BEVERLY HILLS, California — North Americans can be a little squirrelly when it comes to Shakespeare’s plays. We needn’t be. The director of two “king” plays coming to PBS describes them as our first soap operas.
“They were the most successful plays that Shakespeare had ever written up to that point,” says British director Dominic Cooke, “hugely commercial. The structure of soap opera is taken from these, as, by the way, is Game of Thrones, which is based on the original plays.”
While he has orchestrated scores of plays on the stage, the miniseries he’s conjured for Great Performances marks his first film work.
Called The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses, it premières Sunday and consists of Henry VI in two parts and Richard III in one.
Ruminating about his Herculean task, Cooke says he tried to detect the underlying theme of these plays. “And the thing that I noticed, both reading the plays and looking around at the very acres of books that had been written about these plays, is that the centre of the story is the idea of how many bad decisions does it take to put a psychopath in power? Because Richard III is a murderous person who ends up killing children.
“When a leader ends up knowingly murdering children, a moral line is crossed that that person can never come back from,” he says.
“And as in the Scottish play [Macbeth], you know the moment where he kills the Macduff children, the whole universe turns against him, and he ends up having a forest coming toward him. It’s actually soldiers holding branches. In this, there’s a moment where Richard III authorizes the murder of his two nephews, and at that point the world turns against him.”
Cooke conscripted a mouth-watering cast for the job including the hyperkinetic Sherlock Holmes star, Benedict Cumberbatch, Dame Judi Dench, Michael Gambon, Sophie Okonedo, Tom Sturridge and Hugh Bonneville.
Even though she studied at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Okonedo, never acted in a play by the Bard there. While she’s won buckets of awards, she’s only performed in one of his plays, Troilus and Cressida, she says.
“This is my first for these plays, the first time I’ve experienced them is through filming them,” she says. “I think the beauty of this is that often the battles are described. A lot of this in Shakespeare is described onstage [about] what happened offstage. And here, we actually get to see, which makes it much easier to follow the story, because you see everything. You get all the visuals, alongside the language, so it’s really accessible, and it’s really easy to follow the story. It has been wonderful to kind of film all those scenes that were often just being described by one character.”
Her co-star, Tom Sturridge, who portrays Henry VI, has never acted in a Shakespeare play before.
“I didn’t go to drama school. I didn’t do acting at school … I think in performance, in watching other people do it, I think very quickly like Dominic says, I think all great actors are fantastic at Shakespeare. And so it’s a great learning experience watching different Shakespeares in productions, because you very quickly see people who understand their craft and who are quite wonderful and people who potentially aren’t. But it was an extraordinarily steep learning curve doing this job, because it was a universe that I was completely naive to.”
Michael Gambon, who has portrayed everyone from Winston Churchill to Professor Dumbledore, says he never studied either.
“I don’t think you can teach someone to act. I think too much is made of teaching people about acting. I think it’s become an industry. It’s even taught in universities and it’s not an academic subject. It’s an animal, innate, inspirational thing I don’t think it has anything to do with education. I think it’s all an invention in order to make money, these hundreds of drama schools churning out people and bending their hopes. That sounds pretty grim, what I’m saying, but I don’t think it has much to do with all that. I think acting’s about dreaming and pretending to be someone else.”
Playing the role of the Duchess of York is Judi Dench. Dame Judi jumped out of drama school right into one of Shakespeare’s juiciest roles, that of Hamlet’s rejected girlfriend, Ophelia, who goes bonkers when she realizes that Hamlet’s not that into her.
“I followed my brother to drama school for three years,” says Dame Judi. “When I came out, they were looking for someone to play Ophelia at the Old Vic. And I came out at that time and I was cast. I was surprised. I thought I was being auditioned as a walk-on and that would’ve suited me fine.”
