Page 84 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

The Hollow Crown I 73

"Down I Come, Like glistering Phaethon"
Richard II
The Stage Tradition, TV, and the Film That Never Was

Richard II is one of the few Shakespearean plays that have never
been filmed, even during the silent era, when producers drew heav-
ily upon the Bard's work. This is not so surprising, according to actor
Maurice Evans, who stated that the trick to making Richard work
necessitates taking "a [questionable] person, with all his faults, then
play him so the audience becomes sympathetic in the second act
and bleeds for him in the last one." Evans twice portrayed Richard
on the New York stage, on Broadway in 1937, then again in 1951 at
City Center. Having become associated with the role, it came as no
surprise when, in 1953, he announced plans to mount a film. As a
result of Olivier's popular English epics and M-G-M's commercially
successful Julius Caesar (1953) producers were once more willing to
bet their investment money on the Bard.
Filippo del Giudice, who produced Olivier's Henry V and Hamlet,
agreed to do the same for Richard II, which was budgeted at a hefty
$1.5 million. Margaret Webster, a top professional in her field, was
engaged as the editor for a film that would never see the light of
day. Instead, Evans ended up playing Richard II on a live Hallmark
Hall of Fame TV production. Television is, in fact, more appropriate
for this play. There are no big battles to fill a cinematic canvas and
no central character, hero or villain, to dominate a huge screen via a
larger-than-life performance. As critics have noted, Richard II is an
"intimate play"; TV, with its natural reliance on the close-up, is
more suited to it.
Which helps explain why critics of the time felt that this produc-
tion failed—though one year earlier Evans's TV Hamlet had been
hailed. That show was specifically planned for the unique nature of
the medium, emphasizing soliloquies in close-ups and paring away
spectacle. Unfortunately, with Richard II, Evans held to the concept
for his aborted movie. Little wonder Jack Gould of the New York
Times complained: "The tragedy of the playboy ruler was lost amid
a bewildering preoccupation with setings, props, and effects. Too
often the camera and not the play was the thing."
The bloated production, which was awkwardly jammed onto a
small screen, proved that television as a storytelling form was com-