The Thing's Not a Play

Riffs on Shakespeare: The Hollow Crown
The Royal Shakespeare Company
The National Post

This Royal Shakespeare Company standby contains only one piece of writing by Shakespeare. You might call it the title number or, since we hear it at the beginning of the evening, the overture. It's the famous speech in which Richard II invites his supporters to sit on the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings, death being the ultimate mockery lurking inside "the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples" of privileged folk like himself. Ian Richardson, in the current version, delivers it like a virtuoso, packing enormous variety into a dozen lines. A light laugh accompanies the phrase "all murdered." A mordant, threatening grandeur surrounds "the hollow crown" itself.

It turns out to be a misleading introduction, since little else in The Hollow Crown -- a collection, assembled 40 years ago by John Barton, of prose and song "by and about the Kings and Queens of England" -- carries comparable weight or even pursues comparable themes. For a start, Richardson and his distinguished compeers -- Vanessa Redgrave, Donald Sinden, Alan Howard -- never at any point sit upon the ground; they take their ease in handsome straight- backed chairs or, when the moment demands it, march downstage and address us standing up.

Then again, few of the stories they tell are especially sad, and not many have to do with the death of kings. The monarchs they chronicle, all the way from William the Conqueror to Victoria, did die of course, and sometimes the fact is mentioned, but a vital part of the Shakespearean equation is missing. The dramatic point is not just the contrast between celebrity and mortality; it's that these people had power, and with that power went responsibility, and that they were always agonizingly aware of it. It's what makes them dramatically interesting. Otherwise they're just a collection of ordinary ladies and gents who led privileged lives and wore heavy head furniture, and the show is just gossip.

It does regain its dignity at the close, when it dips beneath the horizon of history and gives us the departure of King Arthur, as narrated by Thomas Malory. This has nothing to do with political reality, but it's potent myth about kingship -- and it's stirring. There are a few comparable moments on the way through. We get Redgrave as Mary Tudor, the "Bloody Mary" who went on to burn all those Protestants, drawing a shawl awkwardly around her as if to give herself courage when outfacing a rebellion. (There is, I think, an implicit contrast with the celebrated and far more assured speech -- which we don't hear -- given by her sister Elizabeth, when mustering her troops at Tilbury: "I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman" and all that stuff.) She is equally moving as the condemned Anne Boleyn, protesting her innocence while the juggernaut of the Tudor succession rolls over her. There is Richardson as the absolutist Charles I, on trial for his life and confronting a judge (Sinden) who might as well be speaking a different language; a clash not just of character but of fundamental principle. The change to a constitutional monarchy may have been a giant step for mankind but it was a death blow to a certain kind of English drama. There has barely been a good play written about a British monarch since.

Most of The Hollow Crown is a grab bag, but even on those terms the best bits are generally the sad ones. The death of George II's wife, as recounted by her physician, might equally well be the death of any woman, but Sinden delivers it with a gruff tact, edged by wit, that makes it very affecting. Most of the show, though, falls over itself to be entertaining, as if it were afraid of losing our attention.

Back in 1961, when it first appeared, it was a novelty, the first staged anthology; it may also have owed some of its success to the presence in its original cast of Max Adrian, a great actor who was also a great camp comedian. He could make anything funny. He may, though, have blazed a dangerous path for his successors. It can be oddly reassuring to see that luminaries of the classical stage can behave as desperately as lesser mortals in the quest to get laughs; all the same, the spectacle of Sinden and Howard verbally wrong- footing one another through selections from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (a history, not a newspaper) is not an edifying one. The musical support, too (by a singer-guitarist, Stephen Gray) is predominantly smirky.

Redgrave, who cannot only create a mood but cast a spell at a moment's notice, does the best sustained comic turn as a 15-year- old Jane Austen, at work on what she cheerfully admits to be a thoroughly biased History of England (Mary Queen of Scots good; Elizabeth I bad, very bad). She manages, pretty much, to get us laughing both with the material and at it. Even she, though, has run out of steam by the time she gets to Victoria's description of her own coronation.

Sinden's fine-brandy comic technique remains 100% proof, but he too ends up repeating his effects. Richardson does a jolly Charles II announcing his marriage, but is heavily dependent on a self- deprecating guffaw. Howard is the most starved for good, or at least suitable, material; he is best reciting a poem by the saintly, tortured Henry VI -- a role of whose Shakespearean equivalent he gave a memorable account in the '80s.

And there's part of the rub. We have here three actors whose combined resumes would include a pair apiece of Lears, Hamlets, Benedicks, Coriolani and Richards of both denominations; plus an actress who has played a definitive Rosalind and five separate Cleopatras. I was looking forward as much as anyone to seeing all this talent and experience on a single stage. What I had forgotten is how little opportunity this show (it isn't a play -- doesn't pretend to be -- and I wish people would stop calling it one) gives its actors to interact. All they can do most of the time is smile, appreciatively and looking as if they mean it, at one another's performances.

I found myself compiling mental lists of four-handers (Shaw's Don Juan in Hell? Claudel's Partage de Midi? Beckett's Endgame? -- well, perhaps not that one) that might allow them to strike some sparks off one another. I suspect, too, that The Hollow Crown works better as a divertissement within a regular repertoire than when carted off around the world as a four-star entertainment in its own right. The four stars are here, and I wouldn't advise you to miss them, but don't expect to see them stretched to anything like their full capacity.