Tudor History on a Budget

I've just been  watching the Six Wives of Henry VIII, starring Keith Michel, and Elizabeth R (on Elizabeth I) starring Glenda Jackson.

The dialogue is, for the most part, sparkling. 

Of the two, I think Henry VIII fares better. Apart from the rather steriotyped Thomas Cromwell as a conniving "baddie", very much along the lines of "A Man for All Seasons", the characters are fairly well drawn, and the limited location shooting really does not matter much when most is courtly intrigue in studio sets inside.

Elizabeth R suffers from this in its set pieces. Again the characterisation and dialogue is excellent, although I feel Peter Jeffrey is badly miscast as a pious Philip of Spain. Peter Jeffrey has many virtues as an actor, but playing a pious Catholic monarch is not one of them. He was much better cast as Oliver Cromwell in "By the Sword Divided". Glenda Jackson is however superb - and not even the recent films, excellent though they are, have taken the journey from her youth to her old age.

But the routing and destruction of the Armada takes place entirely off stage - we don't even see the interior of any ship. Instead it is relayed by an Admiral to Philip of Spain and by a sailor to Elizabeth in what appears to be a small tent with four other nobles present. 

Relaying information so that it captures the imagination is not a simple art - Foyle's War managed it superbly on occasion - the gas of the First World War, the bombing raids on London, the ships at Dunkirk - but Elizabeth R singly fails to do so - it is information given by just two individuals - Spanish and English - and is just dumped on the viewer with in the case of the English sailor, speech which has the unfortunately tendency to call to mind Blackadder II.  

The Tilbury speech suffers even more - we just have Glenda Jackson as Elizabeth making her rousing speech - a lower camera angle to suggest she is or may be on a horse - alas the horse of the invisible - some off screen cheering of a crowd, and two soldiers, young and old, by a patently fake tent awning, commenting on bits of it. 

And yet at other times, someone has thought about matters well. The imprisonment of Lady Jane Grey and the other nobles caught up in her plot is done via a series of montages, with each just seen through the grill of a jail (in the Tower) and the sound of a lock turning. Simple, but very effective.

These shows were, of course, of their time, and had to make do with a more limited cast and budget than today. Wolf Hall's tournament, or the death of Anne Boleyn, for example, actually has a crowd present. And in the case of Henry VIII, this works well. Elizabeth R is at times very good, but at other times fails to overcome its limitations and looks more like a stage play, where the suspension of disbelief is lost.