I didn't manage more than a couple of scenes of last night's Richard II on BBC2, and it left me thinking why I don't enjoy Shakespeare on the TV. A day of reflection, and I think I know. I was looking forward to the production. I've seen a couple of fine Richard IIs lately which had given me a taste for the play (Jon Slinger at Stratford, Eddie Redmayne at the Donmar) and Rupert Goold is never less than interesting. The warning sign was that I've recently watched TV adaptations of productions I saw and loved (the Doran/Tennant Hamlet, the Goold/Stewart Macbeth) and been unmoved; perhaps I was unrealistically hoping to recapture the experience of being in a theatre. But at least I watched those through to the end; on Saturday I was bored stiff after a couple of scenes and gave up. It's perhaps significant that although I watch films in cinemas, I rarely watch films on TV. So it may be that my problem is with small screens in my front room, irrespective of content. I've watched a few series to completion (West Wing, The Wire, Spirals) but I've given up on several widely praised efforts (The Killing, The Bridge) or not even got past the trailers (Mad Men --- does anyone watch this other than Guardian columnists?) But what was it that I objected to about Shakespeare on screen in general, and this Richard II in specific? I think the main problem is the focus on faces, rather than the text. Richard II is entirely in verse, often rhyming couplets. Each speech comes as a coherent whole, often with the last four or six lines as couplets to provide a structure and show that the end is approaching. On Saturday, the director didn't trust the text, so cut to reaction shots of other people, or close-ups of the speaker, or crowd shots: anything to avoid the viewer having to listen and engage. With incidental music dubbed over as well, it was as though the text was incidental to a Masterpiece theatre piece with ActOrs declaiming in large English Heritage properties, with the audience expected just to admire the vowels. In a theatre, you are not forced to look in any particular direction, but in general you will be looking at the person who is speaking. The director will block the play so that if you are expected to see the reaction of another person on stage, they will be within your field of vision while looking at the speaker (those with a distaste for thrust stages might disagree). Each speech starts, proceeds and finishes, driven by the line of the text. A television production controls your gaze: you cannot look anywhere other than where the director thinks you should, and therefore your pattern of attention is constructed. The individual shots and edits form punctuation, overlaying the text and providing a different rhythm, fighting with the speech. No matter how good the speaking is, each time the shot changes it will introduce an additional, unintended emphasis. Some productions avoid this. The BBC series of the late 1970s and early 1980s was shot in studios with multiple cameras, rather than on location with a single camera. Complete scenes were shot in their entirety, with such camera moves as were required being done on-line, rather than in post-production, a limitation which means that most speeches fit into a single shot. The same goes, largely, for the excellent documents that the RSC shot of their most successful productions in the 70s and 80s (the Nunn/McKellen/Dench Macbeth, for example) --- they aren't quite a camera set up in the stalls and locked off for two hours, but they are not far from it. But it seems that as soon as a production is shot in a film style with a single camera, the director has coverage of each scene from several angles, and finds it hard to avoid cutting between shots (and, of course, takes). This problem doesn't arise with films that aren't line-by-line adaptations of plays, because the shooting script evolves organically: the dialogue won't be as dense as it is in a play, and the natural grammar of film is the shot in any event. Of course the progress of a film is punctuated with edits, and when they aren't present for a while (Touch of Evil, The Player) or for the whole film (Russian Ark, Timecode) their absence is deliberate and intended to be noticed, just as startling linguistic and typographic effects are in modern novels. The problem for filming a play is that the text isn't intended to have extra punctuation added. ian