BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. _ Americans can be a little squirrelly when it comes to Shakespeare's plays. We needn't be. The director of two "king" plays coming to PBS describes them as our first soap operas.
"They were the most successful plays that Shakespeare had ever written up to that point," says British director Dominic Cooke, "hugely commercial. The structure of soap opera is taken from these, as, by the way, is 'Game of Thrones,' which is based on the original plays."
While he's orchestrated scores of plays on the stage, the miniseries he's conjured for "Great Performances" marks his very first film work. Called "The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses," it premieres Sunday and consists of "Henry VI" in two parts and "Richard III" in one.
Ruminating about his Herculean task, Cooke says he tried to detect the underlying theme of these plays. "And the thing that I noticed, both reading the plays and looking around at the very acres of books that had been written about these plays, is that the center of the story is the idea of how many bad decisions does it take to put a psychopath in power? Because Richard III is a murderous person who ends up killing children ...
"When a leader ends up knowingly murdering children, a moral line is crossed that that person can never come back from," he says.
"And as in the Scottish play ("Macbeth"), you know the moment where he kills the Macduff children, the whole universe turns against him, and he ends up having a forest coming towards him. It's actually soldiers holding branches. In this, there's a moment where Richard III authorizes the murder of his two nephews, and at that point the world turns against him."
Cooke conscripted a mouth-watering cast for the job including the hyperkinetic "Sherlock Holmes," Benedict Cumberbatch, Dame Judi Dench, Michael Gambon, Sophie Okonedo, Tom Sturridge and Hugh Bonneville.
Even though she studied at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Okonedo, never acted in a play by the Bard there. While she's won buckets of awards, she's only performed in one of his plays, "Troilus and Cressida," she says.
"This is my first for these plays, the first time I've experienced them is through filming them," she says. "I think the beauty of this is that often the battles are described. A lot of this in Shakespeare is described onstage (about) what happened offstage. And here, we actually get to see, which makes it much easier to follow the story, because you see everything. You get all the visuals, alongside the language, so it's really accessible, and it's really easy to follow the story. It has been wonderful to kind of film all those scenes that were often just being described by one character."
Her costar, Tom Sturridge, who portrays Henry VI, has never acted in a Shakespeare play before.
"I didn't go to drama school. I didn't do acting at school ... I think in performance, in watching other people do it, I think very quickly like Dominic says, I think all great actors are fantastic at Shakespeare. And so it's a great learning experience watching different Shakespeares in productions, because you very quickly see people who understand their craft and who are quite wonderful and people who potentially aren't ... But it was an extraordinarily steep learning curve doing this job, because it was a universe that I was completely naive to."
Michael Gambon, who's portrayed everyone from Winston Churchill to Professor Dumbledore, says he never studied either. "I don't think you can teach someone to act. I think too much is made of teaching people about acting. I think it's become an industry. It's even taught in universities and it's not an academic subject. It's an animal, innate, inspirational thing I don't think it has anything to do with education. I think it's all an invention in order to make money, these hundreds of drama schools churning out people and bending their hopes. That sounds pretty grim, what I'm saying, but I don't think it has much to do with all that. I think acting's about dreaming and pretending to be someone else."
Playing the role of the Duchess of York is Judi Dench. Dame Judi jumped out of drama school right into one of Shakespeare's juiciest roles, that of Hamlet's rejected girlfriend, Ophelia, who goes bonkers when she realizes that Hamlet's not that into her.
"I followed my brother to drama school for three years," says Dame Judi. "When I came out, they were looking for someone to play Ophelia at the Old Vic. And I came out at that time and I was cast. I was surprised. I thought I was being auditioned as a walk-on and that would've suited me fine."
SHOWTIME OFFERS PEEK AT 'TWIN PEAKS'
Showtime wants to put you in the mood for its new version of "Twin Peaks," which is coming up next year, by airing the original version beginning Dec. 26. The weird mystery series that was created by director David Lynch and Mark Frost, starred Kyle MacLaughlan, Michael Ontkean, Joan Chen, and a bunch of other actors that you would recognize today. The show ran just one year from 1990-91, but thanks to Lynch's quirky narrative, it became a cause celebre and water cooler conversation the morning after. You can catch it on the Showtime streaming service, on demand, and Showtime Anytime and you'll see what "damn fine coffee and cherry pie" was served up in creepy Twin Peaks.
'OCEAN WARRIORS' ATTACKS DEEP SEA POACHING
Poaching not only happens on land, it happens at sea, and Animal Planet's new series, "Ocean Warriors," details the efforts to abate the pillaging that's going on in the deep. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, and film legend Robert Redford have lent their gravitas to the new show where the camera traces dedicated activists and scientists as they try to interfere with greedy poaching. It's not only Greenpeace that's patrolling the waters. The Sea Shepherds chase a notorious pirate poacher into the briny of Antarctica, a biologist tries to stop water blasting of the coral reef in Tanzania, and Greenpeace interrupts illegal shark fishing. The series airs on Sundays.
MILEY CYRUS LEARNS A LESSON
Not only is Miley Cyrus teaching some of the tricks of the trade on "The Voice," she's learning some herself. As one of the judges on the NBC show, Cyrus is charged with molding new talent that has chosen her as their coach. "I think what I've accepted about this competition more than I did in the beginning � and I think that the vets already know this � is it isn't up to us. And I think we get used to that for our weeks ahead of time with battles and playoffs. I got very used to making song choices and making their looks really special. And now I realize that it really is just about what people at home are relating to and interested in. And I think it's actually a good thing for me, in my life, to learn how to be less of a control freak."
