Two Gentlemen of Verona
1983: Don Taylor
This is the BBC Shakespeare version of this play. It is a product from fairly late in the run of the BBC Shakespeare series, and its production costs were apparently fairly modest, but it has some very beautiful sets and costumes, and some fine music.
None of the actors are the A-listers of some of the other productions, but they all turn in very creditable performances. The silliness and florid wordplay of the first part of the play is handled deftly; when the texture of the play gives way in the second part to the dark emotional depths of Proteus’s betrayal of Julia, she carries the added weight with gravity; similarly Joanne Pearce’s Silvia has grace and class.
True to the principle articulated in Shakespeare in Love, this is genuinely a play with “a bit with a dog”. It’s curiously charming. There’s one scene where the dog’s expressive antics are a scene-stealer.
None of the excellence of the performance can go very far toward redeeming the fundamentally distasteful nature of parts of the play, but one can’t expect it to.
This production is the only one of the BBC Shakespeare Plays series I can recall that has the musical support of The Consort of Musicke, and their performance of both the incidental music of the play and background period pieces lends the performance a certain flair that few of the others have achieved. It’s one of the earliest appearances of Emma Kirkby on film, as well, and she is one of the luminous voices of the last forty years in early music. That may be more of interest to aficionados of early music than to Shakespeare students as such, but I imagine the intersection of the two groups is not negligible.
Antonio: Michael Byrne
Crab: Bella
Cupid: Charlotte Richardson
Cupid: Jonathan Taylor
Duke of Milan: Paul Daneman
First Outlaw: Adam Kurakin
Host: Michael Graham Cox
Julia: Tessa Peake-Jones
Launce: Tony Haygarth
Lucetta: Hetta Charnley
Lutenist: Bill Badley
Lutenist: Robin Jeffrey
Lutenist: Tom Finucane
Panthino: John Woodnutt
Proteus: Tyler Butterworth
Second Outlaw: John Baxter
Servant: Daniel Flynn
Silvia: Joanne Pearce
Sir Eglamour: Frank Barrie
Speed: Nicholas Kaby
Third Outlaw: Andrew Burt
Thurio: David Collings
Valentine: John Hudson
Buy the complete BBC Shakespeare Plays at Amazon. Note that this will require a Region 2 player or a region-free player: it will not play on most normal American DVD players. Nevertheless, the price is so reasonable that even with a region-free player thrown into the deal, you’ll come out ahead.