His innate charisma aptly suited to the role of the 'King's son' that the Hal of Part One has to be reminded he is, Hiddleston possesses an unshowy glamour that can be playful or not, as required.

It's the great good luck of the British theatre to offer up so many young actors who can readily navigate the demands of film, as well: Ben Whishaw proved as much last week, playing the self-poeticising yet doomed Richard, and Hiddleston turns out to be to the stature and manners born as this film's Henry V-in-waiting. But in collaboration with a cameraman in Ben Smithard ( My Week With Marilyn) doing career-best work, Eyre allies the verbal landscape of the play to a painterly study in love and loss moving inexorably onward to life and death: when Falstaff and Hal ( Tom Hiddleston) play-act the banishment that will go on to be enacted for real, Eyre's probing lens amplifies the eerie sense of foreboding that exists in the text. (One wonders whether Jeremy Irons, pictured right and on tremendous form as an ageing King Henry here shown to be unusually prone to violence, would accept what is essentially a supporting role in the theatre.) The material, of course, is televisual catnip, shifting from the muddy Cheapside streets of the ale house to the corridors of power walked by Irons's stern-faced, ever-admonitory monarch.

(Indeed, I saw it in just such a setting at a preview screening with the director in attendance.) Lustrously shot in all manner of rusts, ochres, and browns that can drain away where needed, primarily during the battle scenes, Eyre's diptych in its first half makes a ravishing case for Shakespeare on film even as it whets the appetite for Part Two, with the same cast, which will be shown next week.Р”Р„s with Rupert Goold's Richard II, the Henry IVР’В ensemble constitutes a veritable thespian who's who, many of whom one can imagine returning to these same parts on stage, Simon Russell Beale as Falstaff most especially.

Henry iv part 1 bbc 2012