This is Michael Brooke at BFI ScreenOnline:
The BBC Television Shakespeare presented Richard II (see header image) as the second play in its first season under producer Cedric Messina.
According to the BUFVC Shakespeare, ‘The BBC Audience Research Viewing Panel Report noted a production that was ‘gripping, entertaining, moving and believable’. The presentation is penny-plain but unsurprisingly McKellen is compelling. Shakespeare’s drama was broadcast on BBC2 on 30 July and the Marlowe a week later. The following year producer Mark Shivas brought the staging into the television studio, along with Prospect’s Edward II by Christopher Marlowe, also with McKellen. The Prospect Theatre Company with Ian McKellen first performed The Tragedy of King Richard II at the Edinburgh Festival in 1969 before taking the acclaimed production on a national tour.
It’s a bravura piece of performance and of camerawork, not least because of the constantly changing framing of the scene which is observed through the bars of the king’s cell. This is most effective in Act V Sc 5 where Richard’s musings on death and then his murder are played in just one shot that lasts for nine and a half minutes. The television style is also interesting because it makes great use of developing single shots, with relatively little cutting between cameras. Almost hidden among the minor parts are such later luminaries as Eileen Atkins, Julian Glover and Patrick Garland.Īnd these were my thoughts then on this Richard II as television: There a host of other exceptional performances, perhaps most notably Edgar Wreford as John of Gaunt, Tom Fleming as Bolingbroke and Noel Johnson’s Northumberland, and also some surprising ones, including a startlingly effective Harry Percy from Sean Connery (two years before Dr No) and a pre- Z Cars Frank Windsor as the Bishop of Carlisle (above, centre). I was a little underwhelmed by David William (above, right) in the title role, but the supporting cast impressed me greatly: Back in July 2009 I wrote a detailed blog postabout these two episodes. Michael Hayes was the director and Peter Dews the producer. But the first showing seems to have gone ahead as planned.Ī decade later, the BBC’s hugely ambitious History plays cycle An Age of Kings featured the play across two episodes, The Hollow Crown and The Deposing of a King.
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The total budget for a production with 36 cast was £2,000, and according to the Internet Shakespeare Editions Shakespeare website (working with information from the file WAC T5/430 at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre), ‘at one point a professional boxing match threatened to usurp the 8 o’clock time slot’. Not all the cast spoke the Shakespeare as it demands: Bolinbroke fairly hammered out the stresses of the verse. But he was sensitive and sincere, and rose as the poetry rose. The part, especially in front of the revealing camera, needs a personal youthful beauty. Wheatley, is not, I think, the ideal Richard. I am indebted here (as elsewhere) to the BUFVC’s essential and exemplary Shakespeare database for the following extract from a Radio Timesreview by Lionel Hale: Alan Wheatley played the king (he would later be known as the Sheriff of Nottingham in The Adventures of Robin Hood Clement McCallin, Bolingbroke (he later played John of Gaunt in the famous 1974 RSC production by John Barton with Ian Richardson and Richard Pasco) and Henry Oscar, John of Gaunt. Royston Morley’s full-length (145 minutes) production was first seen on BBC Television on 29 October, with three subsequent live ‘repeats’ (there is no recording). Including The Hollow Crown, there have been seven full-length small-screen productions so far. To date, there has been no feature film – Rupert Goold’s highly cinematic treatment for television’s The Hollow Crown (2012) comes the closest, while the 1949 Ealing Studios film Train of Events features an amateur dramatics society performing the play’s last scenes. But before we begin things proper I thought it might be interesting to offer a little background about previous British screen versions of the play.
During the past seven days we confirmed our on-screen host (hurrah!), shot the trailer and began to film the weekly production diary which will start to appear online on 30 August. And we deep in the preparations for the Live from Stratford Upon Avon broadcast to cinemas on 13 November. Rehearsals for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new Richard II with David Tennant start a week tomorrow, Tuesday (the cast get the Bank Holiday off too).
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