Cymbeline
Around the Globe,
Spring 2006
The BBC Shakespeare
began as one of the Corporation’s most promising enterprises of the late 1970s,
but the results were uneven. Last autumn, some 20 years after the final
production was broadcast, the complete cycle was released on DVD. Tony Howard looks
into a mixed bag.
In
1978, with a flourish of trumpets scored by William Walton, the BBC announced its
undertaking to broadcast every Shakespeare play in the First Folio. Cedric
Messina, the project’s initiator and first producer, promised great actors in ‘traditional’
productions uncompromised by tricksy direction. The newish medium of video was
central to his conception. Banning modern dress,
But
the BBC’s attempt to explore the new video market stumbled. Schools and
colleges were expected to buy the entire series, which very few could afford to
do. Only a handful of ‘popular’ plays ever reached the shops, and very few were
ever re-broadcast. Over the years the BBC Shakespeare turned into a slightly
embarrassing memory. Now its long-delayed commercial appearance (on DVD) permit
a revaluation. It’s time to ask: how do these productions hold up?
The
short answer is that they constitute a very mixed bag, containing several
brilliant versions of less familiar plays beside some that seemed unwatchable
at the time and remain so.
As
Kevin Billington’s fine ‘Henry VIII’ shows, the second has real potential. The documentary
approach served the language well as the cast moved between claustrophobic
corridors and Tudor palaces whispering secrets or projecting rhetorical
defiance. John Stride’s fine Henry seems to burst with youthful
self-confidence, but the camera also catches a hint of guilt in his eyes. Sadly
though, these early experiments were killed in an inept ‘As You Like It’, shot
in glum woods around
Miller
boldly rethought the project, investigating the aesthetics of ‘the electric
square’. He relocated Shakespeare in worlds taken from 16th and 17th-century
paintings – Vermeer, Veronese, Caravaggio, Rembrandt and others – and his
productions are beautifully composed. Close-ups and two-shots predominate;
dialogue is conversational and crystal-clear, false emotion anathema. In Miller’s
rational, engrossing productions, we eavesdrop on murmured politics and love,
and though his style is uniform it’s subtly varied. For ‘Antony and Cleopatra’
he crams the small screen with epic characters who burst against its limits; in
‘Troilus and Cressida’ he shows just fragments of the story, allowing a glimpse
of single faces as armies march by in heat-haze or darkness before they are
lost to death. Miller and his new team turned the BBC’s folly into a lasting
experiment in translation.
But
Miller’s historicism also had its controversial side: he insisted that modern
feminism was irrelevant to ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, which he said was a hymn
to Protestant marriage, and he produced one of the last major ‘Othellos’ with a
white actor in the title role. His justification was that the play is about
alienation and envy, not race. Some actors benefited more from Miller’s muted
approach than others. While John Cleese’s Petruchio blew it apart and Bob
Hoskins’ Iago commandeered the camera, the passion of Anthony Hopkins’ Othello
seems stranded. And Miller’s avoidance of obvious emotion can be wilful – the last
shot of ‘Othello’ shows not the dead lovers but Cassio limping down a corridor.
Seen
today, the cycle’s overriding fault is dramatic lethargy. Because the focus is
on realism and there’s no audience to woo, speech tends to become introverted,
pauses accumulate, images lack fire. There’s one exception, however. Elijah
Moshinsky was allowed to be the series’ maverick, breaking its rules to create
intense, filmic productions driven by fluid translations and emotional
conflict. Moshinsky cut radically to create excitement and inner rhythm,
insisting that “plays don’t speak for themselves – they need translation.” In ‘Coriolanus’
he cut back the mob to focus on Oedipal and homoerotic psychological battles:
Alan Howard, Irene Worth and Mike Gwillim are magnificent here. So too are
Helen Mirren, Michael Pennington and Robert Lindsay in his dreamlike ‘Cymbeline’.
Moshinsky dissolves distinctions between reality and fantasy and puts us in
contact with Shakespeare’s teeming, obsessional imagination.
For
the record, the best productions include Billington’s ‘Henry VIII’, Miller’s ‘Antony
and Cleopatra’, ‘Troilus and Cressida’, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ and ‘Timon of
Athens’; Moshinsky’s ‘Cymbeline’, ‘Pericles’ ‘Coriolanus’, ‘All’s Well That
Ends Well’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’; David Jones’ ‘Pericles’; Jane
Howell’s stylized reading of ‘The Winter’s Tale’ and bravura ‘Henry VI’
trilogy, which begins in an adventure playground and ends with horror.
Absolutely to be avoided are ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘The Tempest’, ‘As You Like It’,
‘The Comedy of Errors’, ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona’ and ‘Julius Caesar’. The
middle ground includes countless fine performances – Derek Jacobi’s flamboyant Richard
II, Warren Mitchell’s brave stab at Shylock, Claire Bloom’s collection of
dignifies queens – and even a funny version of ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’.
Classical
drama is almost extinct on television now. The BBC has shown some National
Theatre and Globe productions; it has put some money into films and, with the
recent ‘Shakespeare Retold’ series, it has offered a few modern versions of the
stories. But it has originated only three full-scale Shakespeares in the last
20 years. It’s time to celebrate what is best about the cycle.
The
DVD’s include no extras, but there are subtitles. Switch these on and even the
weakest production can be useful as readings
– educational aids that prioritise text and give Shakespeare’s language
opulent, if fallible, flesh.
Shakespeare on Film,
Volume VII, Henry E Jacobs, The
‘Cymbeline’
is a very difficult play to produce in any medium for several reasons. A
surfeit of names, characters, places, and plots creates an unusually tricky
situation for the director. Although some of the play’s problems proved to be
as problematic on television as they can be on the stage, Elijah Moshinsky
breaks new ground with his videotape of the play.
Moshinsky
was less than successful with his solution to the problem of place and culture.
The choice of a generalized eighteenth-century milieu as the “ground” for the
BBC tape blurred the essential distinctions between the worlds of the play:
prehistoric
The
confusing fragmentation of the plot was handled with judicious cutting and
extremely rapid pacing. For the most part, Moshinsky showed a great deal of
care for Shakespeare’s text, cutting so as to maintain the flow and focus of
‘Cymbeline’ without damaging the fabric of the play.
There
was, however, one glaring exception to this careful treatment of the text. The
tape cut (whether by Moshinsky or by PBS editors) the fight between Posthumus
and Iachimo and Iachimo’s subsequent paroxysm of
contrition (5.2s.d. + 1-10). This
“unkindest cut” resulted in two serious problems later in the catastrophe. When
Posthumus says to Iachimo, “I had you down, and might have Made you finish,” we
have no idea what he is talking about. More seriously, the omission of the
fight and Iachimo’s contrition leave his apparent
change of heart at the close of the play unclear and unmotivated.
The
great strength of this production may be found in Moshinsky’s
treatment of the characters and the superb performances that he elicited from
most of the actors. Richard Johnson’s Cymbeline was a man whose judgement and
moods were controlled by his own changeability and his wife’s manipulations
rather than by age or sickness. Indeed, this Cymbeline never does change very
much; he is as mercurial in the catastrophe as he was at the play’s opening.
Michael
Pennington’s Posthumus similarly avoided excesses while Paul Jesson’s Cloten was an
interesting if eccentric mixture of fop, oaf, braggart.
Robert
Lindsay’s Iachimo and Helen Mirren’s Imogen were
masterpieces. With Iachimo, Moshinsky again avoided the contemporary and
popular conception of a bored dilettante or a cavalier sportsman. Instead,
Lindsay’s Iachimo is the living embodiment of decadent sexuality and lascivious
voyeurism. For this character, Posthumus’ initial faith in Imogen and the
actual striking of the wager are erotically stimulating. Similarly, Iachimo’s long temptation scene with Imogen (1.7) conveyed subtextual lust in tone and movement.
This
eroticism achieves a crescendo in the bedchamber scene. Moshinsky opens the
scene up to all the textual and subtextual implications
of rape through a combination of costuming, subtle lighting, and inspired
blocking. Iachimo, shirtless, the camera focused on his upper body, leaned
halfway on the bed.
Helen
Mirren’s Imogen was an intelligent compromise between
the paragon of virtue idealized by nineteenth-century romantic critics and the
exemplum of disobedient daughter advocated by strict historicists. Mirren’s portrayal and Moshinsky’s
direction illustrated the degree to which Imogen is a powerless pawn who is
controlled by her husband, her father, her step-brother, her enemy, and even
her servant. The resultant Imogen was predominantly a reactive rather than an
active character. This, I think, is very much in keeping with the spirit and
structure of the play.
Any
television production of Shakespeare’s play is subject to the thousand natural
excesses that seem to come with the medium and have been rehashed in these
reviews time after time. Perhaps the most noticeable is Moshinsky’s
willingness to use a tight shot on talking heads. This is not to suggest that
such close-up shots were not used to striking advantage in some parts of the
production.
Still
another excess characteristic of Moshinsky’s
production was the creation of striking visual tableaux vivants in the Flemish style, a
type of shot probably the legacy of Jonathan Miller. The alternation of talking
heads and tableaux vivants
makes for a static production.
At
the same time a nice touch was the grounding of the wager scene in a chess game
which Posthumus proceeded to lose as he was drawn deeper into the wager.
It
would be unfair to Moshinsky and the production not to end on a strongly
positive note. For all its flaws, this production manages to make a rarely produced
and very difficult play work very well indeed. The denouement was a theatrical tour de force that succeeded in
manipulating our emotions backwards and forwards between the joy and anguish of
the characters. In the true spirit of the tragicomic mode, we leave this
production with a mixture of smiles and tears.
Shakespeare
Quarterly, Number 34
Elijah
Moshinsky made another interesting contribution to the BBC Television
Shakespeare series with his production of ‘Cymbeline’. He gave the play a Jacobean
setting, which had two immediate advantages. First, Jacobean clothes and rooms
work well on television: they have a “lived-in” quality and do not draw undue
attention to themselves. Here, together with the frequent use of close-up, they
encouraged the viewer to concentrate on what the characters were saying,
thinking, and feeling. Second, the somberly beautiful Jacobean
interiors emphasized the predominantly somber interpretation of the
play.
Both
the somberness and the stress on character paid off in the two
scenes between Iachimo and Posthumus. Posthumus was seriously,
straightforwardly presented as a true lover rather than a braggart, falling
victim to a lip-curling Italianate villain. His subsequent soliloquy was given
a quasi-tragic intensity, the camera close in upon his face. Michael Pennington
played it with great force, but he and the director missed what G.K. Hunter
calls the “overwrought heroic folly” that is an element of the part. Robert
Lindsay handled Iachimo’s attempted seduction of Imogen
with a relaxed skill that made the notorious difficulties of the text seem
non-existent. Later, he emerged naked from the trunk, a sinister “tempter of
the night.” This certainly established the “potent sexual force” the director
was aiming at, but the effect would surely have been the greater still had
Imogen been naked too, as the text implies: how else does Iachimo see the mole under her breast (II.iv.134)? Up to the
end of the second act, Mr Moshinsky had created a world in which the characters
seemed absolutely credible, even the Queen: Claire Bloom was no melodramatic
villainess, but a striking Medici Queen Mother, maintaining her smilingly
aristocratic manner even when planning to poison Imogen.
In
the middle of the play, the events become more fantastic, less easy to
accommodate within a realistic Jacobean setting; but Mr Moshinsky made the
complexities quite unnecessarily chaotic by reordering scenes and even sections
of scenes. The opening part of Cloten’s soliloquy in IV.i (“How fit his garments serve me!”) was tacked on to
the end of the scene in which Cloten asks Pisanio for Posthumus’ garments, so that a baroque fantasy
involving Cloten admiring himself in a series of
looking-glasses could be played out to a tinkling harpsichord accompaniment. Imogen’s awakening by Cloten’s
corpse was separated from her subsequent meeting with Caius
Lucius by the insertion both of Cymbeline’s worries
about the Queen’s illness and the first half of Posthumus’ soliloquy on his
return. The decision to split this soliloquy was the odder since otherwise, the
battle being represented only by a blazing building, Posthumus held the screen
uninterrupted right through to his vision of Jupiter.
It
seemed as if this was being prepared for when the Welsh scenes were prefaced by
an eagle in flight, and when the Cloten/Guiderius
fight was accompanied by a battle between two eagles in the sky above their
heads, but in fact Jupiter appeared without his eagle. Posthumus’ family merely
gathered round the chair in which he slept, while Jupiter stood looking down on
them in the foreground of the shot, urbanely spoken by Michael Hordern. But if it was oddly unspectacular, the scene
itself went well, and the language, once again, seemed to present no
difficulties. Indeed Mr Moshinsky believes that Posthumus’ “Be what it is, /
The action of my life is like it” is a key line: “Shakespeare is saying the
confusion of the play is like life: it’s bizarre and emotionally penetrating
and psychologically intense. And very lifelike.”
True,
but the serious interpretation of Posthumus was pushed so far as to become
grotesque. With his shaven head and peasant rags, his destitute figure
suggested a conflation of the mad Lear and poor Tom. Here the bizarre eclipsed
the lifelike; and since Helen Mirren was a somewhat
subdued Imogen, in keeping with the overall interpretation, the most moving
moment in the finale was the princes’ obvious reluctance to part from their
foster-father Belarius. This certainly had been
prepared for by the earlier Welsh scenes: Michael Gough gave a superbly rounded
portrait of great tenderness as Belarius, and the
princes were excellent, particularly in the mock-burial of Imogen, where “Fear
no more” was sung, to magical effect, though clearly against the implications
of the text. The passage containing those implications was one of the several
drastic and regrettable cuts that not only diminished the play’s effectiveness
but seemed quite unnecessary, since the scenes which were virtually uncut,
notably those between Iachimo, Posthumus, and Imogen early on, had worked so
well in television terms.
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