Bob Ellis’ Rough Cut
Bob Ellis on the Oscar-winning The King’s Speech (available on DVD this month), Biutiful, The Company Men and the passing of Sidney Lumet.
The Oxford scholar Peter Levi had a theory that Shakespeare was popular because he had only one theme. A man or a woman, he said, is given a task to which he or she is unequal, and comedy or tragedy follows. Thus Hamlet, an adequate joshing student, is a poor avenger, Brutus, an adequate stoic philosopher, a poor generalissimo, Othello a fine generalissimo but a dumb older husband of a young white wife, Malvolio a shambolic wooer, Viola a lousy transvestite, and so on.
This theory well fits The King’s Speech and explains its international popularity. We all of us as children have been made to recite, or sing, or perform acrobatics on stage, and have dreaded the anguished humiliation the experiment was bound to bring to us. And thus we identify with a stammering King, painfully and memorably. And some of us, like me, who overcame years of stage fright at public speaking by, in the stutterer Nye Bevan’s words, ‘torturing my audiences’, cried in the movie, blubbed in the foyer, and wept in the taxi home, so involved were we in the late monarch’s disability and his overcoming of it.
When I saw the film again last week I cried less but saw, this time, how skilfully it was shaped. From some dull conversations in some shabby rooms it broadens out into banquets, palaces, royal deathbeds, a gorgeously-appointed coronation, a world at war, and one unwilling man who can stiffen a nation at the time of its gravest peril by speaking live to a microphone. It is Pygmalion Meets The Gathering Storm, with Rush as Higgins and Firth as Liza, the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain, King George he’s got it! King George he’s got it!, and exactly the same sort of struggle, and trial, and failure, and victory, that My Fair Lady showed, and lured a billion awed admirers to esteem world wide.
