The total budget for a production with 36 cast was £2,000, and according to the Internet Shakespeare Editions Shakespeare website (working with information from the file WAC T5/430 at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre), ‘at one point a professional boxing match threatened to usurp the 8 o’clock time slot’. Not all the cast spoke the Shakespeare as it demands: Bolinbroke fairly hammered out the stresses of the verse. But he was sensitive and sincere, and rose as the poetry rose. The part, especially in front of the revealing camera, needs a personal youthful beauty. Wheatley, is not, I think, the ideal Richard. I am indebted here (as elsewhere) to the BUFVC’s essential and exemplary Shakespeare database for the following extract from a Radio Timesreview by Lionel Hale: Alan Wheatley played the king (he would later be known as the Sheriff of Nottingham in The Adventures of Robin Hood Clement McCallin, Bolingbroke (he later played John of Gaunt in the famous 1974 RSC production by John Barton with Ian Richardson and Richard Pasco) and Henry Oscar, John of Gaunt. Royston Morley’s full-length (145 minutes) production was first seen on BBC Television on 29 October, with three subsequent live ‘repeats’ (there is no recording). Including The Hollow Crown, there have been seven full-length small-screen productions so far. To date, there has been no feature film – Rupert Goold’s highly cinematic treatment for television’s The Hollow Crown (2012) comes the closest, while the 1949 Ealing Studios film Train of Events features an amateur dramatics society performing the play’s last scenes. But before we begin things proper I thought it might be interesting to offer a little background about previous British screen versions of the play. During the past seven days we confirmed our on-screen host (hurrah!), shot the trailer and began to film the weekly production diary which will start to appear online on 30 August. And we deep in the preparations for the Live from Stratford Upon Avon broadcast to cinemas on 13 November. Rehearsals for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new Richard II with David Tennant start a week tomorrow, Tuesday (the cast get the Bank Holiday off too).
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