Probably the most successful attempt at bringing Shakespeare to the small screen in recent years was The Hollow Crown, if only because they took some of the history plays (no-one reads the history plays, not even English students, even if they’re studying them) and made popular films out of them. Part of that has to be down to the decision to film them not as plays, or in any way stagey, but instead to film them as straight period dramas. It’s something the BBC excels at, and allows what might be unfamiliar stories to take prominence, rather than any dramatic techniques.
The casts of these plays are absolutely astounding, especially in Henry IV Part I and Part II. Here, Rory Kinnear has aged into Jeremy Irons, with Tom Hiddleston playing the young Prince Hal. But any performance of this set of plays faces its biggest challenge with the character of Falstaff. Falstaff has to be both joker and substitute father, with melancholy and joviality present in his every scene. Over the two plays, he goes from Hal’s bosom companion to being rejected. It takes a great actor to play Falstaff, and The Hollow Crown chose Simon Russell Beale. By choosing an actor who had already appeared in Shakespeare plays many times on stage, it ensured all of Falstaff’s many lines were delivered with the naturalistic edge they required. And Beale gets the right amount of desperation into the role in Part II, with his rejection by Henry V at the end of the play heartbreaking. Beale was the worthy winner of the BAFTA award for Best Supporting Actor in 2013.
Henry V, concluding the series, is not as good as the other plays, sadly. It’s one of the most filmed history plays, and the only history play to have had one of its adaptations nominated for Best Film at the Oscars. Here, Henry V is played straight as a war play, with most of the humour removed. It’s probably the most edited play in The Hollow Crown, which is a shame. That’s most noticeable in the loss of the character of Fluellen – oh, a character called that is still present, but pretty much all of his lines have been cut. That might have been to waylay any accusations of Welsh stereotyping, given that Fluellen has a fight about a leek. That’s not to say he’s not a one-note character. He’s both a comedic character and a valiant soldier, with Henry V later declaring himself as a Welshman because of Fluellen. The removal of his scenes take away a lot of the humanity of the play. But by focussing on the war, and making everything on screen suitably grimy and dark, it makes a great counterpoint to Richard II’s bright and golden vision. The removal of the humour signals the bleak times ahead, in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy (the Henry VI plays and Richard III).