Load of rubbish!!

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Shakespeare for the masses does not get any better than Derek Jacobi and his interpretation of Richard II. Jacobi must have felt a bit of pressure as in the cast was John Gielgud playing John Of Gaunt who was acclaimed back in his salad days for playing Richard II at the Old Vic.Richard II got to be king at the age of 8 after the deaths of his father Edward the Black Prince of Wales in 1376 and his grandfather Edward III in 1377. When he was 12 the child king was trotted out by his governors to face down the peasant revolt. If being king didn't convince him he was something special than the reverence shown the royal child king by his subjects on that occasion must have. During his childhood like the later Edward VI it was a continual struggle for power by his uncles and as Edward III had several sons you can only imagine what it was like. In 1389 Richard came into his own and ruled more than most by royal whim. Very few ever told this kid no.By the time of 1398 when the action of this play unfolds there are two surviving uncles John Of Gaunt the Duke of Lancaster and Edmund of York played here by Charles Gray. There is also a surviving Duchess of Gloucester in one scene and played with great intensity by Mary Morris whose husband died under unexplained circumstances and she wants answers. She suspects her nephew the king had a hand in it and she wants Gielgud to do something about it. Note the names of Lancaster and York, in Gray and Gielgud you see the founders of the warring houses in the Wars Of The Roses in the 15th century.John of Gaunt had a great respect and reverence for the royal person and institution. If he had not, he would have usurped the throne of his most trying nephew. However he had a son who had less scruples Henry Of Bolingbroke played by Jon Finch. Bolingbroke after a quarrel with the Duke Of Norfolk where they agree to a combat of arms has Richard II break it up and exile both of them. Bolingbroke agrees to go.But he's back with a vengeance when his father dies and Richard II decides to usurp the Lancastrian fortune which is considerable to pay for an Irish expedition. That gets a lot of nobility's attention with them figuring that if he can do it to his Lancaster cousin he could do it to any one of them. And they decide that they've had enough of a spoiled narcissistic brat on the throne. This is where Jacobi is at his best. He saunters through the play with an air of supreme indifference and up to the end cannot believe his loyal nobles are siding against him.Way back in high school I remember English class where in discussing Hamlet the mercurial Hamlet is compared to the little seen Fortinbras who has strength and purpose in his makeup. Hamlet was a guy who did things on a whim like Richard II. The character of Jacobi is in counterpoint with that of Finch as Bolingbroke who the nobles see as a guy they can rely on not to go off half-cocked in his governance. And Jacobi also did an acclaimed Hamlet which I would dearly love to see.The BBC did a tremendous service with their Shakespeare plays. All of them are so well staged and acted and I hope they all become available on DVD. This was one of the best of them with Derek Jacobi's Richard II as a career role for him right along side I Claudius.

This has been one of my favourite Shakespeare plays ever since I studied it at school so it's a joy to own at last the Beeb's Shakespeare Collection on DVD.Through that school study I've always felt an interest in this king and some sympathy for his dilemmas. A king with such flaws and yet such cunning is so much more interesting beside any tough warrior king who goes about fighting aka his more famous and in the past revered namesake Richard I. And surely we can all feel for his love for his wife, and her despair as he is forced in tears to send her away to safety outside England. So it was a joy to see this amazing performance by Jacobi, confirming all my memories of this play as one of the best of Shakespeare. Whilst Jacobi dominated as the electrifying personality Richard, the rest of the cast are also so very good. Being sympathetic to Richard (as I feel Shakespeare was), I always loathed unartistic Bolingbroke and this actor's excellent performance in this version was very satisfyingly hate-able! I am looking forward to seeing how the Beeb deal with his reign as King when he discovers that being King isn't as easy as he'd thought. I could also happily despise York for the chancer he was, keeping on the winning side, so excellently portrayed by Charles Gray in a performance equalling Jacobi's in quality. My one very slight disappointment was in Gielgud's great patriotic speech, This England. We all had to learn this by heart at school as part of the study, and it's still my most favourite Shakespeare speech. It's not easy for any actor, however amazing, to do it just as I want to hear it. So I don't blame Gielgud at all for not grabbing me with his version, how could I blame such a great actor! I just wanted it done a little differently to satisfy my own ideas of how it should be.I noted when reading up the other comments, a remark that some people had criticised the Beeb's sometimes stark settings. But Shakespeare's plays were performed on a virtually bare stage! The Beeb's versions are positively crammed with scenery and atmosphere which Shakespeare's actors had to create just by their personalities and performance. I didn't see anything stark in the settings in this play. It's a tragedy. You don't expect it to be in a jolly sunlit field!

Coming early in the BBC's run of Shakespeare's plays, and kicking off his eight-play History Cycle that ends with "Richard III", "Richard II" is one of the best that I have seen so far in this series.I have previously trashed Derek Jacobi's performance as Hamlet elsewhere on this site, but that had more to do with my dislike of the over-rated character he was playing. As an actor, Jacobi is usually superlative, especially with Shakespeare, and he outdoes himself here in the title role.Richard II is widely assumed to be the 'weak king' of Shakespeare's monarchs, owing to his lyricism, and the fact that he is easily deposed by Bolingbroke (here played by Jon Finch). But I think that this assumption owes more to the plot than the actual character. In reality, Richard was a cunning ruler who was kicked off the throne not once but twice.In Jacobi's interpretation we get a man is arrogant, unwise and self-indulgent, prone to tears and self-pity, but who is definitely NOT a weak man. Note how he draws out his abdication from the throne, sowing the seeds of guilt in his usurper by thoroughly embarrassing him. Not to mention the way he fights off the guards near the end and dies nobly. Jacobi catches all these moments well and truly lives the character.He is well-supported by Sir John Gielgud as John of Gaunt and Charles Gray as York along with a host of other competent Shakespearean performers. The result, though well over two hours long, is a highly compelling piece of Shakespeare.

Richard II is Shakespeare's first great tragedy, for here he realizes that character is destiny, and no English King was so brought to ruin because of his flawed character than the weak and stupid Richard II, son of Edward the Black Prince and grandson of Edward III.Jacobi's performance gets to the very root of Richard's personality: his arrogance, poor judgment, false bravado, impulsiveness - and in the end, his elegiac suffering as he collapses in tears, shorn of his crown and titles. "I cannot see," he wails when signing his abdication papers. "My eyes are too full of tears!" And was there ever a line in literature more heartbreaking than this: "I wasted time and now doth time waste me." A brilliant performance from start to gut-wrenching finish. Shakespeare has never been done better. The entire cast is marvelous.I hear too many complaints that BBC productions have poorly designed sets and costumes. Puh-leeeze! Shakespeare is all about the WORDS. If you want impressive spectacle, go rent one of Cecil B. DeMille's adaptations of the Little Golden Book of Bible Stories. BBC gives us truly GREAT actors reciting Shakespeare, uncut, unedited, and unexpurgated.Richard II was the first play in a cycle of eight plays that cover British history from 1377 to 1485 and chronicles the rise and fall of the high-hearted, ill-starred Plantagenets. Richard II is followed by Henry IV, Parts I and II; Henry V; Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III; and concluding the cycle, Richard III. This was part of a project by BBC to televise ALL of Shakespeare's plays for television. I don't know if they ever finished the series, but what they did complete was excellent, play after play.If American PBS stations really want to raise money for their support, stop with the stupid pledge drives and auctions! Get all these great performances on VHS and DVD and sell them to a public ravenously hungry for good and intelligent entertainment.