Prickt

Well, there went last night.  I was going to write about the glorious weekend of theatre Cambridge had given me—Arcadia, The School for Scandal, and the Moving Day hilarities at MIT—but I found a terrible rogue streaming file of the first night of the new Hollow Crown, and had to watch before it vanished.  Cut to ribbons, my dears, red and white—but what a flutter!  They've mingle-mangled 1 and 2 Henry VI together and squished them into both into two hours.  Somerfolk is Sufferset, Jack Cade has vanished, damn it, and for some bizarre reason, it begins with a disembodied Judi Dench speaking Ulysses' lines from Troilus and Cressida over a majestic shot of the white cliffs of Dover.  Figurez-vous.  Ah well, it was television to begin with.  Elizabethan box-set stuff.  But what faces!  What voices!  What shameless panache!  And of course it ends with the child Richard's silhouette hirpling out of the shadows.  They still have Cumberbatch up their sleeve.

Nine