazing to me how easy it is to find this tragedy beneath the surface of the comedy. It's in the lines, and more specifically, it's in Shylock's lines.

Radford gives us one more sign that we are watching tragedy. The modern viewer seems most aware of tragedy when it is accompanied by irony. I would argue that his explains some of the ongoing popularity of Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet with high school students, as well as Luhrmann's version with its ironic volume turned further up by having Romeo actually still alive, but fatally poisoned, when Juliet wakes up. Radford's ironic touch is far more lyrical. After the last line of the play, the director closes with a gorgeous shot of robed men standing in boats with bows and arrows, shooting fish in the glassy waters around Belmont. The camera pulls back to reveal Jessica, watching them, then tilts down to her hands. On her finger is the ring that Radford showed us traded for the monkey. That scene, then, becomes an imagined event, a figment of Shylock's tortured imagination. Jessica never gave up the ring, never traded it for an animal (another report that's unreliable). What's more, her caress of it suggests that she cherishes it, and the parents that it stands for. The ring, then, becomes a symbol of Shylock's overstepping, of the flaw in his search for justice. Jessica's love, which drove him to attempt to punish Antonio, was and is still available to him, but now, like Oedipus, he is cast out.

Yours,
Randall

Merchant of Venice - Oooooh!

Shakespeares All:

I appreciate Randall's extended discussions of Shylock, whose character, as I say above, may really be the most noteworthy creation in this play. Portia is sweet. magical, racist, and able to deliver an extremely well-wrought set-piece on Mercy, but she lacks flesh and blood – ultimately. Most of the others as well.

But in Shylock, Shakespeare takes a hint from Marlowe, who begins his play by humanizing Barabas. (After this beginning, however, Barabas falls apart as a human and becomes a monster "overreacher"-in-bloody deeds. I have occasionally wondered whether or not either a deadline or his premature death got to Marlowe and the play was either hurried through to get to a crowd-pleasing production or finished by someone else.) But Shakespeare would seem to have poured considerable thought into the making and the psychology of Shylock.

I think we are waiting for Gilbert's weighty shoe to drop, and then, unless he sends us off in other directions, move on. I will conclude, however, by quoting a section from Manohla Dargis's review of Black Book, a film about a Dutch Jew who has an affair with a Nazi officer during the War AND a film, which, despite its apparent cynicism, many writers have praised:

"Despite the non-Hollywood genesis of the project, Black Book relies on the same formula that has fueled Mr. Verhoeven’s big-studio career, namely frenzied sex and violence, bodies thrashing with the ecstasy of coitus and thrashing into paroxysms of death, sometimes at the same time. The thrashing rarely lets up in Black Book, a film in which a Jewish woman’s body is saved from the off-camera death camps, gas chambers and ovens to become a site of negotiation, a means of survival and an erotic spectacle. Abused and misused, stripped and stripped again, Rachel — named, it’s worth noting, for the mother of Israel — survives by masking that body with a putatively Aryan disguise. She also falls for a Nazi.

"Not any old Nazi, but the head of the Gestapo in The Hague, where Rachel has landed after fleeing an ambush that claims her brother and parents. Now working for the resistance, Rachel signs up for the ultimate Mata Hari assignment and agrees to bed Ludwig Müntze (Sebastian Koch) so she can uncover Gestapo secrets. She does that and more. After dyeing her hair a brassy blond, Rachel insinuates herself into the superdashing Nazi’s confidences and, soon enough, his bedroom. It takes just one glance at the top of her head with its creeping dark roots for Müntze to guess the truth. Grasping her naked breasts in her hands, Rachel pleads her case with Shakespearean gravitas, 'Hath not a Jew, er, eyes?'

"Yowza! In truth, Rachel — now called Ellis — asks of her breasts and then her hips, 'Are these Jewish?' Seduced by the pertness of her argument or perhaps that of her physicality, attractively framed by black garters and stockings, Müntze answers her question silently but firmly."

Yowza, yourselves.
Ernst

RE: Ian McKellan's Richard III

Ernst Noted:

I think I remember that, although I may confuse it with the worst Shakespeare performance I have ever seen, the retiring Larry Wismer's attempt at King Lear many years ago. Both Lear and Kent were played by elderly 5'2" drama profs who wore sneakers and looked like refugees from a retirement home. You couldn't tell the difference between Edgar and Edmund. And the costuming was stone-age-ish with various characters wearing grass-and-twig circlets on their heads, one of which was left hanging from the scenery as someone left the stage. A hand reached back and grabbed it about two minutes later. NOT a good moment. Whatever the case, I wouldn't trust ANY Bush-branch today. Not at all.

Ernst

Ian McKellan's Richard III

Hey all, indeed,

Cindy and Ernst have noted the 1995 Ian McKellen film of Richard III. The Royal Shakespeare actually toured this world-wide as a pre-film play, and I saw it in Denver. It was staged in Denver's huge Buell Theatre, maybe 2,500 seats. I went with CSU's wonderful Shakespeare prof, Dick Henze. We had tickets in the third (?) balcony. I remember most that the RSC refused to be miked, unlike every travelling Broadway musical, and the outrage from both the Denver audience and the management of the theatre was deafening.

Dick and I, in the third balcony, did not miss a line (but one must admit that both of us knew most of the play by heart), but to soothe the savage whining, the theatre management promised they would never allow the Royal Shakespeare to return to Denver. How about them Broncos? What we did take from the production was its brown-shirt hues, and the point about a fascist junta. The company was travelling light (from Europe on its way to Japan) so the staging was office tables and Nazi-like flags. Impressive acting quality (and, boy, did they know how to speak Shakespeare lines), but Dick and I agreed that the Nazi point was OK about power-seizing, but did little to illuminate the play or Richard other than as a vicious bureaucrat. I can't place my program, but the cast list was impressive.

Then the film, made after the company returned from its international tour. Now, all the vast panorama of film and effects were available, as well as expanding the cast to include a "star" in every role. Set sometime in the '20s, it is 1 hour, 44 minutes, very brisk for Shakespeare's second longest play (Hamlet is longer). So, no, Cindy, there is no Margaret, and for that matter there is no horse, of course. Most everyone else is there, but compacted. Tyrell is Richard's all-purpose murderer, from cutting Clarence's throat in a prison bath (strangely, there are five bathtubs side-by-side in a deserted room, and, as you must guess, I miss the butt of malmsey) to garroting Buckingham just before the final battle. Thus, it must be Tyrell under Lord River's bed; as Rivers is enduring fellatio in a hotel bed, a sword is thrust up through the mattress and spitted through his heart (Cindy said her then-boyfriend could not look, but my guess it was not tender sensibility but archetypal male fear that shriveled his timbers -- you know, the old 'sliding down a banister that turns into a razor blade' terror).

I'm not sure I'd call McKellen "fun"; he is quite sympathetic early on, then becomes a caricature toward the end. He is given to triumphant giggles (sort of verbal "high-fives" after he has fooled the Lord Mayor or Queen Elizabeth). Half his opening soliloquy is delivered at a '20s victory ball, after a torch singer has sung all of a swing song, "Come Live with Me and Be My Love." The "Now is the winter of my discontent" part is greeted with appreciative laughter from the partying Yorkists; irony is available only because a silent precredit scene shows Richard, in a gas mask, shooting Prince Edward (Henry VI's son) in the forehead. He then continues in the men's room while at a urinal, and describes his deformity and its resultant motivation to himself in a mirror, and finally he faces the film audience directly to declare "I am determined to prove a villain" and "plots have I laid." And away we go.

The seduction of Anne (in a morgue over Prince Edward's body) is still hard to comprehend. I got it for the first time, I think, on this most recent reading of the play, though after she accepts the ring, Richard dances up a stairwell, gimpy leg and all. Later, he seems to be sexually aroused by murder. When he receives an envelope with the late Clarence's glasses in it, he ignores the slinky Anne (Kristen Scott Thomas) waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs, satisfied, perhaps.

Anyway, the mis-en-scene counts for much -- massive buildings, corridors, all grey; barren fields; chambers deserted or filled with crowds to cheer the crowning of Richard (one expects he will begin his first regal address, "Deutsches volks genossen..." (pardon my spelling). I find the film interesting, yet it doesn't teach me much. And the ending is a shambles. None of the courage I see in the play or in my recent reading of history. Tanks, machine guns, armored cars (a few horses were paraded to stables before the battle). Richard's conscience is sort of there as a few voices while he sleeps, whereas Richmond prepares for battle by shagging the naked Elizabeth, his new bride (who says there is no sex in Shakespeare?) before putting on his pants and mounting [sic] his armored car with its machine gun.

Then, Richard's force is destroyed by bombs (Stanley is an air force general), and Richard's armored car gets stuck driving up a stone staircase -- Cindy is right; his "a horse, a horse" is a howler. Then, alone, he climbs high onto the scaffolding of one of those vacant industrial buildings that are cliches in most police-action TV dramas, pursued by young Richmond with his pistol. Up and up they go, until Richard tries to cross an exposed I-beam and is shot and falls, many stories into the bomb-induced conflagration (or hell, if you have any imagination left). And it ends with another swing song: "I'm Sitting on Top of the World" that has a line, "Like humpty-dumpty, I'm going to fall."

Good film, but not good Shakespeare. Still there are scenes, I would show a class were I teaching it. If there were world enough and time, maybe Randall and I can work on an analysis of the imagery here and in Olivier's 1955 version. Do I remember correctly, that at the end of the Olivier, his crown is hanging on the branch of a bush?

Gilbert

RE: Richard III - Film Version, 1994

Cindy's comments on this film, portions of which I have seen in a next room someplace, sent me looking for write-ups to IMDb (Internet Movie Database). There were surprisingly few reviews of much depth, however. The best I found was in the San Francisco Chronicle, which I include with three other excerpts below.

Ernst

1. Does Richard have a conscience? Can evil such as his triumph completely, with no recompense expected on this side of the grave? Can the British monarchy exist without venom and corruption filtering up to the highest levels? These are a few of the more cogent questions addressed by Richard III, and McKellan and director Richard Loncraine make sure that they remain intact in the final version of the film.

In its own bloody way, Richard III is as enjoyable to watch as any recent screen production of Shakespeare, and the shift to the 1930s with its attendant Nazi imagery (parallels between Richard III and Hitler abound) gives the film a twist that conventional productions do not have. If there's a flaw to the movie, it's that this is one of Shakespeare's least ambitious and less thematically rich plays. Nevertheless, since the only memorable motion picture version is Lawrence Olivier's 1956 version, Richard III doesn't suffer from overexposure, and this new interpretation offers an unconventional -- and easily accessible -- perspective.

--James Berardinelli

2. There are other deft touches which distinguish the production. Casting the Queen Elizabeth and Earl Rivers roles as Americans not only lends international appeal to the film but also paints those characters as outsiders to the established York family. The set design is imaginative, with a miniaturized industrial-age London teeming with uniformed officers and the imposing, concrete Tower of London looming at the edge of town (actually an abandoned power station on the Thames, built in the 1930s). The rally that precedes Richard's coronation includes art deco-style murals (reminiscent of 1920s Soviet worker poster) in the back rooms as well as huge red banners decorating the arena whose central logo, a black boar, easily stands in for a swastika.

–Scott Deskin

3. The sinister mood continues as McKellan and director Richard Loncraine manage to implicate the audience in Richard's wickedness by having him deliver his monologues directly to the camera. This may not sound like much but, maybe because no one does this in the movies (except, occasionally, stand up comics) it has surprising power. (Laurence Olivier did it too in his 1955 version, to lesser effect, maybe because close-ups have never been as close as they are these days.) There's something sly in the way this movie surprises and draws us in. When Richard begins his "Now is the winter of our discontent..." soliloquy, it takes the form of a victory speech at his brother's coronation. But then he leaves the hall and begins to mutter; by the time the more personal sections of the speech come along -- where Richard reveals his evil core -- he's alone, relieving himself in a urinal. His eye catches the camera in the mirror and suddenly, he isn't talking to himself anymore. He's talking directly to us.

This thoughtful playfulness in the adaptation is so delightful that I found myself willing to forgive it some misses. The play has been cut down and streamlined so much that it pops from event to event without pausing to fill us in on background and motives, like a comic book version of the classic. Thus, Clarence of Gloucester is sentenced to death for no apparent reason, and within a few moments he's executed. Richard says he plans to wed Lady Anne and the next thing we know it's a done deal. Speeches are cut back to the bare bone, so at times it sounds like a Greatest Hits of the 1600s spot: "That I may die to look upon death no more..." and "A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"

--Stacey Richter

4. Right Time for "Richard III": The lowdown on Ian McKellen's '30s melodrama

by Mick LaSalle

Richard III combines a shrewd understanding of Shakespeare with a healthy, low-brow approach to cinema. The result is the best Shakespeare on screen since Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing.

Star Ian McKellen, who wrote the adaptation, and Richard Loncraine, who directed it, avoid the play's two pitfalls -- namely, comedy and drama. Err too much on the side of drama with Richard III, and you lose the humor. Err too much on the side of comedy, and you have a shambles.

McKellen and Loncraine split the difference here and give us what Shakespeare intended -- a melodrama. Along the way, they give us a lot of things Shakespeare didn't intend but might have found interesting: a new setting, new scenes (but no new dialogue) and lots of tanks, airplanes and machine guns.

Richard III moves the action of the Shakespeare play to a fictional Britain some time in the late 1930s. The country is in the midst of a civil war between the houses of York (Richard's side) and Lancaster. The war ends when Richard (McKellen) drives a tank through Lancaster headquarters and kills King Henry VI and his son.

It's a brazen opening to a film that, unlike many other literary adaptations, never seems uncomfortable being a movie. Richard III is a wholehearted embrace of movie-ness, an unembarrassed wallow in filmhood. The film makers know that with Richard III the bigger, the wilder, the crazier things get, the better, so long as the actors can match the movie's scale -- yet play it straight.

McKellen sets the tone. He makes Richard an appealing man, despite the hunchback, the limp and the useless left arm. He never acts like a sneak but like a sincere person. You'd believe his lies, too -- except that you know his real intentions from his asides and soliloquies spoken directly to the camera.

His first words in the film are public. He's at a banquet celebrating the Yorkist victory. The dance band is belting out a swing tune. Richard, the Duke of Gloucester, takes the microphone and toasts his brother, King Edward: "Now is the winter of our discontent . . ."

He says the friendly half of his speech there but finishes it privately in the men's room, while standing at the urinal: He is ugly. He wasn't made for peace and love. So he's going to be a villain and mess everybody up.

A good rule of thumb for Richard III is that if it's not fun, somebody's doing something wrong. Nothing's wrong here. Some of the unexpected visual touches are brilliant, others simply entertaining. But the picture never stops coming at you.

Switching the setting to the 1930s works as more than a gimmick. It makes the barbarism more immediate, while reminding us of the streak in human nature that has given rise to even worse atrocities this century. The '30s setting also allows for the novel touch of King Edward's wife Elizabeth (Annette Bening), and her brother, Rivers (Robert Downey Jr.), being played as Americans.

Bening is radiant as Elizabeth. Her recent roles have not been flattering to her nor have shown what she can do. But here -- as the fiercely intelligent and desperate queen of a dying monarch -- she makes the best case for herself as a film star since The Grifters.

The screenplay trims the play by about a third. I would have loved to have seen Bening in the scene in which Elizabeth begs the mad queen Margaret to teach her how to curse, but alas, 'tis gone. And the scene in which Clarence begs the paid assassins for his life is a bare shell of itself, even though Clarence is played by none other than Nigel Hawthorne.

But the cuts give the film velocity, and -- unlike in the film version of Othello -- they don't diminish our understanding of the central character. Richard's journey is complete.

Despite added scenes, the film only makes one addition to Shakespeare's text, a swing number, "Come Live With Me and Be My Love." Shakespeare didn't write it. The lyrics are a conflation of two poems: Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd to His Lover" and Sir Walter Raleigh's "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd.''

It's a witty touch that makes people in the know feel smart.

–Mick Lasalle (San Francisco Chronicle, 1/19/06)

Richard III - Film Version, 1994

Hey all!

A couple of weeks ago, PBS broadcast the 1994 version of Richard III with Ian McKellan as our beloved Dastardly Dick. I saw it when it came out and liked it then, despite my cowardly boyfriend, at the time, who buried his head in my shoulder during the scene when the queen's brother is skewered from under the bed. So much for the expression on the character's face being one of ecstasy, eh?

Has anybody else seen this one? I would love hearing your thoughts. Quick thoughts: loved Maggie Smith, as always. Ian McKellan, fun. I howled during his "a horse, as horse..." lament. The scene where the kingdom rallies behind Richard? The Nazi imagery? chilling.

Question: where was Margaret? Did I miss her amidst the sea of exams I was grading whilst Richard III was on my telly?

Cindy

Love's Labor's Lost - Review (Branagh)

Gentlemen,

Ernst asked about productions. I was going to write about the Cal Shakes production I saw in Orinda five years ago, but I didn't make any notes on the play nor can I remember very much. Press clippings tell me it was a good show, but little of it comes back to me. For these moments there is always film. Messieurs Findlay attended the Shakespeare-on-Screen Centenary Conference (the irony of which one of us may go into at a later date, probably when we read King John) in Spain in 1999. There, we met maybe 75% of the world's academic experts on Shakespearean films. The vibe was congenial and, a welcome shock to those who also attend the regular Shakespeare crit conferences, replete with comaraderie. I thought it was interesting though how frequently participants seemed to gently justify their particular corner of the lit/crit world even while surrounded by the converted. Apparently, producing scholarly material on the cinematic Shakespeare experience is akin to offering graduate courses on "Queer Theories of Star Trek" or "Semiotics and Sanford and Son." But, call me a groundling, I'm all for it. And so, as we go forward, I'm interested in throwing out some criticism of various film productions of the plays we're reading.

And so: Mike and I watched Kenneth Branagh's 2000 film production of Love's Labour's Lost, starring Branagh (as Berowne), Alessandro Nivola (as Ferdinand), Natascha McElhone (as Rosaline), Richard Briers (as Nathaniel), Geraldine McEwan (as Holofernia [sic] ), Nathan Lane (as Nathan Lane ... uh ... Costard), and, depressingly, Alicia Silverstone (as the Princess).

From a production viewpoint, Love's Labor's Lost puts the theatrical company in a bit of a pickle. What to do with all the jokes that require extensive glossaries and 400-year-old pop cultural knowledge? How does one approach an audience weaned on Schwarzenegger ("something's rotten in the state of Denmark ... and Hamlet is taking out the trash!") and Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, in which Mercutio's frenetic Queen Mab speech is the result of an acid trip? In his Prefaces to Shakespeare, Harley Granville-Barker calls Love's Labor's Lost a "comedy of affectations" and laments that Shakespeare finds himself a little too impressed with the things he sets out to mock. "And these academic follies of Navarre, the fantastic folly of Armado, the pedantic folly of the schoolmaster and the parson -- sometimes the satire is so fine that the folly seems [Shakespeare's] own" (1947, 415).

Branagh tackles both of these issues, first by cutting over 60% of the text to eliminate some of the play's more difficult language and character inconsistencies and dead sisters, second by embracing and recasting the play's affectation and folly in a modern context, staging it as a 1930s Hollywood musical. His emphasis is on the playful. Whereas Granville-Barker sums up Shakespeare's approach as "[i]nstead of dancing, however, we have a dance of dialogue" (422), Branagh reverses this; instead of dialogue, we have dancing, and singing -- Love's Labour's Lost as Fred Astaire romantic comedy.

Set on the eve of WWII (the presence of French royalty takes on more significance here), Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost gives us a trifling aristocratic Europe, oblivious of the political events beginning to cloud around them. He salts the movie with black-and-white Pathe-esque newsreels that allow him not only to provide extra-textual exposition, but to set a frivolous tone. The men's initial oath, for example, is portrayed as nothing but silly, rich boy hijinx by the arch newsreel voice-over. Still, Branagh's conceit works nicely. Take, for instance, the scene in which each of the men reads aloud his love sonnet. Branagh cuts all the poetry, replacing it with a show tune (Gershwin's "I've Got a Crush on You," I think), his idea being that the Renaissance sonnet is analogous to the tin pan alley hits of Porter, Gershwin, Berlin, and Kern: clever, rhymed verses of love. The muscovite/masque scene is rendered as a hot-jazz version of Berlin's "Let's Face the Music and Dance." The Nine Worthies are cut short in favor of a full-cast musical revue, led by Lane (who actually sounds a little like Ethel Merman), singing Berlin's "There's No Business Like Show Business." And Lane's Costard zig-zags around the film with a raccoon coat and a cardboard suitcase, like a man looking for a temporarily misplaced vaudeville act; he does a nice job with the running "remuneration" gag.

It's all pretty light and frothy until the king dies. Branagh handles this two ways. In keeping with his romantic comedy, the four separating couples share verses of the song "You Can't Take That Away With Me," and while there is a clear allusion to Bogart and Bergman parting on the tarmac in Casablanca, no one says "we'll always have Navarre." In addition, Branagh, never one to leave any ambiguity, returns to the newsreel motif to show us the post-play year of each character until all (minus Boyet who is killed in the war) come together in triumphal reunion and V-E Day exuberance. Jack gets his Jill.

From a production angle, I think this is clever and satisfying. I pick nits with the fact that few of the actors can sing and dance. One's eyes sort of bug out at Branagh's casting choices here; if you're going to turn Shakespeare into an homage to the great Hollywood musical romantic comedies with some of the most recognizable show tunes ever, what's with choosing folks who look like the closest they got to the bright lights was summer stock in Dubuque? Matthew Lillard? He went from playing Longaville to Shaggy in two Scooby-Doo movies.

On the flip side, Branagh's choices are just as confounding sometimes. The most important Shakespeare left in the movie must be handled by three characters: Berowne (Branagh), Ferdinand (Nivola), and the Princess (Silverstone). Silverstone is stunning ... ly ... bad. One becomes mesmerized by the action of her lips, which sashay back and forth across her face, although not in sync, as if they were doing some show tune of their own, but the words she utters arrive without having been given the passport of comprehension.

This is a problem. The play's women are the engine of its plot, as they provide the opportunity for the men's self-realization. They lend gravitas to the language, simultaneously playing the rhetorical games and recognizing the realities that contextualize them. They put the consequence to the action -- their presence renders the men's neo-Platonic pretensions foolish; their departure requires life-adjusting decisions on the men's part. If Shakespeare has a feminist text, it seems to me this is it, for as Granville-Barker suggests "he puts them, in fact, on terms of equality with men" (434). I would argue that in this play, he puts them above men. Replace these with women like Kate in Shrew or Luciana and Adriana in Comedy of Errors, and what do you have?

The Princess, then, is the most important role. But Silverstone can't pull it off, and her performance rides into the apocalyptic badness of Keanu Reaves' Don John and Jack Lemmon's Marcellus. Oh. My. God. (Notice that all of these are Branagh castings; despite his talents, he has an agenda that sometimes extends him beyond Shakespeare's ability to make him look good.) The women go through the motions of shaping the play, but they don't quite get there. They're too busy dancing cheek to cheek. Branagh's production, then, says more about the style of Love's Labour's Lost than about its substance. It is, in fact, a triumph of style, while something less so of substance.

Critically,
Randall