Marlowe and Shakespeare, (Bros) |
"A drama about the lost years of young William Shakespeare after his arrival to London in 1589," (IMDB)
I neglected to include the second synopsis bit about the theater being like rock and roll because I think in order to enjoy this show, you really need to have a relaxed attitude about some things, and the punk music is definitely one of them. I loved this show. Everything looked exciting and colorful, the acting was exciting and colorful, and I was fine with modern music being used to illustrate mood and feeling in Shakespeare's (and Marlowe's) London although not everyone will be. There is a pretty big community of people who get real bitchy about the useage of Iggy Pop, The Clash, and The Beastie Boys in media, and it's a downright certainty that they were unhappy with this placement, but I say whatever. If you can't enjoy "Sabotage," in an appropriate narrative moment, you're probably dead on the inside, anyway.
The point was obviously to attract a younger audience with a bunch of aesthetic spectacle while weaving the glamour and importance of the theater with the poverty, plague, and heavy anti-Catholicism present in England together with the writings of Shakespeare (Laurie Davidson) for more literary-minded, mature viewers. It works. Christopher (Kit) Marlowe (Jamie Campbell Bower), an established playwright who is, yes, portrayed as more rock star than writer, is a significant character in the narrative, and anyone at all interested in a sort of fairy tale glimpse of what it means to be a successful writer (contrasted with Will, an unknown at the series' start) will appreciate the insight explored through this often over-the-top character. Writer's block, drugs, muses, rejection, and sudden (fickle) success are all covered, and in comparison to this guy, Will comes off as somewhat of a lightweight, at first. But patience pays off, and in the end, what begins as a sort of overindulged guilty pleasure turns into a legitimate story with interesting characters who've been written well and are solid enough in their performances to make you care about them.
"What a miserable, mother-swiving profession it is to be a writer." |
WHO WILL ENJOY THIS SHOW: Fans of Shakespeare in Love, fans of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, fans of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, non-snooty writers, sentimentalists, and teenagers.
WHO WILL HATE THIS SHOW: People who hate remakes of any kind, historical purists, Catholic purists, Protestant purists, and musical purists (i.e., if you're someone who couldn't tolerate Immortal Beloved because Oldman's Beethoven used a piano that didn't exist in that time or you give the side-eye to concertgoers who mistakenly clap between orchestral movements, it's probably best to stay far, FAR away).
2 comments:
Why do they always make Shakespeare so sexy? Have these people never seen any of those awful depictions of him? Anyway... sounds neat. I don't get TNT, but I'll watch if it comes to Netflix or Hulu.
He was quite sexy but I suppose everyone was. The only unattractive bits on anyone were some dark gray teeth on a little street kid. And the main villain, Ewan Bremner is made up to be kind of aristocratically unattractive but the actor actually isn't. His hair really bothered me.
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