"The Crown" and the Bard

     Claire Foy has blue eyes. Open and slightly shining, they seem to take up about a third of her face, as if she were a sort of British anime character. Olivia Colman, on the other hand, has brown eyes. Smaller, but still engaging, they tend to twinkle with just a hint of mischief – part of what makes her such a good comedian. Why should I care, beyond a chance to gush a little in prose over two comely actresses? Because both women play Queen Elizabeth II on the Netflix series “The Crown,” albeit at different stages of her life, and because it is a truth universally acknowledged that, whatever else age may do to one’s appearance, it does not radically alter the color of one’s eyes. The makers of “The Crown,” however, seem not to care. Likewise, this series, in its early going, puts (American, mind you) John Lithgow in the role of Winston Churchill. Lithgow is a capable actor, and has an established line in intelligent, beleaguered pomposity of the sort a Prime Minister might need – but he’s also six-foot-four, giving him almost a foot on the historical Churchill. However gamely Mr. Lithgow hunches and shuffles, I couldn’t shake the feeling, when he was onscreen, that someone had stacked a Winston Churchill atop another Winston Churchill. But again – the creative minds at the helm seem not to care. All of which is a long, long way into saying, that if you go to “The Crown” looking for pinpoint historical accuracy, you have come to the wrong shop entirely. It’s mostly well-written; it’s historically dodgy but socially perceptive; it’s a wonderful showcase for talented actors – but its best speeches are about ideas, not characters. What the show offers instead is something like Shakespeare’s history plays, ramped up for film.

     Consider what Shakespeare does with his historical kings. Henry V, Richard II, Richard III – all are great parts for an actor. All get great speeches. What they lack is much depth. Yes, Henry changes, from gadabout Prince Hal in the Henry IV plays to the fierce titular monarch of his own play – but that’s less a character arc than a character about-face. He’s a symbol of the changing face of responsibility and the sacrifices a ruler has to make – from embracing his drinking buddies to rejecting and in some case executing them. The toll on them is noted by the Bard; the toll on Henry, less so. Instead, Henry becomes an embodiment of kingly traits, for good or ill. And so with the others – Richard II is the sum of his anxieties, Richard III a study in greed and manipulation. Even Henry IV himself is the occasion to worry over the ethics of usurpation, before being symbolically and narratively overshadowed by his son. This is exactly what “The Crown” does with its modern royals – strips each down to some constituent element of personality or plot function, in order to ruminate through story on the nature of monarchy. Thus: Princess Margaret becomes a chaos engine, the Queen Mother a spokeswoman for tradition and duty, Prince Philip the grumbly demi-outsider who speaks sense to his wife, and so on.

     Which brings me back to the Queen’s varying eyes. Fidelity to the real Elizabeth’s peepers (light blue, but narrower in actuality) is not at all the point. Each actress is chosen for what they embody about the Queen at that particular stage of life. The first two seasons, Elizabeth is following the Prince Hal track – she’s a clever but traditional girl who enjoys her family and her horses, but who finds herself thrust by her uncle’s abdication and her father’s early death into a royal role she never sought, but must adapt to. Thus, Foy’s wide, bright, ingenue eyes are exactly what’s required. By the time the Queen is a fortysomething matriarch, she has learned how to play the game, and so Colman’s ability to look both serious and silly and to switch between reserve and outburst on a dime is now what’s needed. In other words, like Shakespeare’s Richard III, Elizabeth in “The Crown” is less a person than a part. Likewise Churchill. Hang his height; Lithgow nails the man’s temperament – or, rather, the temperament of the man as he lives in our collective historical imagination: brilliant but bluff, stodgy but sly.

     None of these performances, by the way, slide into caricature. They aren’t mean – just radically condensed. Nowhere should this be borne in mind more than with Josh O’Connor’s take on Charles, Prince of Wales. The real Charles is a complex man – infamously star-crossed in his personal life (more on that in a bit), but also a patron of the arts, a champion of causes, a father, and, of course a monarch-in-waiting (and waiting and waiting). “The Crown,” however, makes him a mass of seething resentments (O, for a muse of ire!) – a sympathetic one early on, when his family seems to overlook him; a deplorable one later on when he checks out of his marriage to Princess Diana. This might seem like an abrupt change from nice kid to villain, but, for one, it’s no more than Prince Hal gets (“I know thee not, old man…” to former BF Falstaff), and, for another, the common thread is how this version of Charles pushes back against many of the royal sacrifices Elizabeth accepted. He, even more than her, is a person stuck in a situation he’d rather not be in – but he never owns that, and he thus becomes the show’s stoop-shouldered embodiment of how the sins of ancestors get visited upon descendants. Charles isn’t monarch yet in “The Crown,” but he’s already a symbol. I don’t imagine that this show gives me any fuller a picture of the real Charles than Shakespeare gives me of any of the real Richards.

     This means, then, that show is free to do what it does best: use these riffs on royals to serve up various meditations on the nature of things like duty, public perception, compassion, gender dynamics, colonialism, loneliness, family, and so on. In other words, “The Crown” is at its best when it stops pretending to be about the royals and instead uses the royals to be about bigger ideas. It has some fabulous exchanges and monologues about these things, and puts them in capable mouths. Jared Harris, as Elizabeth’s father George VI, gets a nice one to Philip in season I about the importance of the Queen (to be, at that point), which Tobias Menzies as older Philip gets to bookend with a similar one to Diana (Emma Corrin) in season 4. Colman as Elizabeth gives a great in-show speech to a packed house that simultaneously praises and rebukes a man she knows (but the crowd does not) to be a Soviet spy. The Prime Ministers get their share, too – Jason Watkins as Harold Wilson gets a fantastic exchange with the Queen about how leaders both shape and bow to public perception, and Gillian Anderson serves up some wonderfully mannered monologues as Margaret Thatcher – who, like the Queen, is a woman affecting a pose to succeed in a man’s world, but has chosen an opposite pose to her monarch’s. Even Camilla Parker Bowles (Emerald Fennell) gives a nice lecture to Charles on the dangers of living in a fairy tale. It’s this sort of move that I most appreciate about the show (and Shakespeare) – that, beneath its sudsy façade, it prompts thought about bigger humanist issues – power, mercy, love, responsibility. Google is right there if I want to look up the real timelines (the show compresses events like mad) or personalities. What shows up on screen is an entertaining frame to put around those events and personalities and their problems.

     It is entertaining, by the way. I’ve made the show sound terribly serious – but it is also just plain enjoyable. The sets are lavish, the costumes lovely, and the writing mostly well-done. That said, “The Crown” does tend to occasionally lack subtlety. It underlines and re-underlines points. Edward VIII’s abdication, for example, is repeatedly held to be the original sin of the Windsor line – to the point that the show has a character comment on it. Nor does the show miss a chance to light Diana with a flashbulb or two (wink, wink, ugh). Hans Zimmer’s music is fitting, but also sometimes a bit much (think: Elgar, but with more caffeine). Though in all fairness – subtlety wasn’t always Shakespeare’s strong suit, either.

     If this last season gets a bit wobbly in any way, it’s because it has to deal with a problem Shakespeare didn’t have. He wrote, mostly, about kings long-dead by his time. Not so here. For my generation, the events of the fourth season especially are in easy memory. I discussed and enthused about Charles and Di’s wedding with a good girl friend of mine as kids (I loved the ceremony – and sword-wearing – of it, she loved the glamour of it). I learned what a Falkland Island was from reading news of Britain’s fighting there. I had respect from afar for Mrs. Thatcher’s sheer gumption. Thus, as much as collective memory helps smooth out the earlier seasons, it makes this latest one bumpier, especially with Charles and Diana. People have shared pictures of Churchill and his ilk, but people have shared feelings about these two, and I don’t envy the actors trying to embody them – even if they do think in terms of (as I said above) parts-not-people. It’s harder to get distance here and let the story be about something more, which it should be. The suds start to rise up and take over, and the tension between meditation and melodrama is more evident in that storyline. Familiarity also breeds temptation to see the show as a revelation of what “really went on” rather than as a narrative speculation on it. This temptation (as the show’s Queen might say), is to be avoided, but moving ahead (there are, as I understand, two more seasons planned), the show has a minefield to negotiate – not least of all given the presence of series creator Peter Morgan’s 2006 film The Queen, which covers some of the same ground, and does so very well.

     Reviewing the 1998 film Elizabeth, about the first Queen of that name, Roger Ebert wonders what Shakespeare would have made of her – had commoners been allowed to write about reigning monarchs. “No doubt,” Ebert writes, “he retired in sheer frustration.” The next seasons of “The Crown” may either prove that to be true, or indicate that the playwright bowed out with a certain sense of relief.