wings that crush us from one side then from the other." According to Bury, "this was a period of armour and a period of the sword; they were plays about warfare, about power, about danger [...] This was the image of the plays. We wanted an image rather than a naturalistic setting. We were trying to make a world, a dangerous world, a terrible world, in which all these happenings fit." Bury employed the notion of "selective realism"; using one or two realistic props to emphasise the social dimensions of the narrative. In this case, such realism was manifested by a massive oval shaped iron council table which took up a large portion of the stage - the constantly changing group of figures who sit at the table visually emphasising the turbulence and political instability of the period. Peter Hall himself wrote of the set, "on the flagged floor of sheet steel tables are daggers, staircases are axe-heads, and doors the traps on scaffolds. Nothing yields: stone walls have lost their seduction and now loom dangerously - steel-clad - to enclose and to imprison. The countryside offers no escape, the danger is still there in the iron foliage of the cruel trees, and, surrounding all, the great steel cage of war." Reception The production was hailed as a triumph, and is generally recognised as reviving the reputation of the Henry VI plays in the modern theatre. Writing for the Daily Mail, Bernard Levin called it a Harold Hobson wrote "I doubt if anything as valuable has ever been done for Shakespeare in the whole history of the stage." The adaptation was immediately seen as the yardstick against which all future productions would be measured, and as late as 2000, it was still regarded by some critics as the finest ever production of the tetralogy; reviewing Michael Boyd's 2000/2001 production for the RSC, Carole Woddis wrote The Wars of the Roses "remains still the benchmark in terms of political and psychological elucidation and drive." Television In 1965, BBC 1 broadcast all three plays from the trilogy. Produced by Michael Barry and directed for television by Robin Midgley and Michael Hayes, the plays were presented as more than simply filmed theatre, with the core idea being "to recreate theatre production in televisual terms - not merely to observe it, but to get to the heart of it." Filming was done on the