A Good Year at Stratford Gets Better
Henry VIII
The Stratford Festival
The National Post
The first play ever to be presented on the Stratford Festival stage was Richard III, and the platform has always seemed to be a natural for the histories. It offers scope and sweep for the massed scenes, and stark concentration for the contrasting moments of solo introspection. It's been years, though, since one of the chronicles was last mounted there. Lacking name recognition, they have been banished to Stratford's smaller spaces. Richard Monette's Henry VIII, his best Shakespeare production since The Tempest, is a tingling reminder of how much we have been missing.
Henry VIII is an atypical history. It contains no wars, nor even the threat of any. Its spectacular scenes depict not battles but processions. It seems only to have acquired its familiar title because the editors of the First Folio wanted it to fit in with the other histories. It previously bore the less regal name of “All Is True”, a name that some recent editors have restored as has (in square brackets) the current Stratford billing.
Such gossipy but non-committal titles seem to have been a defence mechanism for Elizabethan playwrights as they drew closer to the history of their own times. There's another play about Henry called When You See Me, You Know Me while one on Elizabeth herself is breezily labelled If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody.
Anyway the Folio editors did Shakespeare a posthumous favour; “All Is True” could be about anything but Henry VIII is one English monarch who, thanks to Hans Holbein, Charles Laughton, and those half-dozen wives, has marquee value.
The play only takes in the first one-and-a-half wives. It covers the divorce and death of Katharine of Aragon and the courtship and coronation of Anne Bullen, and culminates in the birth of Anne's daughter, the very same Elizabeth. It also presents the pomp and downfall of the all-but-all-powerful favourite, Cardinal Wolsey.
Shakespeare's junior contemporary John Fletcher is reckoned to have been a major collaborator on this play, and, style apart, the play reflects his expertise at dramatizing contemporary court manners, especially the less savoury ones.
Ann Curtis's set gives us the Stratford stage at its most starkly elegant, while her rich Tudor costumes, also stark, make it swirl. The pattern, very clearly and skilfully realized in this production, is of ceaseless frolic and intrigue, punctuated by dark nights of the soul, spotlit when good fortune gives out. Big, lively, stage pictures regularly give way to big, lonely solo performances, each able to command the stage when his or her moment comes.
The character who bridges both these worlds, while never quite belonging to either of them, is the king himself. Like his current Stratford stablemate King John, Henry is a Protestant hero -- he founded the Church of England, after all -- caught in an ambiguous light. Once again Shakespeare hedged his bets, but this time to far better effect. We never get the goods on Henry, and he never gives anything away: He has just a couple of asides and no soliloquies.
Graham Abbey plays him superbly as an isolated and detached young man rapidly reaching authority. Though he starts in the familiar hands-on-hips pose, he is no fat Holbein cut-out: He is a golden boy, and caparisoned as such. At first he seems passive, in willing thrall to Wolsey. A momentary imputation of tyranny arouses him to anger, and the scene shakes. As the cardinal seems about to thwart his divorce, so he becomes more his own man, and these eruptions, generally of a single syllable, become more frequent and more feared. But he remains ambiguous. Any number of motives are imputed to him, by himself or others -- guilt over marriage to his brother's widow, love or lust for Anne, desire for a male heir, anti-Papal sentiment -- and they all seem, in their moment, genuine. Obviously, he can compartmentalize.
He is terrified that Anne will die in childbirth, then, when he hears that she has born him a daughter, he is devastated. He pulls himself together, of course -- partly for the look of it, partly from genuine parental pride -- and when Cranmer prophesies the child's glorious future, he listens in wonder that's tainted with disbelief and even more with disappointment. He still wants a son. At the play's last moment, he spots a likely future mother, Jane Seymour (at least we can tell it's her if we look at the program), and we know that all is up with Anne. None of this is in the text, but it's better than what's in the text. I preferred this performance to Abbey's Macbeth, but I suspect that he had to play Macbeth first in order to give it.
Kicking off the line of royal victims is the Buckingham of Raymond O'Neill, an actor of great presence never previously tapped, making his farewell to the crowd, every inch the noble martyr. His successors are contrastingly unsentimental. Walter Borden, climbing a new rung as an actor, effortlessly projects Wolsey's insolence, deviousness and vindictiveness, plus his confidence in his own powers. He has a crooked smile. Nor is he magically transformed when misfortune strikes. "Farewell, a long farewell" is played not for pathos but for irony -- he's sure he'll be on top again. When he finds he won't, he doesn't crumble but he does repent, because there is, after all, nothing else for him to do. His new piety seems genuine; he remembers he's a priest. On one level, this is opportunistic writing, on another, it's perfectly believable.
The most sympathetic character in the play is Katharine. Knowing this, Seana McKenna declines to play for it. Defying Wolsey or pleading her own case in the divorce court, she is lucid and splendidly angry. Anger persists, laced with weariness, through her interview with the cardinals (a tricky scene she redeems) and even at her death, where she pursues her mental vendetta against Wolsey almost to the end. Finally, when she tells of her heavenly vision, and even more when she makes provision for her attendants, she is sublime.
Monette's production has its share of cliches. An unidentified prisoner stumbles across the stage in the middle of someone else's conversation, to remind us that Tudor England was a dangerous place, as if we didn't know. A pair of celebrity-spotting gentlemen turn up (twice in the text, three times in the production ) to rubberneck at the royal festivities. One of them is Scottish, the other's accent wavers but could be Irish, and they're both very full of themselves and very camp. This makes a kind of sense -- if you know not them, you know nobody - but it's overdone.
The plum role of the Old Lady goes for nothing because the actress (Chick Reid) is not in fact old, and by the same token I'm sure, though I can't prove, that Lord Sands (Steve Cumyn) should be a dirty old man rather than an exquisite young one. However, Sara Topham is a spirited Anne, most of all in the dumb-show of her coronation; Stephen Russell's Norfolk powerfully leads the jackals of the court, and Brian Tree and Steven Sutcliffe are fine as the persecuted Cranmer and the persecuting Gardiner, though I nourish a secret desire to see them switch roles. One of the best things about the show, though, is that their altercation, which comes after most of the stars have departed, is no kind of anti-climax. The play makes sense; and though this isn't the first modern production to bring that off, it's one of the few. This has been a good season for Stratford and a better one for Shakespeare, with the supposed lesser plays coming through like gangbusters.