Three Parts Add Up to Two Thrilling Plays

henry vi: Revenge in France, henry vi: revolt in england
the stratford festival
the national post

The three parts of Henry VI were rediscovered by the English theatre exactly 50 years ago, and since then—intact or compressed, on stage or television—they have consistently occasioned some of the most exciting Shakespeare Britain has had to offer. Until now our own Stratford has never really faced up to them. There was a production in 1966 that stalled halfway through the cycle, and another in 1980 that crammed all three parts into one play. Leon Rubin has now come up, as adaptor and director, with a lucid and crafty version in two instalments, and a production that is a sustained adventure, thrilling for actors and audience alike.

Revenge in France takes us right through the French wars that are the subject of Shakespeare's Henry VI Part One. The revenge is that of the French themselves, casting off the yoke that was imposed on them by the late Henry V. The avenger-in-chief is Joan la Pucelle, who represents the Elizabethans' vigorously unsympathetic idea of Joan of Arc, and whose task is made easier by the state of things in England; with the victorious Henry's son still a child, the realm is in the hands of a set of jealous, squabbling aristocrats, most of them somebody's uncle.

Their intrigues take centre stage in Shakespeare's Part Two, whose first half makes up the balance of Revenge. Henry VI is now grown and—in the immortal words of 1066 and All That—"such a Good Man that he was regarded as a saint, or alternatively—especially by the barons—an imbecile." He also marries an aggressive French princess, Margaret of Anjou, who can match any of the English lords for courage and ferocity, and is resented for it.

The Wars of the Roses are approaching, and they break out in Revolt in England, which accounts for the rest of Shakespeare's Part Two and the whole of his Part Three. Here the House of Lancaster, Henry its titular head, loses the throne to the House of York, led by the Duke of that name and, after his (naturally) violent death, by his sons.

There are plenty of reverses, and—what with the French wars at the beginning and the English at the end—a good half of the action is devoted to battles. These have been staged (by the invaluable John Stead) with superb resourcefulness. They progress from cheerful hand-to-hand realism to a bitter, weary stylization, naturalism and symbolism triumphantly blend at the last when snow falls (as it historically did at the Battle of Barnet) while a giant figure of Death stands astride John Pennoyer's set. This—a metal bridge surmounted by a catwalk and bathed alternately in gold or silver-grey light—proves to be both flexible and resilient, and comes with a great built-in archway.

If these were really Shakespeare's first plays (a vexed question) they were an extraordinarily ambitious way to begin. Part One, which takes some creative liberties with history, suffers from an excess of literal-minded rhetoric, as if not only the playwright but his theatre were still growing up, and stretches of Part Three are numbly written, suggesting that blood will have bloodlessness. It has three or four great scenes, though, while Part Two is wholly magnificent, with the knives temporarily sheathed it offers as vivid a picture of the shifts of power as you can find on a stage.

Its greatest role is Margaret, first seen on the end of a rope as prisoner of the Earl of Suffolk, who takes her home for his king and becomes her lover. Seana McKenna, defensive and flirtatious, plays this scene with wonderful wit; already she is on a journey and thereafter she hardly stops. Still demure when she reaches England, expecting a very different kind of spouse, she grows from kitten to tigress, both dismissive and defensive of her husband and agonizingly possessive of her young son.

Michael Therriault as Henry is delightfully guileless at his first appearance but hardly develops thereafter. This is a waste; Henry may not become powerful but he does become wise, and the scene at the Battle of Towton, where he observes the son who has killed his father and the father who has killed his son, should be the heart of the event. Here it isn't boldly enough staged, and Therriault fails to take, as Henry should, the whole agony of England into himself.

But there is plenty of compensation. Thom Marriott's hulking York grows a psychic inch at each appearance: First he is a cautious young law student; then—newly ennobled—an apprentice troublemaker, gaining in confidence; then a proud and full-grown rebel; finally, in a scene as cruelly staged as written, a bereaved father facing his own death. This is civil war, with victims and aggressors interchangeable, all capable of demanding our sympathy for atrocities identical to those they themselves have committed—and, what's more, of getting it. Marriott has already been at Stratford for three seasons, during which I confess I barely noticed him. He must, like York, have been biding his time.

Jonathan Goad has been insistently promising for as long a time, but as Suffolk, noted for his insolence, he bursts through into the front line of ease and accomplishment. Dispatched at the end of one play, he returns at the top of the next as Jack Cade, the rebel as stand-up comic—an unrecognizable transformation, though I wonder why a Canadian actor should be playing a Kentish character with a cockney accent.

Donald Carrier lacks the weight I would expect of Warwick the Kingmaker, but compensates with courtliness. The older nobility are solidly represented by Brad Rudy's Talbot, bluff soldier and francophobe; David Francis's Gloucester, doomed for his honesty; and Lewis Gordon's Cardinal Beaufort, damned for his lack of it.

The best of the junior Yorks is Robert Hamilton's wavering Clarence, surprisingly since it's the least colourful role. Of his siblings, Rami Posner's Edward is too much the weakling, and Haysam Kadri's Richard Crookback too foursquare to play the devil, though I could forgive him much for the insinuating way in which he croons, "Clarence, beware."

Rubin has had the happy idea of translating some of the French characters' lines into French; when La Pucelle, at lightning speed, turns around the renegade Duke of Burgundy, it helps that they speak the same language. Michelle Giroux's Joan is not allowed, as in the original, to go to the stake pregnant and unable to name the father. She does burn, however, ingeniously and in full view.

I cannot resist quoting once more from 1066 and All That, which says that one of the rules of the Wars of the Roses was that nobody was ever really king but that Edmund Mortimer ought to be. Mortimer's one prophetic scene is played by William Needles, a Stratford founder for whom veteran is too juvenile a word, and who can still show his juniors something about delivering a line with maximum economy and to maximum effect. Here, as in Romeo, too many players try to invigorate these early iambics by italicizing three words in a phrase or pausing three times, and the results are messy; even the sainted McKenna sometimes fails to hit her climaxes cleanly.

I have a few other questions and quibbles. If Cade's mob deem literacy a capital offence, why do they hand out leaflets—some of them, I regret to say, to the audience? The Cardinal's death scene deserves to be acted rather than reported. Some plot lines and prophecies are left hanging, the Mayor of London looks about 17, and half the cast can't pronounce Westmoreland.

Otherwise, there are no complaints, and having written elsewhere that "for building a company, nothing beats the histories," I am delighted that both Shakespeare and I have been so vigorously vindicated.