Shakespeare in Chronological Order (3/37)
Watching through all the BBC Television Shakespeare plays, in the commonly accepted chronological order for their source material
3. Henry VI Part 1

Joan of Arc is such a girlboss easily Shakespeare's best villain I always want her to win and damn you for killing off your best character in part 1, Shakespeare!

This is great, this BBC made-for-TV performance of Henry VI Part 1 feels very retro. The set design feels very 70s / 80s, but honestly, that's usually a good thing. Maybe that's because it's kinda back in style, or maybe it's because I'm a nerd, I'm really not sure. This performance was appealing to me because it's a rendition of the majority of the actual play. Many recorded and live Shakespeare performances don't include the entire Folio/Quarto version of the play they're adapting, so it's good to find a series that sticks close to the source material. Very little was missing from this, which allowed me to read along. Brenda Blethyn's performance as Joan De Pucelle was fantastic, as was Trevor Peacock's Talbot.

To be honest, I find Henry VI Part 1 to be an absolutely exhausting play of poorly connected scenes and faffing about. It has some shining moments (any scene with Talbot is great and I love Margaret's saucy introduction). But it just never really feels cohesive or substantial to me. That said, this BBC production does the best it can, making for a decent (three-hour...) watch. Trevor Peacock (who was incredible in Titus Andronicus) is a fantastic Talbot. And I really like the way the film slips in and out of different realities. Sometimes it feels very much like a stage play with dinky fake horses and cardboard sets, but, in some of its post-battle scenes, it's quite brutally real and violent. An interesting adaptation of a unremarkable play.

An interesting take on Henry VI, taking place in a kind of children's adventure playground set, which makes the events of the play (the back and forth battles between the French and the English) seem like playground fights, until events get darker in the second half as the heroes of Henry V's reign get killed off, and the War of the Roses gets set up.

A very young Brenda Blethyn makes for a surprising but effective Yorkshire-accented Joan of Arc too!

This version of Henry VI Part 1 is by the BBC, who in the '80s made versions of every Shakespeare play for TV. They're sort of closer to theater than cinema, though. Still, they're worth it and when I hit a new play in my Shakespeare dive, I start with the BBC version. For all three parts of Henry VI, there's really no other film adaptations to explore further, unfortunately.

I liked this much more than I expected, considering this is one of Shakespeare's less popular plays and I am not particularly adept with English history. Either way, this crackling adaptation has a great cast and fun bits of action (war scenes), even as Shakespeare's plot does not go so far (it's more or less an intro to parts 2 & 3, I think).

If you’ve been following my reviews this year, you know that most of Shakespeare’s history plays (particularly the ones with “Part” in the title) tend to blur together for me. The Henry VI trilogy is a case in point. This is the installment with Joan of Arc in it, so that means it’s the best one.

This is the first installment of Shakespeare's absolute banger of a history trilogy, and it manages to come superbly close to doing it total justice 🌹

Jane Howell makes some really lively directorial choices with this one–––she brings the play humor where you least expect it, has the actors go for some zanier interpretations of otherwise serious characters, and uses lighting on a pretty limited set to incredible effect.

I love this take on Henry VI, I love this take on the Dauphin, and I especially love this take on Talbot. It's such a joy to watch (mostly) unabridged Shakespeare in the hands of people who know what they're doing. (And almost everyone here knows exactly what they're doing.)

Fairly deserved reputation as one of the less interesting Henry plays, but the direction and acting are holding it up in this adaptation such that it is even punching above it’s weight at times. Plus there’s lots of cathode ray camera burn in.

To anyone who watches this and wonders about the scenography, it deliberately reproduces a children's adventure playground (adventure playgrounds were a novel concept in the early '80s). Its symbolism will become clearer as the circumstances leading up the the civil war, the Wars of the Roses, approach.
In Act... Scene ..., this play presents one of the 'theories' about why this civil war is known as the 'Wars of the Roses'.