This troubled throne of kings

The jewel in the crown of Sir Michael Boyd’s decade as director of the Royal Shakespeare Company was his 2007–8 staging of the major Shakespeare Histories from Richard II, through Henry IV, V and VI, to Richard III. For a short, alas too short, period, the entire sequence of eight plays could be seen over a few days at Stratford. Fortunate indeed were those who were there, and I count it one of my greatest theatrical experiences.

Boyd’s Histories would have enthralled only the tiniest fraction of the population. But with television it’s a different story. BBC2’s four Histories films, packaged as The Hollow Crown and broadcast on consecutive Saturday evenings, stand to have a far greater impact. With perfect timing this contribution to the Cultural Olympiad and London 2012 Festival has gone out before the sporting jamboree takes over London and deluges the media.

The experience of Shakespeare on film is of course very different from that on the stage. But having too frequently suffered in the theatre from indifferent to downright deadly productions, I’m a huge fan of Shakespeare on screen. Immersed at home with DVD and iPlayer, there is nothing nicer than to come up for air or something stronger in the middle of something good. And then, ah yes, there are the words.

As I’ve too often moaned on about in these pages, the clarity of stage diction at the RSC, and to be fair more generally, seems to have fallen away proportionately with the rise of programme credits for ‘voice work’. Thrust stages, such as that at the Globe and now in all three theatres at Stratford, are a serious obstacle to the delivery and audience comprehension of the text.