A drama, scripted by Ben Elton, that concentrates on Shakespeare’s golden years. Many great writers, including James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, have fantasised about the Bard’s personal life, but there’s nothing highbrow about what amounts to a gothic-mystery-cum-rural soap, designed to put Will in context (the guy was a genius, though not much cop when it came to parenting).
In between inviting us to boo a pantomime-ish baddie (Alex Macqueen’s Sir Thomas Lucy), the mood is wistful. Which is a polite way of saying that the whole thing, unlike Elton’s Shakespeare-centric TV comedy, Upstart Crow, is low on intentional laughs. As directed by Sir Kenneth Branagh, All Is True is a ludicrous affair in many ways. Yet, believe it or not, it’s involving.
Branagh casts himself as Shakespeare, naturally, but, cleverly, he’s surrounded himself with the best of the best, including Judi Dench as Shakespeare’s neglected wife, Anne Hathaway, and Ian McKellen as his one-time crush, the Earl of Southampton.
Branagh is tinkering with the truth. By the time Shakespeare retired in 1613, Hathaway was in her early sixties and the Earl in his early forties. Dench is 84, McKellen is 79. Technically, the high-profile pair are too old for these roles, and you could argue they’ve just been cast to put bums on seats. Yet dramatically it works. Dench’s eyes are formidably witchy, while McKellen (in a wig the Cowardly Lion would envy) is spellbinding.
He moves his lips like a man who no longer finds life delicious and is amused by his own loss of appetite. Quoting from one of the sonnets, he does Bill’s words proud.
