The Hollow Crown - Richard III [2016]

Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare, a new years resolution that has been a journey. This week we watched the conclusion of series two of The Hollow Crown, the 2016 BBC production of Richard III.

I'm omitting a summary for this one — you can read through the wikipedia summary, it gets the major beats right.

This is the Benedict Cumberbatch show. While I doubt this is the genesis of the "The Heel" in narratives, it's certainly an early knocked-it-out-the-park example of a Heel — explain to the audience how he's being evil, cackle, twirl moustache — and Cumberbatch really rises to the occasion. It is truly a delight watching him be so debaucherous, monologuing to us, only to have everything he's worked for ripped away at the end. Even the various sensitivities to his form, to see him mocked by a child and utterly lose his cool, beautiful work. Cumberbatch isn't usually an actor I enjoy — admittedly, I mostly know him from his franchise work, Marvel and the Hobbit — but he is captivating here.

I think this adaptation — with Richard II, back at the start — might be one of the more cinematically-told entries in the series, relying on score, camera's focus and movement, framing to create a sense of movement and progression; while this craftsmanship was present in the middle entries, it's very much an actor in its own right in this.

I really enjoyed how this adaptation made it unclear how real Sophie Okonedo's Queen Margaret was, stalking and haunting Richard to shame him into understanding what a mess of things he'd made.

The play's stance about Machiavellian brinksmanship, I found especially resonant in the age of oh, AI, climate change, and so on and so forth. Move Fast and Break Things seems fundamentally incompatible with a message of "be a fair king or you'll get killed and no one will be sad about it, in fact most people will say 'and stay dead' then spit on your grave".

It's been fascinating to watch these and think about how King Lear, a production I bounced off of four times, is more or less trying to cover the same ground as the entirety of these, which I liked very much.

Next week, we are watching The King (2019), the Joel Edgerton / Timothee Chalamet version of the second tetralogy. After that:

• November 1 - Chimes at Midnight (1966)
• November 8 - My Own Private Idaho (1991)
• November 15 - Henry V (1989)
• November 22 - The Black Adder [series one] (1983)
• November 29 - The Goodbye Girl (1977) + Searching For Richard (1996)

In December, we're covering The Tempest. I'm still deciding on a couple options for movies.

Thank you for reading along with My Year of Shakespeare