The first Shakespeare play I saw on stage was Henry V. The second was Henry VI, which makes numerical and even chronological sense but may otherwise seem strange. The fifth Henry’s play has always been popular, whether seen as patriotic pageant, subversive critique, or a bit of both. The sixth Henry’s has been one of the... least played in the canon. For a start, it’s actually three plays. And my initial encounter with them, in 1952, was with Part Three alone.

This is how it happened. Neglected for decades, if not centuries, the trilogy had found a champion in Sir Barry Jackson, the philanthropic founder and guiding spirit of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Correctly believing Part One to be the weakest of the trio, he had started with Part Two; his company, for many years England’s most revered regional rep with an impressive roll-call of future stars, mounted a highly successful production of Part Two, staged by their resident director Douglas Seale. (Jackson himself never directed, though he was an occasional designer and – in this instance – a canny editor of texts.) They followed it up with Part Three, to even greater acclaim, and it was this production that they brought to London, to the Old Vic. On our previous visit, just over a year before, my father had signed us up to the Vic-Wells Association, a supporters’ club covering both the Old Vic itself and its sister opera-in-English theatre Sadler’s Wells (later to become the English National Opera and move to the West End). So we began receiving regular literature on the productions at both theatres. And when I saw that the Vic was doing, or at least hosting, Henry VI Part Three I begged to be taken. At the same time as I was being hooked on Shakespeare, I was getting into English history, which at that age I saw as a succession of kings and queens and battles. The Henry-sixes, and especially their last instalment, offered plenty of all these.

The Henry VI plays are commonly described as being about the Wars of the Roses. In fact, the first battle of those wars isn’t fought until the very end of Part Two.  Part Three, however, is consumed with them; four major historical confrontations get staged and at least one other is described. This makes for excitement but also for monotony, especially given the rival generals’ habit of lining up and delivering speeches of mutual defiance before battle finally and bloodily commences. My memory of that Birmingham production is that it was sharp and vigorous; I also seem to have been well enough acquainted with the text to spot a swingeing cut in Act Four, leaving out a whole series of reversals and counter-reversals to return the warring characters to pretty much where they were before. What I remember most, though, is my surprise when the play failed to end when it was supposed to. The last scene of Part Three shows the victorious House of York (white roses), headed by King Edward IV who never got an authentic Shakespeare play of his own, celebrating its supposedly decisive victory over the rival House of Lancaster (red roses). “Here, I hope, begins our lasting joy” is the king’s concluding line. Some hope: forward in this production, after everyone else had left the stage, stepped Edward’s crookbacked brother Richard, the future Richard III, to launch into the first speech of the next play: “Now is the winter of our discontent…”. Joy would certainly not be lasting.

For the Henry VI cycle is itself part of a larger four-play cycle, whose final episode is Richard III (whose own last episode is the Battle of Bosworth, the final bout in that Roses slaughtering-match that England fondly hoped had been laid to rest). And that cycle can in turn be seen as part of a larger eight-play compendium whose first half stretches from Richard II through the two parts of Henry IV to Henry V – with the added complication that the first chronological half of this octology was actually written later and is a more accomplished and sophisticated piece of work (or, if you prefer, works). So – productions of the history plays can come in all sorts of packages. In general, though, the packages have been getting larger.

Once again, it was the Birmingham Rep that took the initiative, adding a production of Henry VI Part One to their arsenal, and then bringing the whole trilogy back to the Old Vic, to a generally rapturous reception. This was a company of young actors performing plays from the dawn of professional English drama – energy feeding on energy. Part One exemplifies this to the highest degree; it’s all story, one – usually violent – incident after another. It’s also more concerned with wars in France than with wars at home: with the English losing the territory that previous kings had won. Indeed it starts where the still-unwritten Henry V was to leave off: in fact, at the late king’s funeral.

“Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night. Comets, importing change of times and states, Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky…”

Thus, the Duke of Bedford, brother of the deceased, standing over his coffin. Great stuff: but it sounds less like Shakespeare than like Marlowe. Or like Shakespeare – or Peele, or someone – imitating Marlowe. The authorship of Part One is still a vexed question, as is its position in relation to its companion plays.  Current theory holds, plausibly, that Part One was written last, to cash in on the success of the other parts (which had been published, individually, as The Contention and The True Tragedy, rather than as planned parts of a larger whole). It also doubts that much of this prequel is actually by Shakespeare, though one scene surely is; the rival lords, plucking red and white roses in the Temple Garden to denote their opinions on a dangerous legal issue, are presented with a wit and irony that’s hard to find elsewhere. It’s also, of course, the one that looks most clearly forward to Part Two, where the same quarrels fester and finally erupt.

Birmingham’s reclamation of the three Henry-sixes was saluted as a landmark: one of the half-dozen best British classical productions of its time. I, alas, didn’t see it; but I did catch up with it, or some of it, a few years later, this time in a production by the Old Vic company itself.  In 1957 the Vic was entering the last lap of its five-year plan to produce all the plays in the First Folio (meaning everything in the accepted Shakespeare canon except Pericles; The Two Noble Kinsmen hadn’t been admitted yet). Realising they hadn’t yet included Henry VI, the management announced all three parts, to be staged over two evenings. Parts One and Two were crammed into a double bill; this meant in practice that Part One all but disappeared, reduced to  that fiery opening funeral speech (this time chanted by a cardinal) and the indispensable rose-plucking. The French wars were nowhere to be seen, though people in the subsequent parts kept referring to them. Never mind: what remained, in both halves, was exhilarating. Douglas Seale again directed, on a very 1950s set full of steps and rostra, left over from Seale’s production of Richard III the previous season. Part Three was pretty much as I’d remembered it; Part Two, encountered for the first time, was a revelation, full of conspiracies and courtly back-stabbings, some of them literal. In fact, it seemed as fine a presentation of political intrigue as world drama has to offer, far more complex and sophisticated than Richard III itself – an impression that subsequent productions have confirmed. And it doesn’t exclude the lower orders; they’re a recurring disruptive presence, culminating in the ferociously farcical rebellion of Jack Cade, the ultimate populist, who deems literacy a capital offence and “will make it a felony to drink small beer”. These scenes were uproarious. (At the performance I saw Cade was played by the understudy, a young man called Harold Innocent, who was to become of one of Britain’s busiest middle-grade character actors. Decades later, I got to share a stage with him myself, and told him I’d seen him as Cade and thought he was great. He said that he thought he was miscast.)

Cade may be a brutal loudmouth but he’s no fool; he sees right through the aristocrats he opposes – and right through his own followers too. This, though the two never meet, gives him a strange kinship with Henry VI himself: saintly and ineffectual, but capable of seeing through the hypocrisies around him (if not, tragically, the individual hypocrites) and given, in Part Three, the greatest scene of the trilogy. Banished from the battle of Towton by his warrior-queen and their young son who reckon that they’ll do better without him around, he soliloquises about how much happier he would have been as a humble shepherd. He is then confronted by two emblematic members of his own human flock: the Son who has killed his father and the Father who has killed his son, each blinded by the fog of civil war. As Henry, agonised, remarks of one of them “the red rose and the white are in his face”. Henry in this production was Paul Daneman, an actor who could play anything – old, young, tragical, comical – and whom I had seen five years before as Richard of Gloucester, this king’s eventual murderer and spiritual opposite: Henry is all conscience, Richard is everything but. Their last, indeed only, confrontation, has a stoic grandeur about it as if they both know the roles they are destined to play. Richard this time was Derek Godfrey, another of my favourites and similarly versatile; he too was allowed at the end to give us a taste of the future Richard III: a role that he, unlike Daneman, was never to get to play. Just as various was Barbara Jefford, the Vic’s young leading lady at the time, who could be an enchanting comedy heroine or, as Queen Margaret here, an armour-plated Amazon, vocally and physically inexhaustible.

The next Henry sixes were on television, in the fifteen-part BBC series An Age of Kings: the whole history cycle from Richard II to Richard III, each play divided into two 60-minute instalments, except for Henry VI Part One which was only allowed one. This abbreviation meant eliminating the play’s longest role, the fire-breathing Lord Talbot who embodies good old English chauvinism, triumphant against the French until betrayed by temporising politicians at home and witchcraft abroad. The witch of course is Joan La Pucelle, Joan of Arc as seen by her English opponents and their equally unforgiving Tudor descendants. She was eye-catchingly played by an unknown young actress called Eileen Atkins, who never looked back. The adaptation spared us the original’s grosser indictments of the Maid, such as her on-stage conjuring of evil spirits, her disowning of her shepherd father who’s reduced to exclaiming “oh burn her, burn her, hanging is too good”, and her attempts to avoid that fate by pleading pregnancy while being promiscuously unable to name the father. Pucelle though, like Cade, has her good or at least witty and perceptive side; Shaw, in the preface to his own Joan play, expressed the hope that the scenes in which she inspires the French, and those in which she sees caustically through their leaders, were written by Shakespeare.

Henry himself was the finest I’ve seen; the actor, Terry Scully, agonised and emaciated, played the Towton scene from within a snow-covered windmill.  And An Age of Kings, mostly transmitted live, remains the greatest TV Shakespeare in my experience. Appearing in 1960 it marked a watershed moment in British Shakespeare, combining the vigorous competence represented at its best by Seale’s Birmingham and Old Vic productions with the more searching scholarly approach that was to become identified with the Royal Shakespeare Company whose new director, Peter Hall, took over at Stratford-on-Avon that same year. (It was still technically the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre; its re-branding as the RSC, with its long-term actors’ contracts and establishment of a London beachhead, came the following year.) And in 1963 the Royal Shakespeareans began their own assault on the histories. They called it The Wars of the Roses.

This was a trilogy carved out of a tetralogy: the three Henry VI plays compressed into two evenings, re-christened Henry VI and Edward IV, with Richard III given the concluding night all to itself. The Henries came off best; in fact they came off magnificently, in what was generally agreed to be the RSC’s crowning (definitely the right word) achievement of the 1960s. And it was very much a sixties product, reflecting and amplifying a generation’s fascination with, and suspicion of, warfare and power politics. Hall himself directed, with the assistance of the RSC’s scholar-in-residence, John Barton. Barton also edited the text, which in this case meant not just cutting the originals down to size but writing new passages of his own to smooth over the joins. These didn’t just link, they commented; or, if I may re-use a phrase I’ve employed on more than one previous occasion, Barton didn’t just edit, he editorialised. (He even wrote a whole new scene, half-way through the original’s Part Three.) He left us in no doubt of just how ruthless and amoral most of his characters were.  Some of this nudging seemed heavy-handed (it was never hard to tell which bits were Barton and which were Shakespeare-or-another) but at least one invention was inspired. This was a giant council-table, introduced by the pious Henry himself in a newly-written speech as a means of securing order and consensus in the realm, progressively degraded as the fractious and ambitious lords seated around it lunged rhetorically at another’s throats, and finally hacked to pieces by Richard’s storm-troops as he murdered his way towards the throne.

John Bury inaugurated a decades-long artistic partnership with Hall by designing a massive but functional set with two giant arms that swung in and out as the action moved from one killing-field to another, and also to create the image of England as a huge iron prison. The overall scope was awe-inspiring, the detail even more so.  In a huge cast, there was wonderful acting everywhere you looked; every moment was charged with life. David Warner, a lanky unknown, playing Henry as a mournful Dostoveskyan holy fool with a winsome line in self-deprecation, achieved instant stardom though his range beyond this was to remain an open question never quite resolved. Roy Dotrice, an ageless player who had worked his way up the ranks to become a character actor par excellence, doubled an honest war-vet of a Bedford with a playboy-warrior of an Edward IV subject to recurring bouts of frightening anger, of which the last (in Richard III) brought on his death. Donald Sinden, best known at the time as a light comedy actor in film, returned to his classical roots with obvious and contagious enthusiasm, playing a thrusting Duke of York whose ambitions brought him, his own crimes forgiven if not forgotten, to a battlefield Calvary.

1963 was the year I went up to university. It was also my own theatrical annus mirabilis, one that also brought Laurence Olivier’s incomparable production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya with Michael Redgrave sublime in the title role, and Joan Littlewood’s hilarious and heartbreaking Oh What a Lovely War. I travelled to Chichester to see the first, to the end of the London Central Line for the second, and to Stratford to catch all three parts of The Wars of the Roses on a single day. These morning-to-evening marathons have since become commonplace, but they were a new experience at the time and an exhilarating one, bonding actors with audience. I was able to repeat it early the following year when the triple production transferred to the RSC’s London home, the Aldwych. I hitch-hiked down from Cambridge with a friend for another all-day immersion, richer if anything than the first one. It had the most gratifying, exciting curtain-call I have ever witnessed. Actors who had been killed off quite early in the day returned to get into costume and take their bows. Through the din I said to my companion “I think Peggy Ashcroft deserves a solo call.” She had played Margaret, the one character who goes through all three (or, in the original, four) plays, ageing with accent unimpaired from flirtatious French war-bride to terrifying wraith, multiply bereaved; and she was stupendous.  And now, miraculously on cue, she did indeed appear alone on that vast empty stage – pushed on, I imagine, by her colleagues. It’s a wonder the theatre roof remained in place. Many years later I interviewed Dame Peggy, who was equally a knock-out in person, and mentioned that moment. She had no memory of it. But I swear it happened.

The Wars returned to Stratford in 1964, as part of a complete eight-play history cycle celebrating Shakespeare’s four-hundredth, with John Barton’s credit upgraded to co-director; they were still great, though I felt that some of the bloom was off the Roses. Henry VI then remained untouched, certainly by the RSC, until Terry Hands directed it at Stratford in 1977: all three parts, one to an evening, giving me my first real chance to see Part One complete, Talbot and Joan and all. They have kept cropping up, in various formations, in productions by the RSC, by the English Shakespeare Company, in a two-part compression at the Ontario Stratford, and elsewhere. They always work, maybe because the scale of the enterprise brings out the vigorous teamworking best in those who attempt them. I have written, more than once, that “for building a company, nothing beats the histories”. Or for building and bonding an audience.