The Hollow Crown: Henry IV: Part 2, BBC Two, review There is a figure that has towered over Richard Eyre's films of Henry IV Parts One and Two, and it isn't the one you'd expect. The usual show-stealer of these plays, Sir John Falstaff - played here by Simon Russell Beale - has looked quite the jolly jester in his fat-suit. But this icon of ribaldry and dipsomania hasn't been making us laugh. And if Falstaff doesn't make us laugh then we don't care when he's sad, and he spends quite a lot of Henry IV Part Two (Saturday, BBC Two) with a bloodshot eye for the bleaker side of life. No, it's the aged King who has been the wow of this middle leg of the BBC's excellent Hollow Crown series of four of Shakespeare's history plays. Surely Jeremy Irons's portrayal of Henry IV ranks as his best work for TV since his breakthrough role as the eloquent, elegant but oddly vacant Charles Ryder in Granada's Brideshead Revisited in 1981. Irons is a very fine screen actor, able to add rich dramatic colour for emphasis, but never forgetting to keep it detailed. And he's a performer who works by instinct rather than calculation, which is why every scene he was in Saturday's film flared with emotion. "Heavy is the head that wears the crown," agonised Irons as Henry, as the metal seemed to press in on his skull. That lament is the King's leitmotif in this play, as an old man reflects on a reign fissured with anxiety. The hollow-eyed despair, the cracked nobility, the searing self-interrogation, this was like a dress rehearsal for King Lear. Irons has already done a Lear of sorts in Dennis Kelly's modern twist on the play, The Gods Weep, but the way he produced the verse here, breathing and smelling the words, made me long for the real thing. Around him Eyre created a steady stage, with rows of talented actors having their moment in the slivers of light allowed through the Gothic arches of medieval passages, or the well-conjured Boar's Head on Eastcheap. Blink and you'd miss a touching Maxine Peake, or a sonorous Iain Glen, or a quite marvellously frosty Geoffrey Palmer. Eyre has always been particularly skilled at simply foregrounding the talent of those he casts. There was nothing tricksy or indeed even particularly creative about what else was going on on-screen, unlike the clever angles or exotic compositions of Rupert Goold's Richard II, the Hollow Crown's opening play. This worked for Irons and Tom Hiddleston, pitch-perfect as the reformed Prince Hal, but Russell Beale was perhaps let down by it. He could have had laughs if there'd been a bit of slapstick, some sight gags to make up for the textual jokes now lost to time. We know he can do it: he was riot as King Arthur riot in Spamalot. But by and large the BBC have set the record straight with The Hollow Crown: making films (rather than filmed plays) of Shakespeare that are vivid and vivacious not leaden and lugubrious as once such telly plays were; and recording our best actors speaking lines that inspire them. They've also shown us that Jeremy Irons is an actor now snapping at the heels of greatness.