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Post by peggs on May 16, 2016 18:25:44 GMT
Is she a Spooks fan? I remember tuning in for the last series (and not having a clue what was going on!) because Streatfeild joined the cast. No she likes gardening and cricket with a side helping of period drama which is how this gets in I think, she is very anti Tom Hiddestone for bond i think because he IS Henry V as far as she is concerned, the fact that she doesn't watch Bond films is irrelevant. I watched series 10 spooks (and had watched previous series and was a bit baffled so wouldn't worry) but did not then know Streatfeild, shame on me. Will report back if there are any more Cumberbatch comments, it's been suspiciously quiet but Judi Dench is up next week and that is bound to provoke a response. |
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Post by peggs on May 17, 2016 20:00:28 GMT
My mother liked Anton Lesser and therefore couldn't watch his death, she said he had better hair at the start, I suggested there were rather a lot of wigs involved, she was most disillusioned.
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Post by loureviews on May 17, 2016 20:29:14 GMT
My mother liked Anton Lesser and therefore couldn't watch his death, she said he had better hair at the start, I suggested there were rather a lot of wigs involved, she was most disillusioned. He had a very impressive thatch as Fagin in 'Dickensian' recently as well. With that and 'Endeavour' he seems to be popping up everywhere right now so your mother shouldn't have too long to wait to see him again. |
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Post by peggs on May 17, 2016 20:46:09 GMT
My mother liked Anton Lesser and therefore couldn't watch his death, she said he had better hair at the start, I suggested there were rather a lot of wigs involved, she was most disillusioned. He had a very impressive thatch as Fagin in 'Dickensian' recently as well. With that and 'Endeavour' he seems to be popping up everywhere right now so your mother shouldn't have too long to wait to see him again. She probably hasn't made the Endeavour connection (different hair!) may have to point that out and see the reaction but yes you're right he is pretty consistent on tv. |
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Post by kathryn on May 17, 2016 21:25:56 GMT
I haven't enjoyed most of the Henry VIs as much as the first cycle, but my goodness what a jump in quality that last 15 minutes is! Shakespeare suddenly starts giving us a character, instead of a baldly propagandist sequence of events, with people chopping and changing allegiance as the plot demanded.
Having said that, I thought Tom Sturridge did very well with Henry - he must have been bloody freezing in that scene with the sheep! It was definitely raining. I also loved that shot of the crown in the bloody water, as well as the reflection on the blade.
I just read an article suggesting that the BBC might do the Roman plays next.
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Post by oxfordsimon on May 18, 2016 0:16:43 GMT
The adaptation for part 2 was far less successful than the opener. In the main that is due to the source material being far more episodic and the significant time shifts in the action. It is always a stretch to see why Warwick and Clarence switch sides so easily and the script did little to make that any more credible.
The production is, as to be expected, over a very high quality - but the material is not Shakespeare at his very finest.
I am somewhat dreading the finale next week - R3 is probably my favourite of all the plays and so they better not tamper with it too much!!
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Post by vickster51 on May 18, 2016 11:00:08 GMT
I caught up with the second part of Henry IV last night. Overall I enjoyed the two parts and found it much more engaging than when I had a day at the Globe seeing all three. This may be because I didn't really enjoy it until Part 3, so having it condensed for the TV made the whole story more engaging. Focussing on Hugh Bonneville's character was also a good choice for the opener.
I'm looking forward to Richard III. Mr Cumberbatch is a wonderful actor on stage and screen and he has already started to show the range and depth of Richard and I'm looking forward to him getting darker. It will be great to see RIII straight after Henry VI too, so that backstory of the characters, especially Margaret, is fresh and clear in the mind.
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Post by peggs on May 21, 2016 18:18:16 GMT
My mother has declared she is not watching Richard III as it will be 'too awful', no clarification as to whether that refers to Cumberbatch's nose or not.
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Post by oxfordsimon on May 21, 2016 23:30:29 GMT
It wasn't the best interpretation of R3 that I have ever seen. I missed the humour in the play - which perhaps does work better in the theatre than on screen. Certainly the cuts to the Clarence/Murderers scene robbed us of some of the black comedy of that sequence.
Cumberbatch's nervous habit of tapping his ring on the chess board/table/whatever felt like a homage to Spacey's performance in House of Cards (which isn't a bad thing) but it was over-used.
Much as I have missed Margaret in other screen adaptations, I can understand why having seen tonight's production. Her presence is very difficult to explain in the court scene - and it just jarred. Much as I love her as a character on stage, she doesn't easily fit in a screen version. Having said that, Sophie O was at her best.
Dame Judi didn't seem to inhabit Cecily as I had expected - she felt very detached (part of this was due to some of the clunky cuts to her lines)
It wasn't awful - far from it. But I don't think Cumberbatch will go down as a definitive Richard. Perhaps he would be better on stage where he could have that direct relationship with his audience. Hard to tell.
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Post by peggs on May 22, 2016 9:34:06 GMT
Have not read the play in quite a while and think I can only have seen versions where Margaret is cut/lines given to someone else, in the text is she just sort of wandering around as shown here, a sort of prophetic commentary but somewhat random as a 'prisoner'? Sophie O great either way.
Found the years years on (is that in the text?) somewhat jarring, I'm ignoring what historically might have been true as once you start applying actual history to history plays it gets a bit messy anyway, were we to believe that Anne had been visiting the grave for ten years? That it had taken Richard ten years to woo?
Again it was great to see some great actors grappling with shakespeare but all in all this trilogy didn't grab me like the first, partly to do with the plays themselves I suppose but not entirely, I've read several articles suggesting this was done very much with the Game of Throne audience in mind, hence all the gore and a bit of sex, and whilst unarguable there is a lot of death and I'm sure it was horrific for me it got a bit much.
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Post by Deleted on May 22, 2016 14:12:19 GMT
My mother has declared she is not watching Richard III as it will be 'too awful', no clarification as to whether that refers to Cumberbatch's nose or not. I saw, on Channel Four's Gogglebox on Friday, Sophie Okonedo's Margaret butchering a family, and I expect that your mother was anticipating the violence. |
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Post by peggs on May 22, 2016 15:08:26 GMT
My mother has declared she is not watching Richard III as it will be 'too awful', no clarification as to whether that refers to Cumberbatch's nose or not. I saw, on Channel Four's Gogglebox on Friday, Sophie Okonedo's Margaret butchering a family, and I expect that your mother was anticipating the violence. You are probably right, I think it was the expectation of the princes in the tower after that particularly bloody final five minutes of episode 2. |
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Post by kathryn on May 22, 2016 20:16:28 GMT
Just finished watching it. Hmm.
I'm not quite sure whether it was Cumberbatch, or the direction, or the fact that I've seen Mark Rylance perform this role, but it was a bit ... Flat. It lacked the humour that usually gets the audience to like Richard despite themselves.
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Post by kathryn on May 22, 2016 20:49:03 GMT
Oh, and did Cumberbatch's haircut bother anyone else? I know it's trivial, but I kept wondering why everyone else had kept their medieval hair styles while his looked modern.
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Post by peggs on May 22, 2016 20:51:57 GMT
Oh, and did Cumberbatch's haircut bother anyone else? I know it's trivial, but I kept wondering why everyone else had kept their medieval hair styles while his looked modern. Yes I wondered that too! Frankly if i'd been stuck in some of those wigs I'd have been a tad miffed. |
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Post by lynette on May 22, 2016 21:18:29 GMT
I enjoyed this v much. I thought it was done v well for tv. I think any sacrifice of humour was worth it. I particularly liked the intimacy of the family idea, true brotherhood etc. Loved the ending. Didn't those two boys act well?
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Post by horton on May 26, 2016 9:19:45 GMT
Cumberbatch and Shakespeare- Emperor's new clothes. The next Branagh he sure ain't!
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Post by Deleted on May 26, 2016 9:27:14 GMT
Shakespeare coined thousands of words, such as hobnob, so it's surprising that he apparently didn't dream up cumberbatch.
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Post by Deleted on May 31, 2016 12:21:32 GMT
So Sunday night's nausea came courtesy of a migraine; but Monday night's I'm blaming entirely on the second installment of The Hollow Crown. What a bloodbath, from start to finish! I'm wondering how RIII can possibly top it...
Overall, I haven't enjoyed this series as much as the first set of stories - and not just because of the gore! I'm not familiar with these plays at all so I don't know how much may have been altered, but a lot of the characters have seemed underwritten (sorry Shakespeare!). Or possibly underpowered, due to some of the acting. I'm not sure.
I liked Anton Lesser (though I always do), and Ben Miles and Stanley Townsend were great too (took me the whole first episode to figure out where I'd seen him before: The Nether, of course!).
I do wonder how often chaps stop to take in the scenery during battle, though? Surely you'd expect the enemy to creep up behind you with a big blade and jab you with it when you're not paying attention? It seemed to do for a lot of these blokes, though...
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Post by Nicholas on Jun 2, 2016 3:18:24 GMT
Finally caught up with these over the bank holiday, and I’ve got to say I really didn’t like Henry VI. The first part was quite good, because Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins and Sophie Okonedo were very good, but the matter-of-factness to the visuals, the endless scene of posh blokes with hair extensions in dark rooms talking politics, made a mockery of bringing these plays to TV. They were so simple, so repetitive, so visually one-note, so booooooring. I tend to like Cooke, but I can’t help but feel he was swamped by the sheer tedium of the plays with scene after scene of scene-setting politics, and no director could make much of that, but still I wish there’d been more wit to proceedings, more variety, more character to the camera. I quite liked the West Wing-esque walk-and-talk moments, but beyond that I was squinting in the dark as hairy poshos talked politics, and that didn’t do it for me. The second part was MUCH worse for this (poor Andrew Scott, roped in for five minutes with nothing to do but exposition, what a waste of a great actor that was), and the endless, repetitive blood-letting just got boring (what a shame the play’s major moments of contrast – Henry’s speech on the hill, or the father/son on the battlefield – were tossed away as asides to allow for more repetitive shouting and stabbing). The second part of this has to be one of the dullest things I’ve seen on TV this year, and I saw all of ITV’s Beowulf: Return to the sh*tlands.
And we’ve got Tom Sturridge, who seems to me to be one of the worst working actors today. He was rubbish in American Buffalo, galumphing into this naturalistic play about self-deception with such hammy obviousness, playing the role like Smike on smack, or Gollum in Trainspotting, embarrassingly obvious and embarrassingly out-acted by John Goodman (to be fair, most people are). Here, dear god, his one-note DEE-CLAAR-MAAR-TORR-REEEE TOOOOONE made FitKit’s Faustus seem like Lee Strasberg in comparison. Tony and Olivier nominated, so what do I know, but this was like a death mask shouting for four hours. Why wasn’t the much more handsome, much more talented Luke Treadaway in this role?
Richard III’s a much better play, though, which is why things picked up then – not quite as spectacularly as I’d hoped, I can’t agree with the five stars, but there was much to like. After the really quite boring Cumberhamlet, it was nice to see old Cumbers do what he does best, which is a conniving, intelligent arsehole. Yes, it was a bit humourless and I like some fun to my Richards, and no he’s not up there with Rylance or Mckellen or Olivier (high benchmarks, to be fair), but his Frankenstinian focused villain (both brilliant doctor and brutalised monster) suited his style and Cooke’s arc (that said, as humourless, straight-laced Richards go, the bulky, skulking hulk of a Fuhrer in his bunker that was Hans Kesting gets the gold, Kings of War has really stuck with me more than most shows do). More importantly, Cooke pulled his finger out and did something more interesting with the camera – not hard, given there’s more to work with, and too much was still declaiming in dark rooms – and with the Kurosawa-on-the-cheap armies marching, the rapport between Cumbers and the camera, that final helicopter shot, and a certain nice parallel to Thea Sharrock in the Bosworth/Agincourt scenes, this was a far better piece of television, which unlike Henry VI used its medium’s freedom to good, if not great, effect.
One of the joys of the original Hollow Crown was that, in its three directors, there was real exploration and variety. Sharrock’s Henry V was the least exciting, but there was a real solid competence and simple understanding of character in Eyre’s Henry IV, and giving Rupert Goold free reign made Richard II an occasionally OTT and obvious (St Sebastian, sacred lights, Michael Jackson) but always exhilarating watch. That series developed with voice and vision. Perhaps this time it was too few cook(e)s who spoiled the broth (apologies), or more likely Charlie Chaplin himself couldn’t make something cinematic of these plays. Personally, I think the way to make them zing would be to bring out their oddities – more of Joan, more of Jack Cade – but in doing so I suppose the Richard III story gets a bit sidelined. Some good and some great acting aside, Henry VI was a slog, but at least Richard III proved a worthwhile watch in the end.
And after Undercover, nice to see Sophie Okonedo get a story with a half-decent finale.
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Post by interiris on Jun 2, 2016 20:01:12 GMT
Totally agree with you the Hollow Crown part two was disappointing not only for the reasons you outlined but because most of Shakespeare's text had been altered to make it more accessible to those unfamiliar with Shakespeare.I watched it all the way through but it was pretty flat and turgid.
If you want to see an incredibly uplifting adaptation with appeal for young people look out for Russell T Davies A Midsummers Night Dream complete with amazing visuals and a mesmerising Maxine Peake
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Post by interiris on Jun 3, 2016 10:08:58 GMT
I was very disappointed in The Hollow Crown.The text had lost it's poetry etc by the way it was dumbed down for an audience which was deemed to have accessibility issues,the pacing was slow turgid and the acting very up and down. Lupita Nyong'o was excellent if a bit overwrought at times and Anton Lester his usual brilliant self Richard 111 was a mixture insightful moments and pantomime acting.The photography was weird/boring and gave the actors accessibility issues.I can understand them using on director having cut the plays so severley
The first series was brilliant and I have watched it many times.This series has gone straight to the delete bucket.The worst Richard I have seen robbed of all u have watched in the theatre and on screen its humour and passion
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Post by interiris on Jun 3, 2016 13:20:41 GMT
Just his facial work alone looks deformed and villainous Keep up, David J, Peggs's mum has been remarking upon his nose for over a week now, since its first appearance. "I don't recall any other character speaking directly to the camera up until now in these two episodes. You can almost sense Shakespeare suddenly upping his game as Cumberbatch turns to the camera for the first time, as if to say "now the real sh*t can start, motherf**ckers" i just found that so cliched and cheesy but I am not a fan of Cumberbath and Shakespeare-he always sounds like he is trying to hard to i.e over and slow.Not my Shakespeare at all i just hope they do bit better with the Read more: theatreboard.co.uk/thread/796/hollow-crown-wars-roses#ixzz4AWP5yWIn |
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Post by David J on Jun 3, 2016 16:34:55 GMT
Keep up, David J, Peggs's mum has been remarking upon his nose for over a week now, since its first appearance. "I don't recall any other character speaking directly to the camera up until now in these two episodes. You can almost sense Shakespeare suddenly upping his game as Cumberbatch turns to the camera for the first time, as if to say "now the real sh*t can start, motherf**ckers" i just found that so cliched and cheesy but I am not a fan of Cumberbath and Shakespeare-he always sounds like he is trying to hard to i.e over and slow.Not my Shakespeare at all i just hope they do bit better with the Read more: theatreboard.co.uk/thread/796/hollow-crown-wars-roses#ixzz4AWP5yWInTo be fair, I just thought he gave a good and serviceable performance and nothing more. I miss the comedy that can be juiced from such lines like "Is the chair empty". Instead of relishing it, Benedict just took the obvious route and shouted it. I'm still waiting to be amazed by Cumberbatch. And dearly I'd like to. I just find he relies too much on his dark, sombre voice that is part of the attraction. Did you see his Hamlet? I'd wished I could have been overblown by that performance if he wasn't overshadowed by Lyndsey Turner's gimmicks |
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