The quality of the insults constantly uttered by the character of Roman Roy in Succession is so inventive in the filthy register (“He’s going to send a million poisonous spiders in your dick” or even “I’m going to grind your fucking bones to make my bread”, in addition to the “fuck you!”, conveniences of language which act as a hinge between the sentences…), it holds so much attention that it makes you forget its literary inspiration. Something to surprise the viewer who still keeps in the hollow of the ear the dialogues that have been punctuating for four seasons this implacable struggle for influence within the Roy family for the takeover of the media empire built by the patriarch undermined by disease. A tragedy in which each of the characters lives his own.
Rarely has a series-event been so peppered with allusions to Shakespeare, for the springs of his tragedies as for the comedy of his comedies. So much so that decrypting them has become a national sport in Britain. Logan Roy (the father) is a real bad guy, tough, amoral. Already, the surname Roy has for root royal… Brian Cox, who plays him, is also a Shakespearean actor, a former member of the prestigious troupes of the Royal National Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company, who even devoted a book to telling the inside story (The Lear Diaries) what it means to put yourself thousands of times, night after night, in the shoes of King Lear or Richard II. By his own admission, he interpreted the character of Logan Roy as he had done in the theater for those of Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar.
Jesse Armstrong, the designer of Succession, certainly a great reader, does not hide the fact that he borrowed from Shakespeare’s work the spirit if not the letter of his family turmoil and the complexity of his dynastic quarrels with their share of intrigues, plots, scandals, thwarted ambitions. The most emphatic wink of the whole series remains the one where Logan Roy judges his son unworthy and unfit to succeed him, analogous to Act III, scene 2 of Henry IV where the king does the same with his heir. And then what, the first words dropped from the mouth of the patriarch in the inaugural episode of season 1 do not they form the most Shakespearian of questions: “Where am I?” (Where am I ? ). The viewer knows immediately where he is from the first seconds of Succession : in Shakespeare!
The Robert Murdoch Inspiration
Rupert Murdoch was the primary inspiration for the show’s writer and his writing team for the character of Logan Roy. When the fictional mogul of the Waystar Royco media empire is asked what he has planned for his estate, his response is, “Don’t die.” But this kind of humor is typically Murdoch. And when Logan Roy shouts “My favorite Shakespeare quote is: ‘Take the fucking money!'”, it’s still Murdoch. It’s not just a question of power struggle, but of language, lexicon and syntax. “Fasten your seatbelts, you fucking dickheads!” is Falstaff remastered.
During the parties given within the company, the paranoiac atmosphere which develops there among those which are and those which are not owes with the theater of Ibsen and that of Chekhov. Kendall Roy’s inner turmoil is akin to Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Betrayal being the center of gravity of the series, the author drew heavily on Greek and Roman mythologies, for the first names of its protagonists and for the rest (Oedipus, etc.), without forgetting the use that Shakespeare, again and again, made of it (Coriolanus). Literary references, sometimes direct, are so recurrent that Logan Roy cannot help throwing at his vice-president Frank who stuns him with his analogies: “Take yourself a card in a library and go and fuck off! “
The fourth and final season of Succession, a highly addictive series produced by HBO and originally broadcast on OCS, has recently been released on Prime Video. Remarkably written, produced and interpreted, his characters compete in cynicism, abjection and deceit. The series triumphs in many countries. And if you wonder why millions of people allow themselves to be captivated by the tragicomic spectacle of so much baseness, take a card from a library and…!
* Pierre Assouline is a writer and journalist, member of the Goncourt Academy