The staging (basically involving people churning through a long pit of mud running down the nave of a deconsecrated church) was really fun to watch, and the performances of Branagh and Alex Kingston as Lady Macbeth, while not as bone-chilling as those of other filmed Macbeths, were very engaging in their vulnerability and brittleness. Try it! Arooooooint aroint aroint aroint aroint.Īnyways, I enjoyed Branagh's Macbeth a lot, even though they cut the whole "aroint" bit. My only explanation is that I must have really liked the sound of the word "aroint" when I first heard it, and it stuck in my brain. Richard II: 1978: TV Movie: Henry Bolingbroke: Death on the Nile: 1978: Mr. But that doesn't matter if the performances are good - and for the most part, these are first-rate.I saw the National Theater not-quite-Live broadcast of Kenneth Branagh's Macbeth last night, and realized that, for some unfathomable reason, when I think "three witches in Macbeth", the first line that pops into my head isn't any of the good ones that rhyme or sound awesomely spooky it's this stupid line in 1.3 where the first witch is telling the others how she tried to bum some chestnuts of some woman, who told her to get lost. Jon Finch (2 March 1942 body found 28 December 2012) was an English actor who performed in many Shakespearean plays on stage, and made many films. And then there are the usual quibbles with the BBC production values - the sets and such are not particularly impressive-looking it's more like watching a stage production on film. And the scene where York accuses his son Aumerle of treason while his wife pleads for pardon, rhyming all the while.well, it isn't one of Shakespeare's finest moments, but these actors, to their credit, went a ways toward making it watchable. For instance, the confusing and allegorical garden scene is rather unimpressive - it's difficult and stylized anyway, and neither Janet Maw as the Queen nor Jonathan Adams as the head gardener really pulls it off. All this praise is not to say there's nothing about the production that doesn't work. ) ) Although Jacobi's bravura performance dominates the production, there are a few others that really stand out, chief among them Sir John Gielgud's amazing, intense John of Gaunt (whose last scene is just riveting - his elegy for England gave me chills), Jon Finch's calculating Bolingbroke, and Charles Gray's York, who fortunately is not played as comic relief. I'm writing a thesis on Richard II at the moment - indeed, I should be writing it *now* - so I'm still in literary critic mode. :-) (I now apologize for the pretentious opening. The deposition scene alone is worth the price of admission. Richard the Second in 1978, directed by David Giles and starring Derek Jacobi, John Gielgud, Jon Finch, and Wendy Hiller. It's a great portrait of a petulant young king who gains - if not true wisdom, then magnificent pathos. Most of Richard's longer speeches have a nearly operatic quality to them, and Jacobi's reading does not disappoint. Shakespeare's interest, and therefore ours, is focused primarily on "unking'd Richard" rather than on his conflict with Henry Bolingbroke, the "silent king." Fortunately, the BBC version gives us a central performance that does the play justice: Derek Jacobi (one of my favorite actors anyway) does a turn here that's nothing short of splendid. While the action centers on the deposition of a king, the play is not so much a political drama as a psychological one. Richard II is one of those plays that hangs almost wholly on the performance of the leading actor.
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