RosieBell

Victorious, happy and glorious, for a while

The Hollow Crown ended with the fourth play in the series, Henry V. It was brilliant, like the whole series, and it was great to see Henry V in sequence after the two Henry IV's.  I've seen Henry V several times, and the Falstaff and Mistress Quickly scene at the beginning doesn't make much sense in a stand alone Henry V. 

I thought framing the play with the funeral at beginning and end was a fine device.  At first I was puzzled when a woman in black, who I couldn't identify, turned up at the beginning, but at the end you see her again and it makes sense.  By then you have enjoyed her as the radiant, playful Princess Katherine with rippling golden hair and a pale blue. girlish dress, and now she is transformed into a braided, draped piece of mourning and motherhood.  The adventures and romance of Henry were glorious, but short-lived. 

Henry V is a play with a fantastic action hero at its centre and so there were plenty of shots of Henry galloping on a white horse, his cloak flying behind him. Tom Hiddleston looked right - the director had left off the usual pudding basin haircut -and was a young man full of energy and warmth, surrounded by a posse of capable old codgers (all excellent, and Paul Freeman as Erpingham was perfect in his smiling delivery).  Henry is an epitome of Rudyard Kipling's If - he walks with kings (he is one) and has the common touch, all men count with him and none too much.  This was an unbombastic Henry.  Hiddleston seems to be able to do anything, so no doubt he could perform the famous motivational speeches, the once more in the breach, dear friends, and the Crispin Day one as a leader to his troops.  But he was directed to get in a huddle with his immediate comrades urging them on hoarsely, like a coach at a football team rather than Elizabeth I at Tilbury.  Very different from Kenneth Branagh's Henry V. One of Branagh's strengths is to convince as a leader of men, as he did in Shackleton. 

They didn't cut the Harfleur speech, when Henry threatens atrocities if the town does not surrender, as Laurence Olivier's wartime version did.   Any modern production of a play with a war setting will emphasise the cruelties and terrors, so there were plenty of shots of the Boy, who follows the army after he picked up the St George Cross armband at the beginning reacting to the deaths and fear around him.  

I thought that a production that underlined the horrors was going to rob us of excitement - the advance of the cavalry and the arrow shower, but we got them both - a lovely wide shot of the horses approaching, the English bowmen waiting and the hooves thundering closer and closer.  Not as good an arrow shower as in the Olivier and Branagh film versions, but pretty good. 

Henry V is - well not pure jingoism, as nothing Shakespeare ever does is pure and simple - cynics, nay sayers and no-shows have their turns  - it's got a touch of the Wilfred Owen among the Rupert Brookery   - but full on aggressive patriotism, with everyone in the play telling us how marvellous Henry V is - and of course he is marvellous, like James Bond with heavier responsibilities.  His enemy is a sneery  Dauphin (Edward Akrout, an English bloke's nightmare of a handsome, French dude advertising perfume).  The Dauphin and his henchmen are arrogant sods whose horses wear dressy armour - that concertinaed neck protector on the Dauphin's horse looked amazing.  The English stand stoically covered in mud.  If there any image of Frenchman vs Englishman that has staying power with the English, this one is it, the flashy smoothy vs the dogged rough substance.

Like James Bond Henry gets the girl, who is delightful and French to boot (Melanie Thierry - utterly charming, whether giggly or serious).  When in the final wooing scene Henry adds to his other virtues a GSOH and amusing self-deprecation and the beautiful young Prince and Princess kiss each other, it's the end of a fairy tale, but they do not of course live happily ever after   Henry dies, and England bleeds.   The Chorus in the play tells us so, this production showed us, that glory existed but was cut short.

The Hollow Crown - Henry IV Parts I and II

The Hollow Crown series has been marvellous in direction, acting and settings. 

Jeremy Irons, who played Henry IV, also presented a thoughtful documentary about the three Henry plays in the series.  This includes footage of different productions especially those at The Globe and you get an idea of how those plays worked up their audience with contrasting scenes - a comic bit, followed by a love scene, followed by a fight.  

I am glad that the plays have been set in medieval times, when these dynastic discords occurred,  and that the actors are wearing chain mail or robes.  The battle scenes, in snow or through bare woods, are excellent, as the warriors get into single combat and  go to it clanking sword againstsword.  Single combat always makes a good spectacle.  Why else employ light sabres in Star Wars? 

That is a problem with modern settings of Shakespeare.  How do you make the fights work, especially when the dialogue constantly mentions swords?.  Baz Luhrmann's production of Romeo and Juliet tried to get round this by making the camera zoom in on the brand names Sword and Dagger printed on the guns that the Mafia style gangs fought with, but it was a clumsy fix.  Two recent modern productions, Patrick Stewart's Macbeth and Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus managed to sneak in a little hand to hand engagement from the blood-thirsty combatants, however unlikely that would be in the age of ballistics.

Macbeth and Coriolanus were both updated to be political thrillers, and they worked well.   But it can  be annoying to have modern parallels pushed at you.  I once saw a production of Coriolanus with the main man goose-stepping, which infuriated me because (a) Coriolanus isn't a Fascist, just a general bad at democratic politics; (b) even if he were, I don't want the director holding up Think Mussolini! signs like that  It's slightly insulting, like being harangued about politics by Rory Bremner.

However, that doesn't mean you can't find parallels in your own times.  Young Prince Hal goes slumming among the low-life and I thought of a rich boy, the son of a CEO or banker, hanging out with rappers, Falstaff being the veteran MC and the Godfather of the Dive Club. 

The talking heads in the Jeremy Irons documentary agree that, as King Henry IV wishes Hotspur was his son, so Prince Hal is seeking a father figure in Falstaff.  That is neatly symmetrical, but while there are lines where King Henry says that of Hotspur, there is not one to suggest Hal regards the reprobate Falstaff as anything but a playmate.   Hal is eloquent, quick witted,  - one of Shakespeare's smart-arses, like Hamlet, a great world-wielder -and his and Falstaff's exchanges are duelling performances as each out-nouns and out-adjectives each other.

Hal: I'll be no longer guilty of this sin; this sanguine coward, this bed-presser, this horseback-breaker,   this huge hill of flesh,—

Falstaff: 'Sblood, you starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat's tongue, you bull's pizzle, you stock-fish! for breath to utter what is like thee! you tailor's-yard, you sheath, you bowcase; you vile standing-tuck,—

Tom Hiddleston as Hal suggests lithe and young energy and is an eyeful lounging with the bad ass Poins (David Dawson) in the bathhouse scene.*  He gets all of Hal's moods - his enjoyment of his own talents and pranks, the splinter of ice that observes coolly his low-life chums while acting as one of them, the growing awareness that one day he will have to do the equivalent of graduating from Harvard and taking his seat on the board.  His knowledge that his wild ways are a gap year before returning to his real life make him unlovably cool and self-contained.   Prince Hal has to grow out of Falstaff, put on the armour and start fighting as a modern privileged roaring boy starts wearing the suit, tapping the blackberry and spending his days in a glass tower to maintain his position in the world.

Simon Russell Beale was a sound fat Falstaff. with his mixture of intelligent cynicism, warmth and the pathos of one feeling age approaching.  Age presses more and more on him while his corruption becomes less amusing as he accepts bribes from the press-ganged working men and exploits the daffy Mistress Quickly's affection for him (Julie Walters, good, but isn't Mistress Quickly a marriageable forty or so, not sixty?).

Prince Hal and Falstaff are both complex characters that could come from novels, in that we are given much of their thinking as well as their words.  Around them are simpler and vivid characters - the king, Hotspur, Glendower, Pistol, Justice Shallow. 

Jeremy Irons as the king, sick and furrowed with anxiety and guilt is superb. Joe Armstrong, playing Hotspur as a touchy, scrappy whippet of a Geordie lights up every scene he is in, whether rousing his troops, undercutting the operatic Owen Glendower's grandiosity or teasing his wife.  The scene when Glendower's daughter sings in Welsh by the fire in the Great Hall while Hotspur and his wife (Michelle Dockery) are together for the last time is very poignant.

 
This scene's poignancy is echoed later by Falstaff's last hours with Doll Tearsheet ( Maxine Peake).  I liked her fierceness and also her tenderness, but in late medieval England surely even a cut-price whore would wear some finery, not just a torn hempen sack.

When Hal and his father go off to do serious business together, i e. put down a rebellion, Hal speaks his father's language.  The rapping has stopped:-

Henry IV: How bloodily the sun begins to peer
Above yon busky hill! the day looks pale
At his distemperature.

Hal: The southern wind
Doth play the trumpet to his purposes,
And by his hollow whistling in the leaves
Foretells a tempest and a blustering day.

I have not seen the Henry IV plays before.  They are as rich and complex as the great tragedies.   The old feel themselves failing and dwindling and fear the burning young waiting to take their place in the world.  Is there any scene in literature about ageing that is as sad as those between Falstaff and Justice Shallow (a lovely thin reed, David Bamber) talking of their youth?  The powerful use the less powerful and then discard them.  Power colours every relationship - father, son, spouse, friends, comrades.

*Totally gratuitous, as the stage directions just say "A street" but they are fine male specimens.

Small screen Shakespeare

The Beeb has been broadcasting a lot of Shakespeare at the moment.  It repeated one of its great achievements, Vivat Rex, and in the last week has shown Julius Caesar and  Richard II, the first play in The Hollow Crown series, which will follow with Henry IV Parts 1 and II and Henry V.  

Julius Caesar is a televised version of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production.   Some of it worked well,  but the televised theatre medium sets limitations, especially when it came to the final battle scenes, which are seven guys dispersing themselves through what looked like the ablutions block of a disused factory. 

It has an all-black cast and is set in a modern African state.  This makes sense, a play about a coup d'etat set in that continent of coups. It also gives some local colour e.g. the women's cloth head-dresses and the men changing from white shirts or tunics to ceremonial robes for the assassination, so when Octavius Caeasar  (Ivanno Jeremiah) appears in modern battle-dress you take one look at his ironed shirt and  know that cool, self-possessed youth is going to come out on top   Cinna the poet is lynched by necklacing and the soothsayer is daubed in white ash.  Also, the verse delivered with African stresses and full utterance is lovely to listen to and makes the grand rhetoric seem like natural speech. 

The televised  play is billed as "a fast-moving thriller. A vivid story about a struggle for democracy, Julius Caesar is also a love story between two men united by an explosive act of political violence "   Caesar (Jeffery Kissoon) ageing and fattening on the arrogance of his power is excellent and some scenes - the conspirators gathering on a stormy night, the actual assassination on an escalator, Mark Antony's speech to the crowd - do in fact thrill.  But much of the play is Brutus (Paterson Joseph) and Cassius (Cyril Nri) in discussion and as they are not clearly characterised, they tend to blur into each other.     Also - and it's a problem with the play itself - Brutus, supposedly the noblest Roman, is a bad modern hero because he is always wrong.  Brutus over-rules Cassius in advancing to Phillippi, where their forces are defeated, and in allowing Mark Antony not only to live after the assassination but to make a speech at Caesar's funeral, which Antony of course uses to pull the rug from under the conspirators' feet.   Brutus is most sympathetic in his gentle manner to his slave Lucius, a nice boy, touchingly played by Simon Manyonda as one of the youthful followers being caught up in events way beyond their understanding, let alone control.

From the first sight of him flashing his gorgeous teeth, Mark Antony (Ray Fearon) steals the play as the character he plays stole the revolution.  Handsome, charismatic, part playboy, part PR man collecting industry awards he is the portrait of a successful politician - a devious and ruthless opportunist.  He bides his time by shaking the assassins' bloody hands and he then seizes the moment with a literal vengeance through his Friends, Romans, Countrymen speech.  He's a great orator - and the thrust of his speech springs from a real emotion - he does believe that Caesar's murder was an outrage and that the murderers should be punished.  Ruthless opportunist he is, but not a hypocrite.  Antony dwarfs Brutus as the winner through realpolitik will always dwarf the losing idealist. 

The politics of the play are universal - a tyrant overthrown, a would-be revolution that goes wrong and then clever manipulators grabbing power and killing off the opposition. 

Another sort of politics features in Richard II - that of how the powerful, unaware of the difference between respect, fear and flattery, can be deposed. Richard spends his time enjoying his own divine right and not enough time holding on to it. 

Richard II is directed by Rupert Goold specifically for television and uses small-scale spectacle and slanting camera angles, often highly effectively and beautifully e.g. jousting scene with the jousters and their horses in wonderful armour.  There are sumptuous backgrounds of carved and painted interiors and bleached, silvery wood.  In a play which is full of love for England Bolingbroke returns from exile to walk through flowery meadows or along a track among bracken, and Richard stands on the only litter-free, sandy beach in the whole of these islands (it looked like the south coast - how did they manage to clear it of dog-walkers?)

It is highly visual.  At his end a bearded Richard echoes an IRA hunger striker in his cell and then Saint Sebastian shot full of arrows.  Like Marlowe's Edward II Richard is insufferable as the theatrical king, and most pitiable and dignified when brought low to simple suffering, realising that he has been a man of straw with a crown.

It has often been noted that in democratic societies only big name entertainers like Madonna or Mariah Carey dare to come on these days like royalty - a president or prime minister cannot demand that their hotel-suite be decorated with white on white brocade.  So Richard Goold directed Ben Whishaw to play Richard as a Michael Jackson figure, a man who lives in a fantasy world with an entourage of grasping hangers on.

This fey Richard II crashes against the stolid Henry Bolingbroke (Rory Kinnear).  Bolingbroke believes in the prerogative of kings, and he represents the actuality of power as against its ceremonies and decorations.   So Bolingbroke appears as neither cruel nor unfeeling,  but with a heavy face and stance asserts his rights to the end, while the grimmer colder Northumberland, (a menacing David Morrissey) acts as his instrument.  This is kingship - not the fine cloth tents and banners, not the jewelled crown but the heads of the defeated rolling on the floor.  Quite magnificent. 

I have some quibbles.  The lines that show Richard exercising his power badly through his irresponsible and greedy underlings are mostly cut  Also, when Patrick Stewart's John of Gaunt delivers the precious gem set in a silver sea speech it doesn't need music as an accompaniment.  The words, the delivery and  Patrick Stewart's worn out face are enough.  

However it's marvellous television.   I'm really looking forward to the next play in the series, Henry IV Part 1. 

Richard ends starved and abused in a cell, musing on the hollowness of power. "I wasted time and now doth time waste me".   There is no evidence that recently deposed tyrants e.g. Ghadaffi and Saddam Hussein  philosophised that way in their final hours.  A modern western politician's fall is not so bloody.  But the spectacle of a fall from power jolts the heart.  At the end of Margaret, the play about Thatcher's fall, Margaret Thatcher goes to her office and finds the lock have been changed.  In an organisation I worked there was a boardroom coup and the locks were changed on the front door against the ousted managing director.  Then he successfully staged a counter coup.  That was drama and fear and some excitement for us underlings.

Here's a piece about Harold MacMillan's famous Cabinet reshuffle in 1962, the one known as The Night of the Long Knives.  Selwyn Lloyd, the Chancellor, got the boot.  His private secretary was Jonathan Aitken, who in Richard II's style of appointment, owed his job to being Lloyd's godson. 

After the meeting with MacMillan "the Chancellor returned a broken man, pleading with his godson to keep him company. ''What he really wanted to do,’’ recalls Aitken, ''was let his hair down and have a glass or two of whisky when his heart was opening up with worries of a personal kind. He had no money apart from his ministerial salary. In the middle of [his] stream of consciousness the doorbell rang and it was a GPO engineer to remove the scrambler telephone secure line. I remember [thinking] how quickly power fades.’’

At least he wasn't locked up in in Pomfret Castle.  The rise and fall - it's a story we never get sick of, be it kings, politicians or contestants in X-Factor. 

The First Blog - Blog Principles from 1927

I wonder if this was the first Blog.

I found the following in a novel called The Way Things Are  (published 1927).  The heroine, Laura Temple, is visiting her neighbour, Lady Kingsley-Browne, who has been badly upset by the behaviour of her wayward daughter Bebee.  Bebee has caused a huge scandal by moving in with a married man and his wife.

"I must tell you that Bebee, poor darling child, has taken up quite a new line." [said Lady Kingsley-Browne.]

"Oh, what?" exclaimed Laura, her tone of dismay betraying her conviction that any new line followed by Bebee must necessarily be a disastrous one.

"She is leaving him - in fact, she already has left him.  She has - it seems a most extraordinary thing, I know - but she has taken up religion. At least,  I suppose you might call it religion.  Do come nearer the fire, Laura.  I wonder if there any scones, or anything hot? . . .

"Thank you.  But do please go on-"

"It seems as though Bebee has so much personality, poor darling, that she has to express herself in ways that might, in anybody else, seem almost odd."

"Yes."

"It seems she has met a man - I'm sure things would have been just the same had it been another woman-"

Lady Kingsley-Browne paused, but as Laura felt equally sure that whatever "it" might be, things would not have been the same had it been another woman, she made no reply.

"It just happens to have been a man - Ernest Blog is his name, but Americans so often have names that we think odd - well, he has discovered, or invented, a tremendous new creed, and he has quite converted Bebee to it.  And the really bright spot is, that they are on their way to England, to - to try and spread it. . .  I can't tell you how ardently she has taken up this new creed."

"What, exactly, is it?"

". . Mr Blog lays down just one or two broad principles.  Nothing sectarian, you know - it rather reminded me of the Women's Institute movement . . . sort of guiding lines, that makes life simpler for all of us. . .  "

"I should like to hear some of the - the Blog principles, if you can remember them.  I am not laughing, really and truly.  It's only the name that - just for the moment - "

"I know," said Lady Kingsley-Browne forbearingly.  "It has a quaint sound, I am bound to admit.  But the principles seem very simple and beautiful.  She enclosed a sheet, with some Rules of Life written on it, put together by Mr. Blog.  Nothing dogmatic, you know.  Just: It is Better to Speak the Truth than to tell Lies, and Kindness is Right, but Cruelty is Wrong.  Things of that sort.  I liked all that part of it."

"Was there another part, as well?"

"Two other parts.  One was about diet, which always seems to enter tremendously into any new kind of religion. .  . His - Ernest Blog's - idea is nothing cooked.  Only things that have ripened in the sun - and, of course, in this country, that would limit one a good deal.  But anything in the way of drink, and as much of it as one likes.  Prohibition, you see."

"Not in England."

"I know.  Perhaps he'll modify that part of it over here."

"And what else?" said Laura.

"Free Love," said Lady Kingsley-Browne, as one accepting the inevitable.

Later on when Dr Ernest Blog appears he is described as being "exactly two foot high".

So that's the proto-Blog or the  Ur-Blog.  Short, American, cranky, and advancing platitudes as daring originality.  However, you can't really object to the principles of Truth being better than Lies and Kindness than Cruelty - though you can find plenty of writers, on and off blogs,  ready to do so.

The first Blog follower was an egocentric air-head and flake.

(Extract from Chapter XVI of The Way Things Are by E M Delafield, whose Diary of a Provincial Lady has never been out of print.  The Way Things Are is republished by Virago Modern Classics.)


E M Delafield on the cover of Life.