Henry V (Richard Eyre, 2012)

"Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it."

In a way, it's rather annoying that I've done so much musing over the disconnect between Shakespeare's plotting dialogue, specifically written to be performed on a stage, with all the limitations that implies, and the medium of television, and sumptuously shot location shots to boot. If I'd waited until now to talk about I would have had so much to say. After all, consider the chorus here- a gloriously metatextual character, probably played originally by Shakespeare himself, who refers to a "wooden O" and apologises for the compression of time which all historical dramas do and which his bits help to elide. It's particularly eyebrow-raising to hear John Hurt declaiming apologies for not being able to represent the battle scenes properly as we watch brilliantly realised battle scenes. It's a juxtaposition that seems almost deliberately intended to highlight the tension between media.

Metatextual stuff aside, though, and briefly mentioning that this is my first experience of the play, not just there's an intriguing political subtext. This play follows on directly from its predecessors, even to the point of featuring Bardolph, Pistol, Mistress Quickly and (sort of) Falstaff. We can assume, then, that there's a continuity of theme, and that the examination of the nature of kingship should be understood in relation to this continuity. In fact, There's an interesting scene, on the morning of the battle, when he pleads with God not to punish him for the sins of his father, insisting that "I Richard's body have interred anew". Hence, presumably, his determination to attribute his eventual victory to God alone, and perhaps even his very determination to pursue his claims in France- an assertion of royal legitimacy and, perhaps, one his usurping father could not have made.

Hal may be very different from his former self, as we clearly see when he approves the hanging of his old mate Bardolph. The prevention of looting in captured towns is more important to a king than old friendships, however oddly this may sit with his later orders to kill all the prisoners!!! But is he really all that good a king? Because, unusually for Shakespeare, I think I can detect a definite authorial voice at work in this play. And that voice is asking why on Earth should ordinary people suffer and die in war just to satisfy the "honour" of lords and kings. Shakespeare, I think, would have seen honour as Falstaff did, not as King Harry does here. Which, then, is the more virtuous? Shakespeare gives us a king who seems to fit all the conventional notions of the good king, and then questions that. After all, he kills prisoners, betrays his friends, and wages war for his personal "honour". It's a very different angle on kingship from its three prequels, but it's fascinating, important, and rounds out the thematic whole that is the four plays on kingship.

Tom Hiddleston is extraordinary, and pulls off the task of making Hal and King Henry seem simultaneously very, very different and yet absolutely the same person. His two main speeches are surprisingly low-key and un-Olivier-like.

To finish, it's interesting for this Leicestershire native to hear Pistol addressing his new wife, the former Mistress Quickly., as "me duck!" It seems that our ways of speaking once spread much further southwards than they do now. And it's a bit of a bolt to be reminded that King Henry died at 35, the age I am now. He conquered France… what have I done?

Julius Caesar (Gregory Doran, 2012)

"How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown?"

There's a lot of Shakespeare on BBC4 at the moment, and it's all piling up, unwatched, rebuking me. I did a degree in English, many years ago, and yet it's possible that I haven't read or seen any Shakespeare since. I've only read around twelve of the forty-and-counting plays, which is sort of pathetic. My degree certificate is staring sternly at me as I write this: something must be done, and so it shall.

So here's the first of many of these reviews. Generally they'll be looking at the BBC4 productions, which are essentially filmed versions of recent stage productions but with some concessions to the medium of television, although that won't always be so, as in the case of the forthcoming history plays. There'll also be films and whatnot.

This particular production is very topical indeed, being that it's currently running in Stratford upon Avon. There's a contemporary African aesthetic, with everything about the play's look and directorial style strongly suggesting the slow slide from liberty to authoritarianism, driven by one charismatic figure, that seems to be happening in places like Uganda and Ethiopia. There's also, of course, a hint of the Arab Spring. The cast is led by the outstanding Patterson Joseph as Brutus, a slightly subdued Cyril Nri as Cassius and Ray Fearon as Mark Antony.

Lots of people don't like the idea of Shakespeare in modern or non-contemporary dress. I do. For one thing, certain plays (including this one) are very common, and it's nice to have a little variation in the visuals. For another, the anachronisms are already there. These are Romans who hear clocks chiming and allude often, and eloquently, to the effects of the four humours. Realism has its place, but to be shackled to it would be dull indeed. And the setting serves to emphasise certain of the plays themes, and remind us of their universalism. There's nothing exclusively Roman about the power relationships we see here. The only unfortunate side to modern dress is that it renders awkward those features of Shakespeare that reflect the style or technical limitations of the time, with battles always taking place out of shot and wives dying off-screen

It's hard to judge the full effect of the setting, though; it's devised for the stage and, although the crowd scenes (including Mark Antony's speech) are essentially just a camera pointed at the stage, the rest of the play was filmed on location, hence the plotting between Cassius, Brutus and Casca takes place in a urinal, complete with mimed peeing(!), while the "ambitious" Caesar is killed, symbolically, on a broken escalator. I'm almost tempted to go hunting for symbolism in the peeing, too…

The only version I'd previously seen was the 1953 film version, in which the most prominent and foregrounded performers were Marlon Brando as Mark Antony and John Gielgud as Cassius. So I was a little surprised, at first, to see the superb Patterson Joseph cast as a surprisingly wily Brutus, whereas Cassius might have been a more natural part for him. But I came to appreciate this more intelligent Brutus, calculating but never cynical. Nri's Cassius, meanwhile, was far more fallible, and less Machiavellian, than I'd expected. Fearon's performance was strong, but there were too similarities to Brando's iconic portrayal to fully escape from its shadow.

I love this play, and there are always new things to be seen. I love Shakespeare's cynical yet true depictions of the fickleness and murderousness of the mob, who are easy prey to demagoguery and mistake Cinna the poet for Cinna the conspirator as easily as they mistake paediatricians for paedophiles. There's a universal human truth right there. And Mark Antony's speeches, cynical and practical deployments of rhetoric though they are, are things of such beauty.

It would be wrong, I think, to judge the production too much by its camerawork, as it has only one foot in the televisual medium, at best. But the scene in which Antony and Octavian (a Laurent Kabila-like Ivanno Jeremiah) casually discuss their proscriptions is nicely punctuated by short, sharp cuts to hooded figures being shot in the back of the head, which I found very powerful.

Perhaps the production is let down slightly by the sometimes overly restrained performance of Cyril Nri, but the use of the African setting works well, and Patterson Joseph is outstanding.

Doctor Who: Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways

Bad Wolf



“Ladies, your viewing figures just went up!”



Arse. I might as well admit from the start that I’ve ended up awarding a 5/5 to every story of the season. This in no way affects my credibility, I’m sure.

Anyway, we start with a few clips from The Long Game, and a caption tells us it’s a hundred years later. Except that we seem to be in the Big Brother house. And the Doctor’s a contestant. Now there’s an extremely weird pre-titles sequence.

We then switch to Rose in a scene which directly parallels the Doctor’s, right down to parts of her dialogue. She’s about to play The Weakest Link. With an, ahem, “Anne-Droid”. And Captain Jack Back is with a robot Trinny and Susannah. Naturally.

In 2005 I was distinctly uneasy about these references to contemporary game shows, especially as this is supposed to be 198,100 years in the future and technically a bit implausible that people in the distant future would be watching these shows, although at the same time I admired how it was done. This time round it doesn’t bother me at all- that’s just the style of Doctor Who these days. And I can accept the implausibility because it doesn’t really matter- this is allegory, like a large chunk of science fiction generally is, and therefore really about the concerns of the present. Besides, we couldn’t possibly depict the distant future at all without doing this sort of thing on some level. Everything we see is necessarily an extrapolation of the present, so we might as well be blatant about it.

Anyway, it soon becomes clear that not only are the Big Brother contestants disintegrated once evicted, with the only prize being survival, but being the Weakest Link also means disintegration. Oh, and Trinny and Susannah extend their makeover tendencies to rearranging peoples’ faces. It’s all quite mysterious, too; the transmit beam which transported our heroes into these game shows did so inside the TARDIS, indicating considerable power. And no one in charge seems to be picking the TARDISeers- they seem to have just arrived.

Oh, and the Anne Droid asks a question about something called the “Torchwood Institute”. Just thought I’d mention it. No particular reason.

The Doctor escaped, with his new friend Lynda with a “y”, and learns that this is in fact Satellite Five. It seems this is all his fault, as the collapse of TV news is what caused all this to happen. Gosh. And there was me thinking that 24 hour rolling news was a complete load of crap. Oh, and the Doctor agrees to let Lynda travel with him in the most fate tempting way possible. She’s so going to die.

Rose is still playing The Weakest Link alongside the rather gittish Rodric, played rather well by Patterson Joseph (who, incidentally, I was expecting to be cast as the Eleventh Doctor- shows how much I know). The questions are rather amusing: Jackie Collins is now apparently classed as “literature”. Oh, and the Face of Boe is apparently from the Isop Galaxy. As is Vortis, I seem to recall. But just as the Doctor and Jack rush in to disintegrate her, apparently she’s disintegrated. And both Eccleston and Barrowman convincingly portray their characters’ utter dejection as they’re arrested, imprisoned, and sentenced, Frontier in Space style, to the lunar penal colony. Without trial, naturally.

Of course, they escape, and head up to Floor 500 with a whopping great gun. They soon discover that things are rather odd, and that people are just as unquestioning as in The Long Game. There’s a great moment of moral force for the Doctor when, upon being told that the people running the games were “just doing our jobs,” he replies “And with that sentence you just lost the right to even talk to me.”

There’s a brief power cut, courtesy of a solar flare, and the Controller is able to explain that the has brought the TARDISeers here in the hope that they can stop her mysterious “masters”. These “masters” were the power behind the Jagrafess and have been guiding humanity’s destiny for centuries- this means simultaneously that all this is, crucially, not actually the Doctor’s fault, but at the same time he should have thought to dig a bit deeper into what lay behind the Jagrafess.

Jack, though, has found the TARDIS, and it turns out that the “disintegrated” humans are not killed, merely transmatted- Rose is still alive! Then we cut to her- and a certain familiar throbbing sound…

At last we see loads of Daleks, and they look fantastic. The odds against the Doctor are huge, but brilliantly the cliffhanger emphasises not that but his resolve to defeat them.



The Parting of the Ways



“New teeth. That’s weird.”

The Doctor rescues Rose with admirable speed, materialising the TARDIS around Rose and a Dalek, while Jack shoots the Dalek with that whopping great gun. And now the Doctor naturally has to have a chinwag with the Daleks. He discovers they’re half-human. Ah, that old favourite…

It seemed they survived the Time Lord because of a single survivor, who is now their Emperor, with delusions of Godhood. Having established the Emperor’s a bit of a nutter, they all head back to Satellite Five. Once there things start to go a bit UNIT, with the Doctor taking charge of the boffin stuff while Jack takes charge of the military side of things. Jack kisses both the Doctor and Rose full on the lips, indicating he doesn’t expect he’ll live to see them again. Things are getting very dangerous. So the Doctor sends Rose home in the TARDIS.

Rose is not too pleased about this, especially as the conversation with Jackie and Mickey as they eat their chips is as mundane as a conversation can be. Rose is insistent that she can’t live like that, to which Mickey very reasonably retorts “Why, because you’re better than us?” But Rose insists it’s not the travelling she can’t live without, but the better way of living, the refusal to give up. I’m not sure she’s written as being entirely honest here, but it does the trick with Mickey. The fact that “Bad Wolf” suddenly appears as graffiti everywhere clinches it. Rose is determined to get at the heart of the TARDIS…

Meanwhile, the Doctor is nonplussed as the Dalek Emperor denies all knowledge of the Bad Wolf thing. And the cowards on the bottom floor, including Rodric, get what’s been coming to them. The situation seems hopeless, in spite of a bit of fight being shown by the Anne Droid, and Lynda is killed in a brilliantly executed scene. Meanwhile, on Earth, Jackie finds a truck for Rose and Mickey to use. It works, and Rose looks into the heart of the TARDIS. The TARDIS materialises…

It’s too late for Jack, though, who dies heroically. Everything seems hopeless; the Doctor is unable to carry out his plan in the end as the collateral damage would just be too great. But then Rose arrives, full of power from the TARDIS- again, the TARDIS has some worryingly powerful abilities, and this is a potentially bad precedent. But for now it provides a satisfactory ending. In something of a time paradox, Rose herself is the Bad Wolf, scattering the words throughout eternity. Jack is resurrected, the Daleks are all killed- and Rose starts to collapse. She won’t be able to survive all this power.

Of course, the Doctor saves her (with a kiss!) and they leave in the TARDIS. Without Jack, for reasons which remain unexplained. But the Doctor can’t survive himself, and regenerates, to the sounds of the “Chancellor Flavia” theme. Standing up.



Actually, this is one of the weaker episodes of the season. But it’s still good enough for a 5/5. And the season as a whole- wow. A perfect score. Surely this level of quality can’t be sustained?