Adapted from the Twitter feed and mined from the notebooks, Monday night July 13, 2020. Posted Thursday night, July 23.
[Editor’s note: When I posted the Twitter thread that I used as notes for this post, I misremembered important plot points of “Edward II’ and mixed up King Edward’s role with his usurper and murderer, Mortimer’s. Surprised myself when I re-read the play. I thought I had a better memory than this. I’ve incorporated the corrections in the post.]
Once upon a time, and a very long time ago it was, I saw then twenty-five-year old Patti LuPone in a production of Christopher Marlowe's "Edward II".
She played Edward's young teenage son who would become the boy-king Edward lll. That's her, center, huddling against “his” ineffectual, self-indulgent but affectionate father (played by Norman Snow), while his treacherous but loving mother, Queen Isabella (Mary Jo Negro), looks on.
For most of the play her Prince Edward was a boy and a good son to both his parents, struggling to understand the conflict between them and his father’s failure as a king and his mother’s betrayal of her husband and England. I remember vividly her re-entrance in the final act when, after his father’s murder, Edward has returned from exile in Franceto take his place on the throne and thwart the plot of his mother’s lover Mortimer to have himself crowned King.
She marched in, all five feet nothing of her, at the head of a loyal contingent of armed knights and lords, all very much the prince’s senior in age but all very much deferring to him as their commander, looking every bit the warrior-king Edward III would turn out to be. It was a thrilling moment.
I was reminded of that moment listening to the Public Theater's radio production of "Richard II" tonight.
An actress, Miriam A. Hyman, is playing Bollingbroke (Henry IV-to-be whose head will uneasily rest when he wears the crown in his own two-part sequel), and it's not working for me.
I’m a longtime proponent of women playing men’s roles in Shakespeare (although Sarah Bernhardt made the case before me by a hundred years), with or without gender-bending. I would loved to have seen Elizabeth Marvel as Antony in the Public’s Trump-inflected “Julius Caesar”, and I’m glad the director of this “Richard II’ chose to cast a woman as the gruff and manly (and definitely male) warrior Bolingbroke rather than going with the more obvious choice and casting her as the poetical dreamer (read that as more feminine) Richard. And it's not that Hyman isn't a good actress. It's that hers is very much a woman's voice
The Public was planning to stage "Richard II" as one of their summer Shakespeare in the Park productions, with this cast, and I imagine that on stage, in costume, she'd have made a convincingly male Bollinbroke. But with just her voice to carry her in the role, I'm just not buying it. Maybe as I get used to hearing her I'll be more able to suspend my disbelief. WNYC is broadcasting the play in four parts, between tonight and Thursday.
But it's not just Hyman. It's a general problem. Except for Andre Holland, who plays Richard, none of the players who've had their entrances and exits so far has a good *radio* voice...
It's not enough to cast good actors. You have to cast the right sort of voices. It's the same with voice actors for animated movies. Makers of feature-length cartoons make this mistake regularly. They think having someone famous voicing a character is all they need…
Thanks to video film critic Lindsay Ellis, I've taken to calling this the Robin Williams effect.
(A bigger mistake, which Ellis points out in her video on Disney’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame'' is thinking that because they have famous actors voicing the characters they don’t have to work hard at writing dialog. They rely on audiences just getting a kick out of hearing stars’ voices come out of the mouths of cartoon characters.)
But like I said, I might just need to get used to it. I'm going to stick with it. The production isn't bad. It's just not as compelling as it could and I think would be with different voices at work. We'll see - or, rather, hear…
But speaking of seeing and hearing, has anyone seen and heard the BBC's Hollow Crown series? I think I'm going to check out their "Richard II".
Ben Wishlaw plays Richard, and he looks as though sad stories of the deaths of kings would be all about him to him, which is how it should be. Richard is often played as effeminate, as if his tragic flaw is not being manly enough. But I think it's his vanity, which often expresses itself in long outbursts of florid poetry full of self-pity and self-aggrandizement that no one appreciates as much as he does himself.
But speaking of great voices…
I want to watch just to hear Patrick Stewart as John of Gaunt deliver the Sceptered Isle speech.
Maybe that's what I'll do now. It's streaming on Amazon.
The performance that really impressed me in The Hollow Crown was Rory Kinnear as Bolingbroke, who managed to accomplish quite a bit without saying a word. Whishaw and Stewart were excellent, but I expected that.
Posted by: Daniel McIlroy | Friday, July 31, 2020 at 07:18 AM