Shorter than most of his companions, and effete in his manners, Beale plays Falstaff with an earnest and ingratiating insecurity, his confidence alternating with moments of nervousness.
He appears in direct contrast to Simon Russell Beale’s Falstaff. Beautifully, his "I know you all" soliloquy is spoken in voiceover as he walks through the tavern away from his friend, nodding and smiling at the patrons while sad eyes reflect his thoughts. His willingness to be part of this world – playing football with passing children, winking at prostitutes – is constantly undercut by his clear distinction from everyone else, even the slightly unshaven and grinning Poins. Striding through the Board’s Head as if bathed in a constant halo, Hiddleston exudes easy charm and handsome cool, taller than almost everyone else by a head and wearing a leather jacket a cut finer than anyone else’s. Key to this is a quite exceptional cast, headed up by Tom Hiddleston’s Hal. Yet Eyre’s use of the film is homage rather than plagiarism, drawing on what makes Welles’s film so evocative (the bustle and neat characterisation) but creating something distinctive. The visual quotation of Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight is apparent throughout, from Jeremy Irons’s Henry’s central raised dais to the nooks and crannies of the inn, to the arrangement of bodies for the play extempore. The sprawling Boar’s Head Tavern establishes this play a world away from the crisp backgrounds of Richard II, with a lived-in world providing genuine depth and colour to the central plot. Eyre’s film, conversely, begins in an Eastcheap filled to bursting with prostitutes, drunks, servants, shopkeepers and beggars, richly detailed and thoroughly evocative. One of my complaints in my review of Rupert Goold’s Richard IIwas that production’s rather ‘clean’ medieval world, which couldn’t quite shake the studio-set feel for much of its length and seemed surprisingly sparsely populated.
#HENRY IV PART 1 BBC 2012 SERIES#
The second episode in the BBC’s Hollow Crown series offers a stand-alone, prudently cut version of Henry IV Part 1, and immediately it is clear that the central plays of the second tetralogy are in good hands with Richard Eyre. July 8, 2012, by Peter Kirwan The Hollow Crown: 1 Henry IV BBC
0 kommentar(er)
