...De Flores and Beatrice. The other characters don't have much weight. Alan Webb as Vermandero sounds an awful lot like Polonius most of the time and may be ignored. The two De Piraquo brothers are there to provide plot points and are forgettable. Frances Tomelty (Sting's first wife) has some effective scenes as Beatrice's lady in waiting; she has a good comedy sense. The lunatic asylum has the wonderful Norman Rossington (A Hard Day's Night) as keeper. He gets to spit out some funny lines.Stanley Baker comes out best. His De Flores is at first cynical and distant, then as he realizes the depth of his involvement he starts to act with real force. Helen Mirren matches his commitment. To sum up: this is one of the better BBC plays; not too many scenes had to be cut. Beatrice's speech with the line "let the common sewer take it from distinction" is given whole, a good decision.

Helen Mirren and Stanley Baker (and to a somewhat lesser extent, the actor who plays Alsemero) really know what they're doing. It is fascinating to watch Beatrice-Joanna struggle with her lust for de Flores.My sad little confession is that I suspect it is the lack of continuous score makes it a little difficult to feel the tragedy of the piece. Piraquo dies and I barely twitch, Diaphanta dies and the same. There's somehow a little bit of a wall between the audience and the evil.In many of the smaller roles, the lines are recited rather than acted and this detracts from the meaning for those people to whom Jacobean language is less than clear. I watched it with subtitles and cannot count how many times the meaning of lines was obscured by mechanical delivery. Beatrice-Joanna's father seemed to be the worst offender to me.