KING HENRY VI, PARTS I- III. To 17 February.
Stratford-upon-Avon
KING HENRY VI, PARTS I-III
by William Shakespeare
Courtyard Theatre To 21 October 2006 then 9-16 Feb 07 (Part I), 10-17 Feb 07 Parts II & III)
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Wed & Sat 1.30pm Sun 3pm Trilogy days 26 Aug, 9, 30 Sept, 21 Oct Sept 10.30am, Tetralogy Days 10, 17 Feb (Henry VI, II & III, plus Richard III, with Henry VI Part I preceding eve)
Runs: 3hr 10min (Part I), 3hr 15min (Part II), 3hr20min (Part III) One interval each
TICKETS: 0870 609 1110
www.rsc.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 9 August
Fantastic symphony of blood and revenge.
During this year’s Complete Works programme, the Royal Shakespeare Company is bringing in productions from round the world. With this complete Henry VI it’s brought in one of its own past production, now given the complete works itself.
Shakespeare wrote more plays about Henry VI’s reign than any other. 2 reigns in fact, stretching all but half a century with a decade’s gap in the 1460s, so there’s plenty of history to fill them. For Shakespeare and Elizabethan orthodoxy, the saintly Henry VI presided over the dissolution of power abroad and order at home, between his father, the “star of England” Henry V and the tyrannical Richard III.
So it’s unsurprising wars run through his uneasy times, the loss of England’s post-Agincourt holdings in France dominating Part I and the civil Wars of the Roses, which took colour coding to a new dimension and were extremely uncivil, the rest.
There are none of the binding characters that fix dramatic structures in most Shakespeare’s histories, Henry himself being too weak to shape events. So director Michael Boyd has created a range of theatrical motifs in a near-total theatre trilogy filled with what cinema used to call ‘Sensurround’ effects. From the start, three levels are employed, Henry V’s lamented spirit descending from the heights a staircase to death, spilling blood as he crawls to his underground coffin.
Sounds punch or shimmer in the air, providing shock illumination to key words. Lighting opens up to include the audience or create a sense of the dramatic action continuing behind them. And the Courtyard’s full 3-tier height is used; Figures ascend or descend through the air, or hang suspended by harness.
Battles often involve soldiers clutching ladder sections mid-air, or sweeping at a rope’s end from the balconies over the stalls’ heads. Proclamations come from round the auditorium where angry crowds bang the theatre’s fabric in civil riots.
And there’s blood, eventually swept across the rusting metal stage surface as Richard of Gloucester drags Henry’s murdered corpse. When the victorious Yorkists finally sit together talking of their lasting joy, Henry’s blood stains their clothes as, on the stool that’s mockingly stood for a throne throughout, they seem to be camping-out in a blood-flooded temporary home. It’s here, finally, Richard cuddles the baby nephew who, in Richard III, will be one of his princes-in-the-tower victims.
Boyd shows England descending into brutality and moral anarchy from lack of leadership and through power-jealous lords. The first half is largely a battle between the beneficent Lord Protector Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, and the smiling, sneeringly treacherous cleric Henry Beaufort, Richard Cordery’s deliberately paced Gloucester and Geoffrey Freshwater with his verbal sniper-attacks being finely contrasted.
The process is amplified in casting Katy Stephens as the 2 French women who help destroy England. Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc combines the worst elements of witch and charlatan. Boyd gives her a red-dressed trio of spirits to enforce her will, before deserting her. Stephens reappears, straight after Joan’s death, as Margaret of Anjou whose beauty make the impressionable Henry agree to give up tracts of France in a marriage agreement.
This energetic Margaret contrasts her husband’s abstraction. Her love affair with Suffolk isn’t emphasised; their enforced mid-point parting brings a surprise in the intensity of feeling. Elsewhere it’s incredulous disappointment with Henry that fuels her anger.
Boyd has another strategy for the separation, and Suffolk’s subsequent death at the mob’s hands. Straight after they part, Beaufort dies, naturally but in moral, and oral, agony. As he’s whisked away the ghosts of the Talbots, father and son, England’s military heroes from Part I, emerge from his deathbed.
Killed in battle against the French owing to quarrelling lords back home denying them supplies, the Talbots become spirits of England, taking the place of the rioters who kill Suffolk, and in the final part becoming the Father and Son who discover, as Henry muses during the battle of Towton, they have killed their respective son and father. To make the point again, Lex Shrapnel doubles Young Talbot and Richmond, who will finally redeem the curse by defeating Richard III.
Such insightful liberties intensify Boyd’s thematic choreography. It’s there in the Jack Cade scenes, where revolution becomes a carnival of the oppressed rather than a mere uprising of the ignorant. So an overarching revenge operation comments ironically on individual retributions.
At times it grows excessive – dragging an audience member onstage to be a Cade victim doesn’t work. But such moments as the murder of York’s child Rutland (Alexia Healy’s cries of baby-like panic intensifying the cruelty) stand out. And Chuk Iwuji’s Henry, an ineffective ruler but a person growing in moral anger without the bite to act ruthlessly, is a fine creation.
Henry’s white-coated morality contrasts the eventually indistinguishable realpolitik which emerges. Two major performances make the point. In earlier stages Clive Wood’s forceful Richard of York could still show moral understanding. Later, someone like Patrice Naiambana’s Warwick, deliberate in action and commandingly voiced, has cast aside all moral pretensions. Bargains are sealed, friendships smilingly claimed without a whisper of conviction.
Sometimes, this early Shakespeare might benefit from simpler treatment, but that’s beside the point. This is Boyd’s vision, true to the scripts, for a bloody modern world, and it’s startlingly resonant and memorable.
King Henry VI: Chuk Iwuji
Humphrey Duke of Gloucester/Louis XI: Richard Cordery
Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester: Maureen Beattie
Duke of Bedford/Duke of Buckingham/Lord Hastings: Tom Hodgkins
Duke of Exeter/Lord Clifford/Sir John Stanley/Duke of Norfolk: Miles Richardson
Bishop, then Cardinal Beaufort: Geoffrey Freshwater
Duke of Somerset: Nicholas Asbury
Earl then Duke of Suffolk/Lord Rivers: Geoffrey Streatfeild
Mayor’s Officer/Horner/Earl of Westmoreland: Kieran Hill
Richard Plantagenet later Duke of York: Clive Wood
Edmund Mortimer/Earl of Salisbury/Lord Say/Duke of Exeter: Roger Watkins
Young later Lord Clifford: Keith Dunphy
Earl of Warwick: Patrice Naiambana
Lord Talbot/A Father That Has Killed His Son: Keith Bartlett
John Talbot/Son That Has Killed His Father/Henry, Earl of Richmond: Lex Shrapnel
Sir William Lucy/Peter/Rutland’s Tutor: Julius D’Silva
Alexander Eden/Earl of Oxford: Paul Hamilton
Sir William Stafford/Earl of Northumberland: Chris McGill
Charles the Dauphin/Jack Cade/Sir John Montgomery: John Mackay
Reignier/Weaver/George Plantagenet: James Tucker
Duke of Alencon/Holland/Edward Plantagenet: Forbes Masson
Bastard Of Orleans/Bevis/Richard Plantagenet: Jonathan Slinger
Simpcox’s Wife/Duke of Rutland/Lady Bona: Alexia Healy
Margery Jourdain/Nurse: Hannah Barrie
Duke of Burgundy/Simpcox/Sir Humphrey Stafford/Marquis of Montague: Matt Costain
Joan La Pucelle/Queen Margaret: Katy Stephens
Joan’s Fiends/Margaret’s Attendants: Hannah Barrie, Alexia Healy, Ann Ogbomo
Countess of Auvergne/Lady Elizabeth Grey: Ann Ogbomo
Keeper: Antony Bunsee
Keeper’s Assistant/Edward Prince of Wales: Wela Frasier
Director: Michael Boyd
Designer: Tom Piper
Lighting: Heather Carson
Sound: Andrea J Cox
Music: James Jones, John Woolf
Movement: Liz Ranken
Choreographer/Aerial Consultant: Gavin Marshall
Company voice work: Alison Bomber
Fights: Terry King
Director of Rope Work: Matt Costain
Assistant director: Donnacadh O’Briain
2006-08-11 13:33:33