riffs on shakespeare: The Rise of Edward 04
Canadian Stage: Shakespeare in High Park
The Globe and mail

SHAKESPEARE of course never wrote a play called The Rise of Edward IV, let alone Edward 04. Why the Canadian Stage Company should be so scared of Roman numerals is a puzzle. Maybe it's their contribution to universal ignorance.

Shakespeare did write a three-part play entitled Henry VI. Early work, with a high quota of verbal and physical violence, it shows rival dynasties of robber-barons double-crossing and decimating one another in the Wars of the Roses. Scorned for centuries, it has recently been rehabilitated. The Royal Shakespeare Company has mounted three major revivals, the latest a two-part reduction called The Plantagenets. This is the version - Edward 04 is its second half - that the CSC has brought in.

It is not too satisfactory. Whatever their crudities, each of the original Henry VI plays has a shape and temper of its own, and if this is to be denied we have to get something in exchange, not just the old order denatured and speeded up. The main impulse here is simply to cram three nights' action into two.

Henry VI Part Two, as written, is a wonderful portrait of courtly in- fighting. For three acts there is nominal peace; the fourth erupts in a stage-managed popular uprising. Edward 04 starts with this peasants' revolt, Jack Cade's rebellion, which plays like a comic interlude cut off from its moorings. The local yokels assemble for a country dance. Then they stand around, holding scythes and billhooks but looking harmless, though they are supposed to have professional soldiers running scared.

By the end of the evening the beginning has been forgotten - which is both the blessing and the curse of episodic theatre - and things have perked up. War has broken out, and it occupies the whole of Henry VI Part Three, which is given pretty much intact except that one battle has been superimposed on another.

None of the stylized fighting works, and little of it is necessary, but the action really lies in individual atrocities. The Duke of York's young son is killed, and he himself subjected to a prolonged humiliation, presided over by the gloating Queen Margaret. Hours later, she witnesses the killing of her own boy. On one estimate, both she and York deserve all they get, but the play allows them their suffering and we feel for the situation if not for the people.

The agony is ritualized when the pious Henry sits on a battlefield wishing he were a shepherd, while behind him appear two representative victims: a son who has killed his father and vice versa. This already stylized scene is given a staging twist that nearly ruins it but not quite. Henry meets his own end at the hands of his polar opposite, the future Richard III. And in Hardee Linehan's performance the Crookback's emergence becomes the main excitement of the play.

A salty brutal joker, he carries his destiny with him; even at the beginning of his career, when his hands are no bloodier than theirs, people address him as if he were a mass murderer. The production marks him out from the start, giving him a compartment of his own in a multi- levelled set, and pointed entrances down long flights of steps. Tanja Jacobs as Margaret catches the lightning in her most sadistic moments, and Juan Chioran is a sprightly Edward who, the tides of war being what they are, shares the crown with Henry on a 50-50 basis.

Nearly everybody wears red, making it impossible to tell York from Lancaster or rank from file. Armies line up to defy one another at opposite edges of the stage, leaving us interesting stretches of totally empty space to gaze at. The actors yell with gusto but the production lumbers.