King Richard II

Alternative title: Richard II
Synopsis: Television production of the play directed for stage by George Schaefer and for NBC by Albert McCleery with Maurice Evans in the title role. Heralded as a major cultural invasion into the world of commercial television. The production values are extravagant with the result that what is seen is a cluttered pageant rather than a play inhabited by generally unimpressive performances.
Series: Hallmark Hall of Fame
Language: English
Country: United States
Medium: Television
Transmission details: 24 Jan 1954 at 16:00 (Channel: NBC)
Duration: 119 mins

Notes: Budget $175,000 financed wholly by Hallmark; a large part of this budget went into the construction of the sets.
General: Sarah Churchill, daughter of Sir Winston Churchill, was hostess for a number of Hallmark Hall of Fame programmes, often acting in them as well. Evans had played Richard on Broadway in 1937 and revived it at the City Center Theater, New York in 1951. In an interview with Evans in the New York Times (24 January 1954 x13) he revealed that the face of Richard’s corpse in the coffin at the end of the play is a bronze bust of Evans as Hamlet.
History: Hallmark’s second Shakespearean production and the first time that Richard II had been performed on American television.
Reviews: Review of the production by Jack Gould in New York Times (25 January 1954).

For an interesting and thoughtful analysis of an experiment conducted in watching this production with a family gathered round a television set see Leon Howard ‘Shakespeare for the Family’ in The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television. vol. 8, no. 4, Summer 1954 pp. 356-366.

Jackson, Russell ‘Maurice Evans’s Richard II on Stage, Television and (Almost) Film in Sound and Screen 61: Shakespeare, Sound and Screen(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). pp. 36-56.

Maurice Evans	King Richard II
Sarah Churchill	Queen Isabel
Fredric Worlock	John of Gaunt
Kent Smith	Bolingbroke
Bruce Gordon	Thomas Mowbray
Jonathan Harris	Sir Piers Exton
Louis Hector	Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland
Morton da Costa	Duke of Aumerle
Ralph Clanton	Bishop of Carlisle
Richard Purdy	Edmund of Langley, Duke of York
Whitford Kane	Gardener

British Universities Film & Video Council