and now for something completely different

[angevin2]

Working with Mendes on the BBC's "epic film versions" of Richard II, Henry IV part I and II, and Henry V will be some of British theatre's leading lights, including Sir Richard Eyre, Simon Russell Beale and Rupert Goold, director of Enron....The four plays have not been adapted by the corporation for TV since 1978 and 1979, during the BBC

Comments

[murasaki_1966]

I hope they will be braodcast over here (australia), and if not, released on DVD.

[sadcypress]

SIMON RUSSELL BEALE AS FALSTAFF? YES PLEASE.

[angevin2]

THAT WOULD BE EPIC AWESOME. I HOPE MY GUESS IS ACCURATE.

[highfantastical]

OMG OMG!!!

[lareinenoire]

OMGYAYSQUEE!!!!!

[sophia_sol]

Hi! I have stumbled across your journal and have friended you for your most excellent Shakespeare thoughts/squee, and figured the polite thing to do is to tell you.

(also, you are beginning to make me actually interested in Shakespeare's history plays, which is not a phrase I ever expected to find myself using.)

[angevin2]

Nice to meet you!

The thing many people do not know about the history plays is that they are fucking fantastic. (Also that they are brimming with complete filth. Eric Partridge called Richard II "Shakespeare's cleanest play and by any standard a remarkably chaste one," but I suppose that we can excuse him on the grounds that it was 1947. But only a little bit. Anyway half of my dissertation was devoted to proving him wrong. ;) )

[sophia_sol]

Hah, awesome. I think my problem up till now has been that when I was younger I thought that HISTORY was boring (crazytalk, I know), so history plays? BORINGER. And I've never really been given any reason to think otherwise, so I've just sort of been...contentedly ignoring their existence? Yeah.

Your dissertation sounds fascinating, btw.

[angevin2]

Heeeee. I have noted, in general, that people outside of Britain tend to assume that the histories are inaccessible to people who don't know a lot about English history and so they aren't staged (other than Richard III and Henry V, which is actually my least favorite of the histories) or taught as much, and so people miss out on them. Or assume they are a Tudor-propaganda sausagefest (okay, the latter is kind of true, but most Shakespeare plays are sausagefests). Which is a shame, because they completely rock. My very favorite is Richard II, but I also think that the Henry IVs are as good an example as any other play of what Shakespeare could do in top form.

And thank you! If you want, I can put you on the dissertation filter -- I don't use it anymore because the diss is finished now, but obviously I used to use it all the time. It was about depictions of Richard II in the 1590s, i.e. Shakespeare and a bunch of other texts that only specialists ever read. ;)

[fuunsaiki]

Um OH MY GOD SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Why do we have to wait until 2012? D: