The Hollow Crown

Henry VI, Part 2: With virtually nothing left to call English in France now, the ailing and mentally strained Henry VI (Tom Sturridge) returns home with his French wife Margaret (Sophie Okonedo) to a court that is just as rife with intrigue as the one he has just left. The King has been enthroned for many a year now, but that isn't going to stop Warwick (Stanley Townsend) from advancing the claims of Edward (Geoffrey Streatfield) as more legitimate by way of his lineage from the deposed Richard II and before. What does temper his treasonable intent is the decency of York (Adrian Dunbar) who having the throne at his feet, agrees to allow Henry to continue to reign provided he grants the succession to the Yorkist heirs. Needless to say, this irks his wife who brutally ensures the truce is broken. Now Edward and Warwick imprison the King whilst she and her son flee to the court of King Louis XI (Andrew Scott). To cement his role as kingmaker, Warwick follows shorty afterwards and proposes a marriage of state without realising that his new boss has fallen deeply for Elizabeth Woodville (Keeley Hawes). Feeling embarrassed and betrayed, he jumps ship (again) and promises to restore Henry VI to his crown. We all know how that went, and also just how brutally menacing Shakespeare liked to portray his real villain of the piece - Richard (Benedict Cumberbatch). This production ventures outdoors a lot more and the combat scenes are really well arranged to give us a genuine feeling of not just the terrain and conditions, but of the severity of the weapons at the time - no quick kills here! The acting is really only adequate here, though - Sturridge does well as he slowly loses what grasp on the plot her ever had, but is rarely on screen as the king and I didn't really find Townsend's duplicitous Warwick nor Dunbar's ambitious York to have quite the impact I would have wanted. Cumberbatch does give us an indication of what is to come but otherwise this has much more of an holding role in the tale of the War of the Roses, condensing the decline of one king and the ascension of the other in quite a rushed fashion. I know that was as much down to the bard as to Dominic Cooke, but it still seemed a bit shallow at times and a little too much of a chronology. Still, it's a great piece of television theatre that does illustrate well that the crown might well be hollow, but never more than when the head that wore it was even more so.