A THOROUGHLY miserable Bank Holiday Monday (except for those of you with the wit to live in the north) brightened into something like glorious Technicolor with the screening of BBC1’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This was a partnership between Shakespeare and Russell T. Davies, whose adaptation was a thorough reimagining of the masterpiece.
The production channelled the Harry Potter movies; it was more of a feature film than something made for television. Davies totally remodelled the story: Duke Theseus was a fascist despot; Hippolyta was bound in leather straps until the glorious final denouement; metrosexual couplings abounded. This might sound unnecessary — meretricious even — but it was not. Shakespeare was unquestionably the senior partner, and Davies’s version was a celebration of the poetry, plot, and depth of character of the original, besides its openness to the most radical reinterpretation, and its ability to move and delight.
The casting was excellent too: Maxine Peake as Titania, Matt Lucas an entirely believable Bottom, Nonso Anozie, Bernard Cribbins, Richard Wilson, and at least half of the roles were played by rising, superlative black actors. This was grown-up television for our times, 17th-century prose marrying seamlessly with contemporary sensibilities.
Jonathan Meades examined the architectural legacy of a real-life fascist dictator in Ben Building: Mussolini, monuments and modernism (BBC4, Wednesday of last week). It’s long been fashionable to consider that, besides getting the trains to run on time, Mussolini — in wholly inadequate counterbalance to his overwhelming enormities — should at least be credited with a championing of modernist design, especially in architecture. Not so, said Meades, who likes to puncture an unquestioned shibboleth. In fact, he demonstrated, Il Duce was happy to support a bewildering range of styles, as long as they appeared in some sense to reflect his greatness.
This was a deconstruction of fascism itself — its half-baked incoherence; its celebrating of brute force as an end in itself, and of war as the normative state; its focus on the imposition of one’s own will and the moral duty to destroy the weak — all carried out with Meades’s sardonic verve and childish delight, at once deeply irritating and curiously engaging. It looked, of course, terrific.
The architectural ambitions of absolute monarchy provide the backdrop to a new costume series, Versailles (BBC2, Saturdays), which chronicles the life and loves of Louis XIV. A French production, but entirely in English, it is, despite all the care lavished upon it, a sad and sorry affair, with risible dialogue. Much has been said about its explicit sex scenes, but, unless the glimpse of the naked female bosom utterly confounds you, they were much less distressing than the ghastly torture on show.
Using the actual historical locations, the settings and costumes are terrific, but there is not enough liturgical detail in the Chapelle Royale for me to recommend it as a model for invigorating your Sunday high mass — unless, that is, you want to introduce a grille behind which, in distressingly clear view of the congregation, your benefactor cavorts with his mistress.
