All is True review: A boldly fanciful but nuanced portrait of Shakespeare’s final years
There is a knowing irony in calling a film as fanciful as this latter life Shakespeare biopic All is True. Written by Ben Elton and directed by its star Kenneth Branagh, the film plays so fast and loose with the playwright’s final years that they needn’t have bothered fitting Branagh with a prosthetic nose – accuracy is clearly not the priority here.
There is a succinct emotional truth, though, to All is True, whose name comes from the alternative title to Shakespeare’s final play, Henry VIII. It was during a performance of that play that a rogue cannon burnt the Globe Theatre to the ground in 1613 – and it is in the aftermath of that disaster that the film begins. Shakespeare, vowing that he is “done with stories”, returns home to his family in Stratford to live out the rest of his days. But he has been absent for so long that his arrival disrupts their life more than completes it.