History as Rich as Shakespeare Intended
henry iv part one, henry v
the stratford festival
the national post
The general word on last year's Stratford Festival was that it did everything well except Shakespeare. This year, that not- inconsiderable breach has been filled up in terms of quantity -- we have had four Shakespeare productions already, with one to come later in the season -- and of quality. The Shakespeares have been as exciting as everything else in what has been, if you can pardon The Sound of Music, an extraordinary opening week.
As an acting instrument, the festival company has come together more strongly and consistently than ever I remember. Look at its geological strata. It has William Hutt and Douglas Campbell, veterans of Stratford's commencement in 1953, as authoritative as you would expect and still amazingly fresh. It has mature players -- Brian Bedford, Martha Henry, Peter Donaldson, Seana McKenna -- who have been in and out of the festival in the intervening years and seem to belong there. And it has, at last, a solid, lively brigade of younger actors, some of them products of the theatre's new classical conservatory, which, to judge from the standard of speech and understanding up there, is feeding them the right stuff. Go to Stratford this year and you may hold the whole of the festival's history in your hands.
Talking of history, at the end of last week, Stratford continued its progress through the English chronicle plays on what might be called the Doughnut Principle, i.e., munchy but with a hole in the middle. Henry IV Part Two has yet to arrive, but the two plays that flank it are richly in place, as is the continuity between them: an especially remarkable achievement given they have been mounted by different directors on different stages. Scott Wentworth's production of Henry IV Part One begins with a silent young man, whom we rightly take to be Prince Hal, dressed in neutral, modern black leather. This is not the cheeriest of beginnings, and it becomes downright perplexing when his father the king appears red-coated to meet with his advisors in what seem to be the fashions of the First World War. The next scene, the first to which Hal textually belongs, finds him in the company of Sir John Falstaff, who seems to have stepped out of some older production, being dressed in the style usually known as Merrie England. And at this point, everything clicks. Hal, surveying the king's world and Falstaff's, is having, in effect, to choose between the values of two kinds of past: one near, chilly and politic, the other distant, warm and seductively disordered.
Orthodox criticism gives the prince a choice of fathers; in this production, the actor playing Falstaff is the actual father of the actor playing the king, so Hal has to choose between father and grandfather. Visually, too, the mixed costuming is a cunning method of providing the best of all worlds; often we get the different periods side by side (by side) and Patrick Clark's designs are stylish enough to give us contrast without head-aching glare. I confess to feeling apprehensive of Douglas Campbell's Falstaff. I have not always found him the subtlest of actors, and he has played the fat knight so often that I was afraid of getting a routine stroll through the role. I have rarely felt so humbled. Campbell's performance certainly bears the marks of experience but his ease is invaluable, not only to the actor but to the character. Falstaff may be perpetually young in spirit but it is age and a continual sense of having been here before that give him authority; everyone else in the play is his junior.
Campbell knows his way around this text, knows in his bones how to phrase it; he never sentimentalizes and he is also -- a surprisingly rare quality in Falstaffs -- very funny. The great tavern scene lives up to its reputation, both in the uproar it creates and in the frost that dispels it. When Falstaff, asked to explain his flight from the disguised Hal at Gadshill, snaps back, "I knew ye as well as he that made ye," he brings down the house: for once, a Great Shakespearean Comic Moment that works. After that, I could have forgiven the performance and the production anything.
Not, as it turns out, that there is much to forgive. Benedict Campbell presents a masterful Henry with an unfailing knack for saying the wrong thing. Wanting desperately to get through to his son, he cannot stop lecturing him; though he succeeds in regaining Hal's loyalty he can never believe that he has won his love, and the play ends with the gap between them still wide open. One of the ironies is that the king preaches the virtues of dissimulation to a prince who already knows more about them than he ever will.
Graham Abbey, who has been making a heartening progression through the ranks (he was D'Artagnan in last year's Three Musketeers), is a very fine Hal, simultaneously open-faced and close- hearted. He approaches kingship as a job, and he is a superb professional; he fights and kills Hostpur because it's expected of him, and his respect and regret seem genuine. He takes to the Eastcheap pub scene almost to the manner born; his comic timing is as good as Falstaff's.
Jonathan Goad's Hotspur lacks the right headlong pace, the sense of being carried away by his own excitement, but he is spirited, and especially sympathetic in the scenes with his wife (Jane Spence), which play like a happy sequel to The Taming of the Shrew; Shakespeare even changed Lady Percy's historical name to Kate.
Richard McMillan makes a pouchy-eyed politician out of Worcester; while, back among the lowlifes, two minor roles are cast from unprecedented strength: Barry MacGregor a stolid batman of a Bardolph, and Diane D'Aquila, an unusually sensible (and personable) Hostess.
The production is good at overlapping the disparate scenes, bringing them all into the same world. A huge map, spread across the floor for the rebels to plan their carve-up of England, stays in place when the king laments the country's fate to his son. Cloaked attendants change identity instantly from one scene to the next, and furniture displays the same obliging versatility. Only a small chorus of nuns seems puzzling; maybe they've wandered in from the musical down the road.
Henry V, directed by Jeanette Lambermont, wears a similar set of chronological bifocals. In this war play, we again have 1914-18 uniforms co-existing with medieval surcoats; since both styles, in Dany Lyne's design, are basically black, they go together well. Only the French are allowed colour and look full-bloodedly medieval, as if they lost the Battle of Agincourt by being militarily behind the times (which is historically true); unfortunately the Gallic males, with the exception of Michael Therriault's superb herald, are uncertainly played, though I thought I'd figured out by the last scene what Donald Carrier's pretending-to-be-weak king was up to.
The set consists mainly of a ramp, similar to that in the same director's As You Like It but far more appropriate. Behind it, ceaselessly projected, is video footage: close-ups of the principals, newsreels of marching mud- soaked troops. This may sound intrusive but it works very well, keeping a double focus. This is a specific historical war; it is also every war. It also poses the old double question: Death or Glory?
The play, which like its hero is the most opaque in the canon, never gives a definitive answer and the production, despite its obvious pacifist sympathies, never forces one either. Seana McKenna, a close-cropped Chorus, starts by addressing us with grim over- emphasis, punching every other word to make her meaning clear. Then, when she gets to the line about letting our imaginary forces work, she relaxes, as if she has now decided to trust us. She stays in firm but gentle control, giving all the choral praise of Henry its due, never ironizing until the epilogue when the script permits her. Much of what we see onstage contradicts or at least qualifies her, but that's fair enough; if the chorus told us everything, we wouldn't need the play. A solo cellist, Jill Vitols, both supports and modifies her with music that is alternately requiem and celebration.
Graham Abbey's Henry is still a young man easing himself into a role, and doing it consummately but at a cost. The cheerful face sometimes looks haunted. His patriotic war-whoops aren't set pieces; they're morale-builders, delivered to specific hearers for a specific purpose. In the big speech on ceremony, he almost wriggles spiritually free, but the summons of the outside world drags him visibly and painfully back to reality. He still snatches at humour whenever he can, with his soldiers and most notably in his wooing of the French princess. Sara Topham, who was Lady Mortimer in the preceding play and speaks French as enchantingly as she spoke Welsh, gives him a harder time, takes longer to melt, than most Katharines, and Domini Blythe makes her a watchful worried duenna; there is a sense, even as they kiss, that this match and the peace it symbolizes, will not last.
Diane D'Aquila makes the account of Falstaff's death as moving, if not quite as endearingly absurd, as it should be; she and her hearers are sitting in a line at the edge of the stage, their feet dangling into space.
Barry MacGregor completes his Bardolph by being spectacularly hanged on stage; this is becoming a convention, but I wonder if the point could not be more economically made. Similarly, Paul Dunn's excellent Boy is presented to us as camcording the proceedings; this maintains the overall performance metaphor but it robs us of direct comic contact. Keith Dinicol's Pistol and Thom Marriott's hulking Nym are welcome newcomers, and Evan Buliung's grumbling Williams is first-rate.
So, in a different sphere, is Bernard Hopkins' Archishop of Canterbury, smooth but shifty: This notorious bore of a character avoids boring us. Indeed, the house seemed spellbound by the entire show; certainly I was. The history plays, so history shows, are the best possible material for forging a Shakespearean ensemble. They have come through for Stratford; and Stratford has come through for them.