King Charles III

Where did this fantasy "reality" drama come from? It takes real living people and turns them into farcical characters with evil or untoward motivations. Yet, like a train wreck, I couldn't look away. I guess it's interesting to watch but I'm not sure why. We all have our opinions on the royal family and what we think makes them tick. It just seems a bit irresponsible to commit those notions to film, which has the unfortunate effect of being interpreted as having a basis in fact.

King Charles III is a fictional drama with cod Shakespearean type language as it is spoken in blank verse which sees Prince Charles finally becoming monarch after the death of the present queen.

Almost immediately the new king causes a constitutional crisis by falling out with the elected Prime Minister over the issues of giving assent to a new law regarding press privacy.

King Charles's action brings chaos to the country and causes division within his own family with a grasping Kate seeing this as an opportunity for her husband William to seize the crown.

This was one of Tim Pigott-Smith's last performance who reprises his stage role of King Charles III, a man who finally gets to play the role he was born to play but whose ambition exceeds his constitutional grasp.

This was a finely performed film, however I would have thought in this crisis the press would be overwhelmingly on the side of the new King as he defends the freedom of the press.

The big issue I had though that the plot was similar in many ways to the BBC series, To Play the King (the second part of the BBC's House of Cards trilogy) which also had a Princess Diana type character vying to wrest the crown from her then errant husband and pass it on to her son. Here we see the ghost of Diana and Kate taking on the substance of the character who is an opportunist.

A great idea and a great presentation. The use of "language style" to separate the classes was a wonderful choice. While the underlying reason for the drama is a bit thin (contrived?), the presentation is well worth it.

I don't give a rating because I only lasted 3 minutes into it. After hearing Camilla explain to Kate that Charles is king immediately after the queen's death instead of at coronation, and that the UK doesn't have a constitution, I knew this was written so that characters say things to each other that they already know, for the sake of the audience. Bad writing at its worst.

While it is shocking to see living people turned into characters that behave in unexpected ways, it is a pure and glorious tragedy that any Greek or Elizabethan playwright would recognize. Betrayal and unmasked ambitions abound. There is even a ghost!