To Play The King


The Times
; London (UK); Nov 20, 1993; Elizabeth Udall;
The Guardian
; Manchester (UK); Nov 22, 1993; Nancy Banks-Smith
The Independent
; London (UK); Nov 22, 1993; Tom Sutcliffe;


The Times; London (UK); Nov 20, 1993; Elizabeth Udall;

Ian Richardson, returning as the ruthless Francis Urquhart, tells Elizabeth Udall why he agreed to play the prime minister. At least six months must elapse before Ian Richardson will even consider watching one of his television performances on videotape and even then he downs at least two glasses of wine to "anaesthetise" himself against his acting errors. But when he watched himself as Francis Urquhart in House of Cards, in preparation for the making of its sequel, he was incapable of guiding a glass to his lips.

"I was shaking uncontrollably," he recalls. "I was so incredibly impressed that I was shaking at the prospect of not being able to live up to what we had done first time round."

When House of Cards was first shown in 1990, Richardson, for his role as chief whip Urquhart, collected three awards for best actor. The sequel, To Play the King, which begins this week, sees Urquhart now installed as prime minister.

Richardson's return to the role is surprising. He has made it a rule in his professional life never to play the same type of part twice, thinking of himself as an "artist as opposed to a personality". But he could not resist the lure of Urquhart. "It is such a deeply interesting psychological study." Richardson attributes this complexity not only to Michael Dobbs's characterisation in the original novels but also to Andrew Davies's screenplays.

"In House of Cards we saw a man on his way to the top and as we all know from life and history itself, the exciting part of the story is always the achieving. But in Davies's hands, the achieving, the holding on to success has become as exciting as the climb."

An element of boredom has begun to creep into Urquhart's life at the outset of the new series. Then he is invited to meet the (unnamed) king (Michael Kitchen) whom we see crowned in the opening scenes, a man whose beliefs are totally at odds with those of the prime minister. Suddenly Urquhart's boredom evaporates and a battle begins in which he can use the skills at which he excels.

Viewers are already familiar with Urquhart's Machiavellian leanings and Richardson acknowledges this may have been a problem for him, in terms of keeping an edge to the character, in To Play the King. However, the element of surprise is maintained in the sequel by exploring new areas of Urquhart's character.

"Believe it or not, we see for the first time a certain vulnerability," Richardson explains. "We see him begin to have personal doubts, which come at his blackest, four-o'clock-in-the-morning moments. It is Matty's murder, it haunts him." Many of those moments, inevitably, are spent in the bed of a mistress. "I think it is essential, don't you?" says Richardson, with a smile.

This time it is Sarah Harding (played by Kitty Aldridge), a political consultant and it is she who seduces him. "It is her brain Urquhart wishes to ravish, not her body. She gets the same sniff of power as him with the aphrodisiac that is contained therein. But as things turn out," adds Richardson in a tone with more than a hint of Urquhart, "it might have been so much better for her if she hadn't."

Richardson believes he has done nothing to match Urquhart "since Richard II at Stratford-upon-Avon". This is strong language from a man who spent 15 years with the RSC and played most of the major roles open to him. He left the company in 1976 and went on to play Professor Higgins in the Broadway revival of My Fair Lady before going to Canada in the lead of Shaw's Man and Superman. On his return to England, he was horrified to find he had been all but forgotten, so decided to make the move into television. He stuck with television and movies, taking on roles as diverse as Sir Godber Evans in Porterhouse Blue, Robespierre in Danton's Death, Ramsay Macdonald in Number 10 and Nehru in Mountbatten The Last Viceroy and starring with, among others, Alec Guinness in Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Michael Caine in The Fourth Protocol.

Richardson's father was always strongly opposed to his son's choice of career and, while he softened enough to finance his last two years at Glasgow College of Dramatic Art, it was not until his son achieved success on television that he began to respect his choice. Four years ago Richardson was awarded a CBE "for services to the acting profession". "I found it quite agreeable," he recalls, "but for my father it represented an enormous achievement. He was so furious that by this time he was rather too elderly to get to the Palace, but he insisted on endless photos of the thing so he could show off at his club and around the place. "I shall be eternally grateful to Mrs Thatcher, as she was then, for putting me up for that. My father died six months later."


The Guardian; Manchester (UK); Nov 22, 1993; Nancy Banks-Smith

Francis Urquhart is a Demon King and Michael Dobbs' To Play The King (BBC1) is your party political panto for Christmas. There is a real king too, who, as he rather tactlessly says, has waited a long time for the crown and wants to get cracking.

"He wants to be of use. He has a conscience. He wants to con-tri-bute," says Urquhart, spitting out the pips. The Prince of Wales cannot fail to be flattered by this warm portrait of Good King Charles, a man who speaks from an open heart if through clenched teeth.

It is a pleasure to watch Ian Richardson and Michael Kitchen glitter at each other frostily. "Break him, Francis. Bring him down," urges Urquhart's Lady Macbeth-ish wife. She never calls him Frank because he patently isn't and she solicitiously feeds him personable fresh young assistants like fish. It seems the king rules alone. Princess Charlotte, his divorced wife, is reduced to attending a performance of Finchley Children's Music Group wearing a rather noisy dress. ("How much more of this? Christ!") and selling her life story for pounds 100,000 a year. Cheap price considering that Michael Dobbs used to earn pounds 150,000 a year in advertising. The Queen, so summarily defunct, was, according to Urquhart, fond of a little joke. Not perhaps this little joke.


The Independent; London (UK); Nov 22, 1993; Tom Sutcliffe;

It's a wonder actors don't get the bends, they whizz so recklessly up and down the social ladder. Last Tuesday night, in Between the Lines (BBC 1), Michael Kitchen was playing something scraped off on the lowest rung - a journalist. Last night he was at the top playing King. Just King. The credits didn't add a name and nobody in To Play the King (BBC 1), a follow up to the enjoyable House of Cards, breached etiquette by mentioning it. Nobody needed to, in fact, because every detail of Kitchen's performance bellowed Charles, from the regal hand diving for cover into the barathea blazer to that irritable muttered drone in the voice.

Part of the charm of the series, though, is not naming names. "Remember that frightfully nice man who talked a lot about `the classless society'?" Ian Richardson asked in the opening moments. "He had to go, of course, in the end." We do remember, and the assumption that we know what is being talked about so elliptically is the key to the series' principal seduction. Even the dimmest viewer is made to feel wily and in the know, a fact pressed home by the flattery of the direction.

Richardson's face is never larger in the screen than when it is looking directly at us, his principal confidantes in this game of knowing cynicism. "We know, don't we?" he says. Well, no we don't, actually, but it's great fun pretending we do. Francis Urqhart has made it to PM but isn't entirely happy. He suffers the odd pang of remorse for tipping Susannah Harker to her death and feels "becalmed" by the achievement of his ambitions. Then along comes the new king, passionate about architecture and the environment, hostile to his government's right-wing policies and determined to speak of his convictions in public. Even devotees may feel that this first episode was a little smugly assured about the appeal of silky villainy but there are some very promising elements being stirred into the pot for the coming weeks.

Princess Dia . . . sorry, Charlotte, is being finagled into queering the pitch for her former husband, the King's devoted press secretary is about to burst messily out of the closet and someone has possession of the tape that proves Urqhart is a murderer. Conspiracy addicts disappointed by the growing sobriety of Kennedy assassination programmes will find much to feast on here.

Many thanks to Deb for digging out these reviews.