London calling to young Shakespeare in uneven ‘Will’
William Shakespeare is having a moment.
The playwright, dead 400 years, topped headlines for the recent staging of “Julius Caesar” in New York with a Trump look-alike as the doomed Roman leader.
The uproar suggested a number of things, including that Shakespeare’s works continue to be provocative as ever and that Americans must have been dozing during ninth-grade English class. Shakespeare’s point there is that mob actions are a curse to democracy, not a cure. (Also: There wasn’t a peep when the same play was staged in 2012 in Minnesota with an Obama look-alike.)
If you were to tweak our Twitter-happy president, you would reach for “King Lear” — the ruler who loses his realm, his sanity and his life because of his overwhelming demand for adulation.
Meanwhile, TV continues to dance around Shakespeare’s works. ABC has banished Shonda Rhimes’ “Still Star-Crossed,” a sequel series to “Romeo & Juliet,” to Saturday nights — one step away from cancellation.
Now we have TNT’s “Will,” which dramatizes the playwright’s early years in London. It plays like “Shakespeare in Love,” only without Gwyneth Paltrow and with a lot more torture and gore. (I was not prepared for the bloody intestines.) The first hour so mirrors the 1998 Academy Award-winning film, it even features a sequence similar to the climax in which authorities descend on the theater as a performance plays out.
Will (newcomer Laurie Davidson) gives up life as a glove-maker — and his wife and three children — to make his fortune in London. First, his parents charge him with delivering a letter to Will’s cousin, Father Robert Southwell (Max Bennett), a leader who advocates Catholic rebellion. It’s a dangerous thing to be openly Catholic in Lutheran England, what with the queen’s inquisitor Richard Topcliffe (Ewen Bremner) taking such pleasure in torture.
That letter almost immediately ends up in the hands of Presto (Lukas Rolfe), easily the most annoying urchin this side of those orphans who pop up occasionally on “The Simpsons.” Presto also has a rather plot-convenient ability to show up at exactly the wrong time for our characters.
Will finds a home of sorts with bombastic producer James Burbage (a funny turn from Colm Meaney, “Hell on Wheels”) and his company of overacting players. Burbage’s daughter Alice (Olivia DeJonge) is something of a feminist and likes to venture out dressed as a man because it makes life easier for her. Will is immediately drawn to Alice, but that whole married thing sure is a roadblock. Rival playwright Christopher Marlowe (Jamie Campbell Bower, “Camelot”) is key to Will’s salvation or downfall and takes pleasure in his power. The shifts from comedy to bloodletting can be unnerving, even if the whole thing is unconvincing.
What would Shakespeare make of this muddle?
To quote the prince from “Romeo and Juliet”: “For never was a story of more woe.”