THE HISTORIES: HENRY VI PARTS 1–3, RICHARD
III
The Roundhouse, London NW1
Opened 6–7 May, 2008
****
The “i” in “parliament” is silent; its
vocalisation is a recent and erroneous affectation. This may well be my
greatest single criticism about the second tetralogy of Michael Boyd’s
RSC production of Shakespeare’s history plays. All else is not quite
perfect enough to warrant a five-star rating, but excellent enough to
make four seem somewhat niggardly.
Although portraying events subsequent to those of the Richard II / Henry IV parts 1&2 / Henry V tetralogy, these plays were
written earlier, and indeed may well be the earliest of Shakespeare’s
plays to survive. One can see a progression in authorship skills from
the unsubtle jingoism of part 1 (with Joan of Arc portrayed as a
promiscuous witch) to the greater complexities of Richard III, which deftly combines
a plot emphasising the legitimacy of the then-reigning Queen
Elizabeth’s grandfather Henry VII’s ascension to the throne at the end
of the Wars of the Roses with a grim indictment of how corruption in
the body politic may rack the whole country beyond the court. The
staging in the Roundhouse space, too (in which a clone of the Courtyard
Theatre in Stratford has been erected), makes the cycle feel like a
civic event of sorts. I do not recall, when watching Boyd’s previous
staging of this production in the Young Vic in 2001, such a sense of
the audience bearing witness as citizens to the narrative of the state.
There is, I think, a greater coherence to this tetralogy than to the
other. Motifs can be more tellingly woven through. Keith Bartlett and
Lex Shrapnel play a succession of dramatically powerful fathers and
sons, beginning with Bartlett as Henry VI’s great general Lord Talbot
(who in some ways is more the focus of part 1 than the king himself),
ending with Shrapnel as the Earl of Richmond (Henry VII to be), and
sounding most keenly in part 3 where, in one of Shakespeare’s greatest
meditations on the hell of war, we see at the battle of Towton “a son
who has killed his father” and “a father who has killed his son”.
Jonathan Slinger (of whom more later) first appears in part 1 as the
Bastard of Orleans, repeatedly irking the other French nobles by
running on as if to attack them then removing his helmet to reveal
himself; this continues through other roles until, early in his
portrayal of Richard of Gloucester (later Richard III), he subverts the
image by jokingly donning headgear instead… the “garment” being the
sliced-off face of one of his victims in battle.
The supernatural weaves its way through the plays, as the handful of
ghosts in the script are joined by a succession of largely mute,
ethereal witnesses to their successors’ wrongs, and also by the
red-robed Antony Bunsee in a variety of minor roles as assorted
castellans and wardens which coalesce into a single figure designated
in the cast list as “the Keeper”, but in effect almost the Reaper: if
you see Bunsee nearby, or observing from the balcony of Tom Piper’s
steel-rampart set, best make your peace with God post-haste.
Chuk Iwuji’s King Henry begins as a surprisingly convincing adolescent
in part 1, maturing throughout the three plays as he becomes more aware
of the increasingly bitter divisions between the factions of the red
rose and the white but never quite able to be the king that his court
requires; his final retreat into monkish contemplation seems neither a
culpable act of weakness nor (as history suggests) a mental breakdown.
Patrice Naiambana is a coolly swaggering, self-regarding Earl of
Warwick; when England begins to call him “the kingmaker”, it is clearly
only catching up with this Warwick’s opinion of himself. Katy Stephens
is a little too demonstrative as Joan of Arc, but her later Queen
Margaret of Anjou (Henry’s wife) is a figure of steel and fire,
manipulating the politicking courtiers and finally almost incandescent
in her grief when she returns in Richard
III bearing, literally, a bag of bones.
Increasingly, what we see laying waste to court and country is madness:
a madness in the polity driven by differing shades of insanity among
individuals, and none more so than Jonathan Slinger’s Richard
Crookback. Yet, despite Richard’s voiced resolve “to prove a villain”,
this is not a deliberate, moustache-twirling adoption of the left-hand
path; as Richard switches in an instant between screaming passion and
throwaway black humour, it becomes apparent that what he really is is a
maniac, but a lucid maniac… the most terrifying kind. Slinger begins
this eight-play cycle with a very different, but almost equally
unsettling, portrayal of Richard II; such impressive bookend
performances, along with his others herein, from the Bastard of Orleans
to a shockingly brutal Fluellen in Henry
V, make the next twelve months’ batch of assorted Shakespeare
performance awards all foregone conclusions. The Histories project as a
whole ends later this month after a two-year term of service for its
actors; it augurs well for Boyd’s vision of reintroducing an ensemble
approach to the RSC.