For the next four Fridays, PBS's Great Performances lives up to its billing with a spectacular and dazzlingly acted mega-miniseries titled The Hollow Crown.
This four-part adaptation of Shakespeare’s historical cycle (“Richard II, “Henry IV, Part 1,” “Henry IV, Part 2” and “Henry V”) spotlighting the battle to win and to hold the English crown is both brilliant and eminently accessible.
The performances are so wonderful it feels wrong to single any out. But Whishaw finds great power in stillness; Hiddleston fits himself admirably to his character's stages and turns of mind, resolving his coldness with his warmth, his cruelty with his generosity. And there is Beale's Falstaff--marvelously poignant, a scoundrel-hero, getting everything wrong. His sorrow at losing the transformed Hal is as tragic a moment as any here, his fall no less thunderous than Richard's.
The trump card of Hollow Crown, of course, is that it was written by Shakespeare--and if the language sounds stilted to modern ears, anyone who listens for more than a few minutes will be properly seduced.
For the most part, the flexibility that television provides is used to good advantage in The Hollow Crown to clarify the action and enhance the dynamics. Only occasionally does it feel misplaced, as in “Richard II,” when [director Rupert] Goold goes all in with Jesus imagery.