1979–80 BBC Production
This version, directed by David Giles, starred Jon Finch as King Henry the Fourth; David Gwillim as Prince Hal; Rob Edwards as Prince John of Lancaster; David Buck as Earl of Westmoreland; Robert Brown as Sir Walter Blunt; Clive Swift as Earl of Worcester; Bruce Purchase as Earl of Northumberland; Tim Pigott-Smith as Hotspur; and Anthony Quayle as Falstaff.
Commenting in depth about “The Production” (19–27) of this adaptation in the BBC booklet published to coincide with the broadcast of this play, Henry Fenwick began with producer Cedric Messina describing the best history plays, from Richard II to Henry V, as Shakespeare’s best plays (19) and then cited director David Giles’s emphasis on the realism of his productions of Henry IV, Parts I and II and his comment that most of the scenes are private and involve many “duologues” (20). Giles said of the Shrewsbury battle scene that “what we’ve used is a very long lens on the camera, so what you see in focus is clear but everything else is blurred,” adding, “We didn’t want to use this just for the battles, so we decided to use it in all the exteriors” (20). Odette Barrow, the costume designer, described the difficulty of achieving historical accuracy in the costumes, arms, and banners, and the need sometimes to neglect historical accuracy (21), while script editor Alan Shallcross noted that not many cuts were needed in this play and that most of the cuts involved political details (22). Giles himself highly praised the skill of Shakespeare’s writing and craftsmanship and his creation of vivid characters (22–23), describing in particular the scene of Hal killing Hotspur by remarking that “as the sword goes in, the scales [drop] from Hotspur’s eyes—he sees that all the honour he has accrued will now go to Hal, a very bitter death. But,” he added, “one also feels that in the last speech Hal meets someone who is nearly his equal and [that] given other circumstances they could have been great friends” (23). Commenting on his role as Hotspur and on Hotspur’s death, Tim Piggot-Smith remarked that his character “ends up slung head down across Falstaff’s back—the most humiliating image we could find.” He explained that “[w]e worked very hard on the fights, trying to take them away from the noble image [of fighting]. There’s quite a bit of rolling around, nothing noble about it—we just hack away” (23).
David Gwillim, playing Hal, said that “Falstaff becomes much more a living, breathing person on television. On stage there’s the big chap with a fat belly, but on television the camera goes right in and you see those frightened eyes! It’s ludicrous, it’s amusing, but …” (25), while Anthony Quayle remarked that he had last played Falstaff a quarter century before this production. He thought his age was now appropriate to the role and said that Falstaff has to be played loudly and theatrically on stage but that the risk of playing him on television is the risk of underplaying him, so the right balance had to be found (25). Quayle saw Falstaff and Hotspur as “two extremes,” with Hal somewhere in the middle, remarking, “Actually I believe Hotspur and Falstaff are a corrective to each other and alongside Hotspur’s excessive obsession with honour you see Falstaff’s total debunking of it…. But yet in the last resort if we lived like [Falstaff] we would never have fought Hitler” (26). Quayle considered Falstaff one of Shakespeare’s two greatest characters (the other being Hamlet) and as much more complex and intelligent and even thoughtful and sensitive than he is sometimes assumed to be: “he knows how a man should live but he goes his own way. To my mind you should be thinking, ‘He’s adorable but he’s ghastly.’ … he is the character with the greatest understanding of the agony of living” (26–27).
J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen, in their 1988 anthology Shakespeare on Television, quoted from several early reviews of this broadcast. Thus, one reviewer wrote that “Quayle … perfectly caught… Falstaff’s insecurity” while Finch’s King Henry was too “starchily declamatory.” Another reviewer asserted that this “understated production … takes about half an hour to build [but] brings out everything that need be hoped for,” including “vast edifices of hilarity that crumble into death and moral ambiguity” and “battlefield scenes of majestic slaughter and crushing impact.” Speaking of the two Henry IV plays together, a writer for the New York Times declared that “These are not brilliant, dazzling productions, stuffed with pyrotechnical turns. They are certainly not ‘experimental’ in any way. Instead, these are careful, almost primer-like interpretations, rarely less than competent, frequently shot through with marvelous displays of acting.” This reviewer called Quayle’s Falstaff an “insinuating scalawag” who nonetheless “taps an intriguing vein of melancholy” and whose rejection by Hal is “curiously moving,” concluding that “Mr. Quayle’s performance is, as usual, intelligent and splendidly theatrical” (258).
Samuel Crowl, discussing the BBC Henry IV, Part I in some detail in 1980 in the Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, began by declaring that “the small screen just can’t contain or capture its massive energies” and that the play “can’t be squeezed into a series of medium close-ups.” Crowl felt that because “Jon Finch’s range of expression appears to extend from dread to dead,” he “gives his king an embarrassing and irritating series of hand gestures,” which Crowl considered “the most amateurish sign language,” adding, “The stain of Henry’s usurpation becomes such an overpowering image that it subverts Shakespeare’s certain intention to create in 1H4 not an embryonic Macbeth, but a far more generous and optimistic work about the rewards and risks of power politics.” Crowl felt, however, that although the production’s “close-ups … expose the shallowness of Finch’s performance,” they “are turned to advantage by David Gwillim’s Prince Hal and Anthony Quayle’s Falstaff,” partly because “Gwillim is an inventive actor blessed with a remarkably wide and expressive mouth which he uses most effectively, especially when smiling” (3). Meanwhile, Crowl asserted that “Quayle’s performance is most interesting when director Giles has him identify and confront the camera-as-audience and to share his anti-establishment jests as a series of private confidences directly with us” (3). But he found Quayle “less effective in action with Hal because he repeatedly slows the pace of their nimble exchanges by unnecessary interjections” (3–4). Finally, Crowl argued that “Tim Pigott-Smith’s Hotspur is appropriately redheaded and fiery but fails to rival our affection for Hal” and that the “production’s battle scenes are studio-stilted, but the play does emerge with more of its life intact than many … other productions” in the BBC series.
In 1991, Scott McMillin, in his book on this play for the Shakespeare in Performance series (99–105), called this production “notable” for featuring Quayle as a “humanised Falstaff” who speaks his soliloquies directly into the camera, thus directly connecting with the production’s viewers (99–100). McMillin, remarking that this adaptation suggested that Falstaff is “dangerous and must be rejected,” considered “Quayle’s assured performance … the strongest element of the production,” partly because “his soliloquies happily [interrupt] the dutiful effort to capture history in the space of the television studio.” McMillin considered Falstaff “in better control of the medium,” thus making “Prince Hal’s efforts to take better control of the kingdom seem second-rate,” partly because of the production’s “naïve” realism (100) and uninventive use of the camera at a time when coverage of contemporary sporting events, music videos, and television commercials were experimenting with “unexpected camera angles, tracking patterns, colours, visual design, repetition, and cutting,” among other innovations (101). McMillin also found flaws in the production’s lighting due to its efforts to be historically accurate, concluding that the “BBC tape, correct and dull, remains on the schoolroom shelf until the teacher assigns it. It is as difficult to dislike as it is difficult to view, and it makes no impact,” unlike Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (102).
Also discussing the BBC production (in his 1991 book Screening Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V), Ace Pilkington noted that “restrictions on budget and the corresponding constriction of rehearsal and shooting schedules” hampered this production, which was required by the BBC to adopt a “naturalistic house style, with its semi-documentary emphasis on history” (64). Also in 1991, Susan Willis, in her book The BBC Shakespeare Plays: Making the Televised Canon, considered this production more realistic than the BBC’s Henry V (100) and emphasized “appearance as a dominant theme” and the use of “long establishing shots to give context” to specific episodes (204).
In his 2008 book on both parts of Henry IV (176–80), James N. Loehlin noted that both parts were shot on a soundstage; that such an approach was appropriate to “the early interior scenes of Part I” but worked less well for external battles and the famous robbery episode; but that the “small-screen treatment allows for a very intimate and conversational style, which shrinks the scale of both rhetoric and character but allows for psychological insight.” Loehlin called Gwillim a “thoughtful” Hal, “capable of sardonic humour but always controlled, always conscious of his future role” but wrote that “Tim Pigott-Smith’s Hotspur is perhaps reined in somewhat by the small-scale medium but he also turns it to advantage” (177). He praised Quayle’s “sly, subtle, small-scale performance of” Falstaff as “an old man living by his wits” who “does not seem particularly gross in his appetites; he is a connoisseur rather than a glutton, a wit rather than a buffoon” (178).