The Hollow Crown etc
Jul. 23rd, 2012 03:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shapinglightSo, King Henry V has fangirls?
I can't tell you how tickled I am by this.
Seriously, though, I thought the play - in fact, all the plays in the BBC's Hollow Crown sequence - very well done...
....though unlike the others, I know Henry V well enough to realise when things have been left out.
Not that I've ever seen it on stage - only two previous film productions, the famous Lawrence Olivier one and the one with Kenneth Branagh. So, three very different portrayals of Henry V, of which I think Olivier's is probably the seminal one (for me, anyway), in that I can quite believe his Henry would invade France on such a specious pretext (an explanation of which was one of the bits missing from the latest BBC production) and would be cold and ruthless enough to carry the project through. I didn't care for Branagh's Henry, as I felt Branagh played him as pretty much the captain of the school rugby team (public school, of course, by which I mean private), or it may be that Branagh's looks just lend themselves to that interpretation, I don't know. Anyway, it's not a persona I find particularly attractive, though, conversely the only one of the three interpretations that doesn't make you think "Yeah, right," during the wooing scene when Henry describes himself to Princess Katherine as 'just a plain soldier.'
But anyway, yes, there were several scenes missed out of this latest version (should I call it the 'Loki' version? Perhaps not, that's doing Tom Hiddleston a vast disservice), including the 'if an Englishman, an Irishman, a Scotsman and a Welshman went into a bar' scene (originator of so many jokes), which was inevitable when the Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman hadn't been included in the cast. The king's brothers, as seen in Henry IV parts 1 & 2, were conspicuous by their absence too, though two of them are in the play (they don't do much, as I recall) and when I glanced through the text, I noticed there were three 'conspirators' mentioned, and I don't remember them from any version and have no idea what they were conspiring against.
Never mind, though. Really, this version was all about Tom Hiddleston's performance as the king, which I have to say I loved (for the record I loved Ben Whishaw's Richard II too, and Jeremy Irons's Henry IV). I suppose it was a very 'modern' performance, in that Hiddleston played Henry as consumed by self-doubt and anguish over the suffering his war had inflicted on his own men - a compassionate king, in fact, in tune with the common man, which gives his hobnobbing with the hoi polloi in the Henry IV plays context. He manages to give the impression that he'd deliberately set out to understand his people better by becoming one of them, which makes his rejection of poor old Falstaff a little less brutal (not that Hiddleston ever played it brutal, which it's perfectly possible to do), and also makes you feel he is genuinely regretful for what happened to Bardolph.
This doesn't always work to the production's advantage, though, as Henry's scene with, say, the two common soldiers the night before the battle (the night before battle scenes were some of the best) had more of an emotional kick than any scene he has with the Duke of York, and yet it's York's death that goads Henry into ordering the execution of the French prisoners - something that Hiddleston's performance makes seem out of character, but which would have worked better had he and York seemed genuinely close. Oh well, you can write stuff out of Shakespeare, but you shouldn't really write stuff into it.
I could witter on for ages about this, so I'd better stop. Will just say that I thought the production was superb and so was Hiddleston. He carried the play with his troubled, emotional performance, and the wooing scene at the end was so delightful (and funny - I laughed out loud) that it was quite upsetting when it sequed back to the king's funeral.
Great stuff, altogether. I think the BBC have done Shakespeare proud.
Re: the other fandom-y thing going on this weekend past, the Mark Watches meltdown, I have nothing much to say, except that that old Talking Heads song is right: first impressions often are correct. I'm glad I stuck by mine and stayed well away from Mark and his minions.
ETA: should add that, of course Henry's reasons for invading France (ie. that he thinks he's the true king of France and all that Salic Law stuff is just a smokescreen the French 'usurper' is hiding behind) aren't specious if a person truly and genuinely believes in the divine right of kings, but IMO, of the three kings depicted in these plays, only Ben Whishaw's Richard II comes into that category. Henry IV, a usurper himself, is always conscious that he acquired the crown by force rather than right, and Henry V, while subscribing to the view, is played by Hiddleston as more wanting to believe it than actually doing so.
I can't tell you how tickled I am by this.
Seriously, though, I thought the play - in fact, all the plays in the BBC's Hollow Crown sequence - very well done...
....though unlike the others, I know Henry V well enough to realise when things have been left out.
Not that I've ever seen it on stage - only two previous film productions, the famous Lawrence Olivier one and the one with Kenneth Branagh. So, three very different portrayals of Henry V, of which I think Olivier's is probably the seminal one (for me, anyway), in that I can quite believe his Henry would invade France on such a specious pretext (an explanation of which was one of the bits missing from the latest BBC production) and would be cold and ruthless enough to carry the project through. I didn't care for Branagh's Henry, as I felt Branagh played him as pretty much the captain of the school rugby team (public school, of course, by which I mean private), or it may be that Branagh's looks just lend themselves to that interpretation, I don't know. Anyway, it's not a persona I find particularly attractive, though, conversely the only one of the three interpretations that doesn't make you think "Yeah, right," during the wooing scene when Henry describes himself to Princess Katherine as 'just a plain soldier.'
But anyway, yes, there were several scenes missed out of this latest version (should I call it the 'Loki' version? Perhaps not, that's doing Tom Hiddleston a vast disservice), including the 'if an Englishman, an Irishman, a Scotsman and a Welshman went into a bar' scene (originator of so many jokes), which was inevitable when the Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman hadn't been included in the cast. The king's brothers, as seen in Henry IV parts 1 & 2, were conspicuous by their absence too, though two of them are in the play (they don't do much, as I recall) and when I glanced through the text, I noticed there were three 'conspirators' mentioned, and I don't remember them from any version and have no idea what they were conspiring against.
Never mind, though. Really, this version was all about Tom Hiddleston's performance as the king, which I have to say I loved (for the record I loved Ben Whishaw's Richard II too, and Jeremy Irons's Henry IV). I suppose it was a very 'modern' performance, in that Hiddleston played Henry as consumed by self-doubt and anguish over the suffering his war had inflicted on his own men - a compassionate king, in fact, in tune with the common man, which gives his hobnobbing with the hoi polloi in the Henry IV plays context. He manages to give the impression that he'd deliberately set out to understand his people better by becoming one of them, which makes his rejection of poor old Falstaff a little less brutal (not that Hiddleston ever played it brutal, which it's perfectly possible to do), and also makes you feel he is genuinely regretful for what happened to Bardolph.
This doesn't always work to the production's advantage, though, as Henry's scene with, say, the two common soldiers the night before the battle (the night before battle scenes were some of the best) had more of an emotional kick than any scene he has with the Duke of York, and yet it's York's death that goads Henry into ordering the execution of the French prisoners - something that Hiddleston's performance makes seem out of character, but which would have worked better had he and York seemed genuinely close. Oh well, you can write stuff out of Shakespeare, but you shouldn't really write stuff into it.
I could witter on for ages about this, so I'd better stop. Will just say that I thought the production was superb and so was Hiddleston. He carried the play with his troubled, emotional performance, and the wooing scene at the end was so delightful (and funny - I laughed out loud) that it was quite upsetting when it sequed back to the king's funeral.
Great stuff, altogether. I think the BBC have done Shakespeare proud.
Re: the other fandom-y thing going on this weekend past, the Mark Watches meltdown, I have nothing much to say, except that that old Talking Heads song is right: first impressions often are correct. I'm glad I stuck by mine and stayed well away from Mark and his minions.
ETA: should add that, of course Henry's reasons for invading France (ie. that he thinks he's the true king of France and all that Salic Law stuff is just a smokescreen the French 'usurper' is hiding behind) aren't specious if a person truly and genuinely believes in the divine right of kings, but IMO, of the three kings depicted in these plays, only Ben Whishaw's Richard II comes into that category. Henry IV, a usurper himself, is always conscious that he acquired the crown by force rather than right, and Henry V, while subscribing to the view, is played by Hiddleston as more wanting to believe it than actually doing so.