Archive for the 'Alan Bennett' Category
The Merry Wives Of Windsor – Directed by David Hugh Jones – Low Oomedy. A fat old reprobate tries to seduce two wealthy wives. 120 minutes Color 1982
Here we have one of the greatest recordings of a Shakespeare play ever set down. And yet it is of one of WS's thorniest scripts. Like Henry V it is tortured with a melange of voices in Latin, French, Welsh, and German, making the script monstrously hard to parse! But it wasn't written to be read, but to be acted, and WS understood the rubric of acting like no one else, so that in the bodies of the actors it comes alive here, understandable here, priceless here. The sixteen shifts of mood in one character's speech on the page are gibberish, but in the craft of the great Elizabeth Spriggs as Mistress Quickly, we have a masterpiece of human truth and humor, a performance of genius. Each minor character here is enacted, embodied, played to full measure. They are characters with no history, for their history lives in the exact present entirely. The piece is a proving ground for its players, led by Judy Davis' Mistress Ford and Ben Kingsley as her frenetically jealous hubby Frank Ford. Prunella Scales' performance as Mistress Page gets lost and monotonized behind its regionalism, but its energy is right on the money. Richard Griffiths we have recently seen in The History Boys plays Falstaff. Now this was made 25 years ago, so our actors are in their twenties (i.e. Alan Bennett) , and perhaps Griffiths is too young for the part in the sense that he wants merriment. TMMOW is a play, unlike Henry IV 1 & 2. In those plays Falstaff is driven by a lust for zest; here he is driven by a lust for money through lust, and it's not that he is just too old and too fat, which he is, he is also just too ridiculous to score. This complicates the part, and Griffiths makes him a little more downbeat than one wants him to be. A little less of an unmoored balloon. A little less of a roguish liar. Still, when he thinks he has finally achieved the bosom of Mistress Ford, and utters the jubilant line, "Let the sky rain potatoes!" we are in a world of comedy unparalleled. The odd attic setting and the inn and the house of Ford and Caius and all the costumes and wigs and make-up are fabulous. If you love Shakespeare or want to learn to love Shakespeare, dive in.
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: ENGLISH FUSTIAN, Alan Bennett, Ben Kingsley, DOCUMENT OF THEATER PERFORMANCE, Elizabeth Spriggs, Farce, Filmed in England, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, JUDY DAVIS: SCREEN GODDESS; ACTING GODDESS, Low Comedy, Richard Griffiths, Sex Comedy, SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA, Tudor Costume Drama, WRITTEN BY: William Shakespeare