NOW THE TWO PLAYS TOGETHER
ENGLAND IN FERMENT, AND SOME DANGEROUS WOMEN
We are in the 1450s, in a dangerous doldrum: Henry V of Agincourt is long dead, his stripling son married to pretty French Margaret of Anjou but still as a lad ruling under the Lord Protector, his uncle Gloucester. Who is, of course, resented by the usual stroppy court of nobles. These are encountered round a gorgeous banqueting table as we join them, beefing about France and one another.
The Bishop of Winchester (a fabulously weathered, sharp-eyed Paola Dionisotti) is clearly up to no good; the new Duke of Suffolk who negotiated the marriage is out for his own ends; Oliver Alvin-Wilson as York is showing promise of starting the future war of the roses, and still more excitingly, the Protector’s wife Eleanor – a diminutive but ferocious Lucy Benjamin in a pearl headdress reminiscent in form of Ena Sharples’ hairnet – is plotting, in the style of a proto-Lady-Macbeth, for her honourably reluctant spouse to seize power.
Shortly she gives it even more of the soap-opera touch in a passing brawl with the young queen, and hires a tame wizard to call up a disembodied – prophetically blood-dripping – head from a sudden trapdoor before being arraigned, raggedly defiant, and finally striding off to doom with her alarmed warder without dropping any of her innate menace. Bravo to Benjamin in this her debut RSC season…
Luckily, this sense of out-of-control female agency (always good in a warlike macho history-play) is picked up with interest by Minnie Gale as the Queen, as sneaky a foreign-born plotter as ever Shakespeare devised, who at a later point smiles treacherously over her petit-point while arguing the case for poor Gloucester handing over his power of protectorate. She eventually snogs the equally treacherous Suffolk (Ben Hall) and spends the rest of the play carrying his nastily removed head around, weeping openly over it to the visible discomfiture of her husband the King (Mark Quartley, an endearing performance of the devout well-meaning young monarch, looking about fifteen).
And don’t accuse me of spoilers: for one thing it’s a very old play, and for another we’re still in the first act: haven’t even got to the fate of Gloucester, the young King swooning with his crown rolling about, a poison death, a ghost, a battle scene with rope descents, barricades and a full-on rebellion of Kentishmen under a loutish Aaron Sidwell. All of it fast-moving, and a good 80% comprehensible even to non-Shakespearian non-historians.
For one of the things the RSC does best – and has done particularly well under Gregory Doran – is the barnstorming-yet-learned Shakespeare history play. Taking on the particularly awkward, and least familiar Henry VI sequence, the barnstorming element in the two plays (this and the Wars of the Roses, which we’ll come to next) is accentuated by having – beyond the professional cast of two dozen, up to 93 members of its “Shakespeare Nation” volunteers and 19 young performers from the Next Generation group. This enables scenes of populace, rebellion and warfare to be satisfyingly uproarious.
So under Owen Horsley’s direction (Doran himself oversees the season) the show clips along nicely on a bare set beneath moody monochrome projections to keep it moving, with suitable sounds from a brass and percussion and a couple of strings overhead. It is slightly hobbled by the author’s original form, which means that the rivetingly personal politics of the male and female courtiers in the first parts are lost for a while in the rebellion scenes.
But there is a particular and unexpected interest (to me, fairly ignorant of the play) in the emphasis on the populace’s hatred of learning and paperwork – “Let’s kill all the lawyers” comes from this play, with the populace’s jeering contempt for Latin, for writing of any kind and for ‘innocent lambs” skins being used as parchment and bees’ wax as seals on oppressive documents. In the most brutal heads-on-sticks sequence, torn pages rain down from the heights. This may be a quiet message to government and Arts Council about the attrition of culture, who knows?
But all in all, given the difficulty of getting the ‘lesser’ history plays right for a modern audience, it’s a triumph. Doran’s trademark in leadership here has always been , apart from deep care of the text, clarity, vigour and storytelling élan. And – as rather suggested above – no pompous reluctance to zhoosh up the soap-opera elements of archaic court doings. I enjoyed it.
Box office. Rsc.org.uk. To 28 may
and now –
PART 2 – SEPARATE PLAY, BOOKED SEPARATELY BUT FOLLOWS ON: THE WARS OF THE ROSES
The two plays (made from the original three part Henry VI set) each stand alone, but if you have seen the first – above – there is pleasure in meeting many of them again, and in addition the ominous figure of York’s youngest son, one day to be Richard III. The casting of Arthur Hughes – who in real life has a shortened and deformed arm – attracted some attention as disability-casting, because he will be Richard III here later in the year . But so far it is no tokenism: he deploys a playful quality, an impish nastiness which makes me much look forward to Greg Doran’s production later this summer.
As to this second play (H VI was originally three plays, remember, and the RSC has neatly split it into these two , it is far more battle-heavy: brawling blokes from the start, sons avenging fathers and fathers their sons, heavy clanging swords, cut-off heads thrown and abused as well as put on sticks. There are moments when unless you are an aficionado of stage fighting you may feel a bit sated, and if the RSC went in for trigger warnings it would have taken up half the programme, what with the truly nasty murder of a terrified child Rutland (York’s son) and almost equally unpleasant stabbings throughout.
But whenever that happens we come to some tremendous, character-driven face-off : gentle Henry knighting his son, saying “learn this lesson, draw thy sword in right” (some hopes, in this play). Or Minnie Gale as the Queen even more poisonous than before in a breastplate and skirt, taunting the captured York with a cloth dipped in his son’s blood, pulling it from her garter to do so; spurts of mutual hatred between them, making even the Queen momentarily flinch, doubled up at a holy curse. It is thrilling, as the young Shakespeare feels his poetic power and sense of drama evolving by the line. Or there’s York himself earlier, lounging on the throne forcing Quartley’s even more endearingly nice King Henry to disinherit his son. Feral metaphors spring up: the monarch a “trembling lamb environed by wolves”, York as a bear savaged by dogs.
It’s high-quality melodrama: there are odd almost farcical interludes among the bloodshed – Paola Dionisotti’s Exeter amusingly politic in a shrug about the succession; Henry in his Scottish exile with a couple of disbelieving hooded locals, flinging off his cloak and departing nude (Quartley’s performance has by now made us all very much on his side: not a heroic monarch but a sweet lad). And there’s a directly funny scene when Warwick goes to France (Richard Cant a rather camp King Louis) to sue for a royal marriage for the new King Edward, old York’s son – only to change sides in a huff when betrayed by the fact that York has already married.
More use is made in this half of the roaming camera onstage showing huge monochrome closeups on the screen above : it works, absolutely, surprisingly to me who is usually a bit irritated by such stuff. And young York, our future Richard III, gets to borrow a speech or two from his own eponymous play, which is neat and gets its own round of applause.
box office rsc.org.uk to 4 Jun
rating four
BUT – A JOINT RATING FOR THE TWO- BECAUSE SEEING THEM ONE AFTER ANOTHER IS A GREAT BUZZ – IS 5 MICE IF YOU MAKE IT THROUGH BOTH:
theatreCat 