Review: THE HOLLOW CROWN - PART TWO, BritBox

BWW will review the multi-award winning BBC Shakespearean series, The Hollow Crown, over the next three weeks, one episode per day, starting with Ben Whishaw's Richard II and finishing, 19 days later, with Benedict Cumberbatch's Richard III.

Woad-encrusted Welsh warriors wait on a shore for their King, Richard II, to return from his war in Ireland - they tire of it and go home, Richard again displaying his extraordinary ability to take his subjects for granted. Meanwhile Henry Bolingbroke musters the overtaxed nobility and wins over Richard's OIC, the Duke of York, as the justice of his case to have his lands restored and his armies demonstrate exactly where moral and physical power lie in England.

This is Ben Whishaw's episode from the moment he kisses the shores of his homeland to his acceding to the demands of Bolingbroke (a nicely controlled Rory Kinnear). Whishaw vacillates, dreams, has episodes of piecing lucidity, but never loses the fatal combination of vanity and hubris that did for monarchs then as much as it does now. He knows he should have seen it coming, but he dons his golden armour anyway, as much to convince himself as to convince Bolingbroke of his status as his authority slides through his fingers like the sand he embraced.

Rupert Goold's direction is wonderful throughout, balancing the intimacy that much of Shakespeare demands (echoes of Andrew Scott's acclaimed Hamlet in some of Whishaw's work), but using the rugged landscape and sweeping skies to remind us of the stakes in play. Weighing those scales can make or break any adaptation of a stage play and I've seldom seen it done better - the cinematic informing the theatrical.

Part One is reviewed here