Trevor Nunn’s stage productions in
recent years have tended to display a relaxed performance pace which is
faithful to our sense of naturalism but often in conflict with the
requirements of dramatic impetus. Thankfully, no such slacking is in
evidence in his production of
The
Wars Of The Roses: it would be especially fatal on those days,
such as the press day, when all three three-hour productions are staged
serially. Nunn is partly paying respect to the Rose’s great champion
Sir Peter Hall, who at the RSC in the 1960s adapted (with John Barton)
and directed this edit of Shakespeare’s second tetralogy of history
plays. In this version the three parts of
Henry VI are compressed into two
plays entitled
Henry VI and
Edward IV respectively, leaving
Richard III more or less untouched.
It amounts to what you might call a live box-set-watching experience,
and as such has attracted a number of prominent names. Joely Richardson
makes a rare stage appearance as Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI’s queen
and later an implacable voice against Richard III. A little
too implacable, in this case, since
– in a slight, I guess, Angevin accent – Richardson grows increasingly
shouty as the chronicle progresses. True, so does Margaret, and
admittedly the dynamics in general grew less subtle as the all-day
marathon progressed, but a little more variation would be helpful.
Another vocal miscalculation affects Robert Sheehan as Richard
Crookback. Sheehan suppresses his native Irish accent beneath an
assumed patrician Englishness, but it then sounds as if he’s
consciously
doing the kind of
Richard III voice that has been stereotypical since Olivier. His
leg-calipered physical performance is excellent, his facial deadpanning
even more so, but Richard is famously one of the most soliloquising
characters in all of Shakespeare, and it is hard for an audience to
trust such an audibly artificial voice.
The trilogy begins with a strongly acted focus. Alex Waldmann’s skills
have grown over the years and are now meshed with his still-boyish
features to create a convincingly innocent, youthful Henry VI; he grows
in wisdom, but scarcely in understanding regarding the ruthlessness
demanded by kingship. Oliver Cotton, Alexander Hanson and Andrew
Woodall each play a (sometimes flamboyantly bewigged) clutch of nobles,
and Rufus Hound continues his successful journey from stand-up into
acting as the revolting peasant Jack Cade. Most flatteringly, Edward
IV’s queen Elizabeth Woodville is played with a powerful directness by
an actor whom I had mentally classified as the next generation’s
Alexandra Gilbreath, until a perusal of the programme revealed that she
is in fact the original Alexandra Gilbreath.
Shakespeare’s
Henry VI part 1,
which forms the bulk of the first part of this trilogy, is openly
propagandistic, exulting in Henry’s triumph over the French led by a
Joan of Arc who is explicitly a witch. It is unsurprising that it feels
more satisfying in its own right than either its immediate successor or
such a (no pun intended) hobbled portrayal of Richard III.
Nevertheless, in both Barton & Hall’s editing and Nunn’s
production, this is probably the clearest account of these wars’
dynastic factionalism that I have seen.
Written for the Financial
Times.