Acting Shakespeare (1982) Review

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(More customer reviews)I saw this video in my high school British Lit. class in 1986 and was mesmerized. I was not a particular fan of Shakespeare at the time, was in fact one of those kids who found Shakespeare mostly boring and irrelevant, but this turned me on to all that Shakespeare can be and why he has remained popular for so long. I have been a huge fan of Ian McKellan ever since; he is superb in this. I have been looking for this video for years, checking McKellan's website, ebay and everywhere I could think of, so I was so excited when I googled the title today, and found it on Amazon! I cannot recommend McKellan's _Acting Shakespeare_ highly enough. It remains, in my memory, the best theatre -- Shakespeare or otherwise -- that I have ever seen. It is just Ian McKellan on a bare stage, no props or costumes as far as I remember, performing monologues from several Shakespearian plays and commenting on the plays and characters and how he approaches them. The simplicity is perhaps part of what makes this so beautifully done.As it hasn't been released yet, I cannot comment on the technical quality of the sound or video. My hope is that the reason they took so long to release it is because they were picky about getting the audio and video quality right. Anyway, it is superb.

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A masterful tour de force from "one of the most distinguished performers of his generation" (The New York Times).
Alone on stage, without props or costumes, Ian McKellen performs some of Shakespeare's most striking monologues and offers his own personal anecdotes about life in the theater. From Henry VI to Macbeth, McKellen demonstrates the incredible universality of Shakespeare's plays with wit and humor – skillfully revealing the actor behind the writer in this celebrated one-man show.
Produced by Andrew Susskind and presented at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York City.
Also includes an 8-page booklet with reflections by Ian McKellen.

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The Plays of William Shakespeare - King Richard II (1983) Review

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(More customer reviews)This made-for-television (or possibly video, I'm not sure) production starts off, if you're watching it on DVD, with several knocks against it, as the blurb on the box claims, with rather dubious accuracy, not only that the production is staged as seen in the sixteenth century (not true, it's indoors and there are women in it), but that unlike most filmed Shakespeare it does not feature "unfamiliar English accents." Despite these harbingers of doom I tried to give it a fair shake, and indeed occasionally director William Woodman makes some clever choices, but this is a dull and uninspired effort. In the title role, David Birney gives perhaps the most uncharismatic performance since David Gwillim donned the royal arms and whined at his soldiers to storm a cheap plywood Harfleur in the BBC Henry V; he plows through his speeches rather flatly and spends the whole production with either an arrogant smirk or what I think is supposed to be an anguished smirk. Paul Shenar fares slightly, but not a whole lot, better as a brooding but excessively pasty and sweaty Bolingbroke; the supporting cast ranges from unmemorable to wretched (and frequently causes utterance of the phrase "hey, what have I seen that guy in?"). Don't bother unless you're madly obsessive about Richard II like I am. In fact, if you're madly obsessive about Richard II, you *especially* ought not to watch this production.

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Shakespeare's An Age of Kings (Richard II / Henry IV / Henry V / Henry VI / Richard III) (1960) Review

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(More customer reviews)By any standard I can think of this series stands out in memory as the finest television treatment of Shakespeare that exists. If for nothing else the performances of Connery as Hotspur, Hardy as Hal and Harry in Henry V, and Richard Daneman as Richard III are worth owning this. Robert Hardy's St. Crispin's Day speech rivals Olivier's and Brannagh's, Daneman's Richard III also rivals Olivier's and the great Stratford performance of Antony Sher. At no time in his long career did Sean Connery ever exceed his incomparable interpretation of Hotspur. I have wished for, prayed for, hoped for an opportunity to see this again, and NOW! Thanks to all the gods of drama.

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