Shirley you can’t be serious.
And another vote for both Henry V’s, Branaugh’s and Olivier’s.
Yes, I’m serious. And don’t call me Shirley! :mad:
I just did a search on Netflix and none of the movies mentioned was available for streaming. Several were available on dvd.
I found a few on Amazon, some streaming free with Prime, some for rent.
The Patrick Stewart Macbeth is a PBS Great Performances offering, but I haven’t looked on the PBS Roku channel yet to see if it’s available.
Haven’t searched Hulu Plus yet.
TV watching is so complicated now. :rolleyes:
She was really hot back in the day, wasn’t she? :o
Def Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus - a really modern, mad, scary production. It’s worth just googling the imagery.
Fwiw, I quite liked Dr Who’s/David Tennant’s Hamlet though obv. any of the usual suspects do a decent turn.
These are all recent and solid BBC productions with amazing casts who earn huge money elsewhere. If I picked one it might be Richard II because it’s not produced that often and it’s a subtle, nuanced portrayal of RII by the mighty Ben Whishaw.
I loved these productions (and some of them are available on DVD).
John Cleese directed that Taming of the Shrew and instead of casting a glamour-puss as Kate (a la Elizabeth Taylor), made Kate a plain woman who’d always been overshadowed by her more-attractive younger sister Bianca. The result was very touching.
NAF1138 mentioned Richard II: the BBC version starred Derek Jacobi. His “let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings” will rip your heart out. Just a masterful performance.
The Othello was distinctive, too. Anthony Hopkins would never be given the title role today, of course. (His makeup made him look sort of North-African, rather than sub-Saharan, I guess.) It’s Bob Hoskins’ Iago that was amazing–it certainly shaped my view of the character. Hoskins played him not as a mustache-twirling villain, but as a “plain, bluff soldier”…and it worked beautifully.
Highly recommended, all of them.
It IS! HULU has criterion so it should have many of the older films.
No love for the 1999 Midsummer Night’s Dream with Kevin Kline?
And, just for fun, check out the Reduced Shakespeare Company. They put on an abridged version of all the plays in a single hour. (The twelve history plays are a football game, with a crown as the football.)
As an aside, her scream is the ringtone I have tied to my mother’s phone number.
The best version of Twelfth Night is the BBC version starring Felicity Kendall.
Playing Shakespeare (available from Netflix and on YouTube, it seems) is a 9 part series where John Barton from the RSC gives a master class on how to perform Shakespeare, with actors you know well. A highlight is Patrick Stewart and David Suchet giving alternate versions of Shylock’s speeches from the Merchant of Venice.
It will make you think about the plays in ways you never did before.
Felicity Kendall, mmmmmmmmmmmmmm! :o
… Which is where the Moors were from.
If you haven’t seen it something really brilliant about Ian McKellen’s Richard III is that it’s not set in modern times, but rather in an alternate-history 1930s Britain where England has embraced European fascism (very Nazi-esque). Although it isn’t the traditional setting it fits the tone and drama of the play perfectly (and they stick to the Elizabethan dialog).
I just wanted to give a shout out for the thread title. I’m sure most folks got it, but I opened the thread up because of it. And I come out with a load of great ideas and productions to watch. Thanks all.
Glad you dropped in! Love your screen name, BTW. 
I also recommend this one. In addition to the casting of Kate, Cleese as Petruchio was extremely good, including one soliloquy where he says what he’s planning to do to change Kate.
That text could be read as male dominance-asserting control over the woman, but Cleese’s delivery made it clear that he saw Kate as having been harmed by her father’s treatment of her compared to Bianca, and Cleese by putting her under strain was trying to bring her out of that and re-discover herself.
It too was very touching, because far from being the male dominant (that Petruchio can be), he came across as very insightful and caring. Unorthodox methods, perhaps, but with the goal of helping Kate, not dominating her.
One more to add:
The Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino as Shylock and Jeremy Irons as Antonio. Pacino does a good job as a man driven to madness by anti-Semitism.
Certainly, but for several years now no respectable production has cast an Othello who looked anything other than sub-Saharan, or at least of partial sub-Saharan heritage. It’s just the societal consensus (though no doubt that will change as the decades go by).
That’s a great show! I saw a production in Orlando some years back and laughed my arse off.
I agree. It was a great reading of the play. (In general, those 80s BBC productions didn’t play it ‘stodgy and safe,’ but instead employed the top people of the day to come up with some very fresh, though canonical, versions of the plays.)