SOURCE: Pilkington, Ace G. “The BBC Richard II.” In Screening Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V, pp. 29-63. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Pilkington offers a detailed assessment of the highlights and deficiencies of the 1979 BBC production of Richard II, directed by David Giles and starring Derek Jacobi as Richard.

Factors Shaping the Production

John Wilders told me in a June 1987 interview that two of the constraints on the BBC Richard II were (as might be expected from the general background of the series) time and money. He used the Mowbray-Bolingbroke confrontation as an example of a scene where “the camera tended simply to shift in a rather automatic way from one to another.” And he went on to argue “that if more had been done with having many more cameras and many more camera angles and more interesting lighting and so on...