Brian Rintoul successfully paired Shakespeare's play with Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons about Thomas More, cross-casting the actors playing the king, Cranmer, and Norfolk, in his production for Canada's Stratford, Ontario, Festival in 1986. The juxtaposition illuminated both plays; one reviewer concluded that it drew attention to the ways in which "Shakespeare chooses to sacrifice the extremes of noble idealism and diabolical intrigue."101
In his 1991 production of Shakespeare's play for the Chichester Festival, Ian Judge cast Keith Michell, who had played Henry with great success in the BBC television miniseries, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970) in the title role. It received universally unfavorable reviews with reviewers finding Michell inadequate to the demands of the part on stage:
the Chichester stage has a rather larger acreage than most television sets, and Shakespeare and Fletcher make greater demands on the voicebox than most screenwriting teams. How does Michell's Henry VIII cope with a challenge he has, as it happens, never faced before? Not much better than anybody else in Ian Judge's lacklustre production.102
Mary Zimmerman's production for another festival, the 1997 New York Shakespeare Festival at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, was more successful and more warmly received. It was significantly the last play in the Public Theater's thirty-six-play Shakespeare Marathon, started by Joseph Papp nine years earlier. Zimmerman's "efficient, often elegant" direction produced a "streamlined staging that's almost miraculous in untangling the convolutions of the story."103 The period costumes were shown to good effect against a "set of connected archways, shrinking in perspective and painted a lush royal blue ... lovely in its classic simplicity."104 The New York Times' critic suggested that "the disparate nature of the play" was highlighted by the cast's "varied styles of acting"105 and speaking. In his view, Jayne Atkinson's Katherine was the outstanding performance, a judgment the elements concurred with on press night:
The trees in the park seemed to sigh in sympathy as Katherine, played by Jayne Atkinson, presented her case to a less than sympathetic court; the documents in the hands of Katherine's nemesis, the ambitious Cardinal Wolsey (Josef Sommer), threatened to blow away, and as the words of the menaced queen melted from offended dignity into regal anger, there was little question which side the angels were on in this trial.106
In 2003 Granada television produced an updated version "without any cod Tudor language" or "ludicrous dancing in pantaloons" which was "partly inspired by The Sopranos" and starred Ray Winstone, "one of our seminal screen hard nuts,"107 as a "gangster king" Henry. There was yet another festival production at Stratford, Ontario, in 2004 directed by Richard Monette described as "another solid offering ... except for a few gratuitous trappings of self-indulgence including a couple of fruity gentlemen and a dream masque."108 Seana McKenna's Katherine was again judged the "most attractive figure in the play" and her "powerful and deeply moving" performance conveyed "fierce dignity."109
For the 2006 Complete Works Festival of all Shakespeare's plays, the RSC invited AandBC Theatre Company to present their touring production of the play in the historic venue of Stratford's Holy Trinity Church, the same church where the playwright was both baptized and buried. It proved an inspired setting:
The mellowing evening sun pours in through the stained glass windows on a staging that arranges the audience along the nave like a parliament or congregation in two opposing banks of raked seating. This leaves a lengthy, narrow acting area ... though spectators may succumb to Wimbledon Neck as their attention is swivelled from one end to the other.... 110
Director Gregory Thompson exploited the challenge it presented: "The audience's proximity to the acting space serves the play well as audience members are literally drawn into the action by being selected to hold props and serve as members of the jury."111 Audience members thus enhanced the versatile cast of fifteen. Dressed in period costume, the staging was "lavish" with an emphasis on spectacle:
Fireworks interrupt Wolsey's feast as Henry's disguised revellers swarm into the church. During their entrance, one of the merry company memorably performs a lewd dance with one of the female audience members in the front row.112
At the play's center was "Antony Byrne's fine, red-bearded, ambivalent Henry."113 Corinne Jaber was praised as an "unusually fierce Katherine of Aragon, hurling herself on the floor of the nave in front of the king, [who] dies like a political martyr."114 Animal metaphors sprang to several critics' minds when describing Anthony O'Donnell as a "toad in red silk"115 or a "scarlet slug sliding to the top of the pile over the bodies of his victims."116 The two undoubted stars of the evening, though, were the seven-month-old Alice Wood as Princess Elizabeth--"an alert, silent, lovely child who had the audience spellbound,"117 and the venue itself, which lent the play "a sombre, melancholy grandeur."118 Gregory Thompson discusses the production and the challenges he faced in "The Director's Cut" below.
Reviews of the 2010 production at Shakespeare's Globe directed by Mark Rosenblatt all advert to the disastrous fire of the 1613 staging at the original Globe. While several critics still feel the need to apologize for the play, Paul Taylor of the Independent describes how Rosenblatt's sophisticated direction managed to
pull off the considerable trick of giving full due to the nostalgic, propagandistic elements in this Shakespeare/Fletcher collaboration, while also highlighting and extending the flickering moments of subversive acknowledgement that there is a much less "official" version of events which cover the contentious birth of the English Reformation. So though the production pulls all the stops out in a blaze of mitres, ivory silk, boy choristers in the gallery, and trumpet acclaim for the culminating baptism and Cranmer's prophecy of future national glory, there turns out to have been a cunning optical illusion here that cuts the sequence down to size.119
Dominic Rowan's "trim, darkly handsome and enigmatic"120 Henry was praised for "wit, energy and sudden enlivening moments of menace,"121 while Kate Duchene's Katherine of Aragon as "a foreign-accented outsider" proved "awesomely fiery and confrontational."122 Miranda Raison's Anne brought "a welcome dash of sex appeal to the fusty proceedings" while Ian McNiece's "grotesque Cardinal Wolsey ... hisses out his lines like a poisonous snake and slithers across the stage like a disgustingly plump slug."123 Reviews also picked out
Amanda Lawrence's triple whammy of splendid cameos [which] add up to a brilliant bluff-calling device. A snipe-faced Welsh eccentric, she's the lady-in-waiting who disputes Anne Boleyn's pious disavowal of any yearnings to be queen. She also plays the silent white-faced Fool who, in Rosenblatt's version, shadows the King with a puppet of his deceased son.124
AT THE RSC
Politics and Pageantry
The most controversial decision that a director can take in relation to Henry VIII seems to be to stage the play at all. Its combination of reportage and pageantry has left critics confused and divided: the terms "whitewash" and "Tudor propaganda" recur constantly. All three RSC productions--Trevor Nunn's in 1969, Howard Davies's in 1983, and Gregory Doran's in 1996--have provoked undisguised hostility from some critics who use its joint authorship (with John Fletcher) and seeming refusal of moral condemnation as sticks with which to beat it:
Henry VIII is an odd play. Why Shakespeare wrote it is a mystery. Whether he wrote it is another. And why Trevor Nunn should have chosen to stage it, in what is without exception the most amazing production I have ever seen at Stratford, is a question which may well vex the scholar in decades to come.125
When he came to write a play dealing with a Tudor monarch in person ... Shakespeare found himself having to sacrifice all artistic integrity for crude propaganda.... Instead of courageously meeting the problem head-on, Shakespeare wrote one of the worst plays ever penned, playing safe by creating a rogueish [sic] but loveable King, surrounded by councillors of varying degrees of integrity who pose no real threat to his majesty.... There is no earthly reason why anyone should read, see or produce this play.126
Ninety years ago, when Brita
in still ruled most of the waves, you can imagine Greg Doran's bizarre production of Henry VIII would have been acclaimed as a sumptuous celebration of England's Tudor royalty and the glories of the new Protestant supremacy. But to see a Golden Heritage approach seriously adopted in 1996 to this weak chronicle-pageant play, which Shakespeare wrote with John Fletcher, beggars theatrical belief.127
Henry VIII is seen then as something of an ideological "problem play." Hugh M. Richmond analyzes what he regards as some of the dilemmas it poses for directors:
Moral concerns have persisted ... for every audience of Henry VIII since 1613. They constitute the familiar context which attends the play with its sustained dramatic irony: unexpressed but omnipresent in every audience's awareness.... Any successful production must communicate this final delicate balance of the sinister and the hopeful, without slipping into a naive proclamation of one or the other in the last scene. The sustaining of this elusive tone constitutes the unique challenge which the play proposes in production.128
Directors have risen to this challenge in a variety of ways in the face of critical hostility. Historically productions had focused on the play's pageantry and the leading roles of King Henry, Katherine of Aragon, and Cardinal Wolsey. Trevor Nunn was reacting against such a conventional approach in his 1969 production, which employed a modern set and production style while locating the play within the context of Shakespeare's other late plays. In his program notes Nunn argued that "They do not idealise the human condition, the beast is there alright, so also is the angel. Man is in search of ripeness or grace or ... self-knowledge. In the late plays grace is achieved through love."129 According to John Barber such a context revealed that
Henry VIII ... is held together and sustained by the same themes as in the other late works: pity for the unjustly used and hope that a new generation will right ancient wrongs. Thus the newborn Elizabeth is only another Perdita or Miranda.130
This reconciliatory conclusion though seemed at odds with a consciously political interpretation, set against the backdrop of 1960s political radicalism and a production style most often described as "Brechtian." It was played within a black box with "a fine, heavy, Elizabethan castle hung against a black backdrop and lit ingeniously to give it varying degrees of depth."131 Other critics were less complimentary. Irving Wardle referred to the set as "a permanent toytown backdrop of Tudor London."132 He was one of many to be irritated by the self-conscious "series of newspaper headlines that flash up before every scene."133 These were subsequently dropped in the London revival.
Wardle speculated that the captions were one of the techniques deployed, "meant to establish a link between modern spectators and the ordinary citizens who carry so much of the play's narrative." But, he concluded,
attitudes to Royalty have changed so much that the link is more ironic than direct. Apparently this is not intentional, as the production finishes with rapt invocations to peace and plenty which are meant in earnest even though they do transpose the finale from blazing ceremonial into the mood of a gentle masque.134
Various strategies were employed to engage audience participation. In Act 2 Scene 1 in the discussion between the two Gentlemen, on the line "We are too open here to argue this" the promptbook reads "They clock audience." Direct address was used "in the manner of the music-hall"135 and there was a "splendid football match in which Emrys Jones's Archbishop Cranmer takes a penalty kick after the ball has been neatly returned to the stage from the front stalls."136 This scene did not, however, impress all the critics with its splendor:
in period productions (and this one is no exception) there is invariably a varlet whose breeches fall down, supported, for reasons seldom clear, by quantities of disagreeably self-conscious small children. It is nervous work watching Cranmer dribbling a woolly ball with these juveniles as he waits ("like a lousy footboy at chamber door") before his trial; worse is to come when the peers in council, routed by the king, line up to pass the same ball embarrassedly from hand to hand, as in a number rather low down on the bill at the Palladium. Mr. Nunn has shown signs before of an alarming weakness for woolly balls, but never on such a scale as this.137
Ronald Bryden in The Observer described the end of the production: "a sonorous white hippie mass in which actors advance on audience, chanting Cranmer's wishes for England's prince's 'peace, plenty, love, truth.' " He regards this as a "triumphant close"138 to Trevor Nunn's first season. D.A.N. Jones in The Listener was less convinced:
When Cranmer makes his final great speech, that Blake-like vision of a future England of "peace, plenty, love, truth," Nunn uses a modern style for expressing rapture. You know those modish camp-meeting songs, "That's the way God planned it" and "Oh happy day, when Jesus walked," and the mantras of the Hare Krishna group. In this mood, Nunn sets his actors to surge toward the audience chanting the four pleasing words. I think this over-softens a tough play. They have left out the fifth word: "terror."139
In retrospect, theater historian Hugh Richmond judged it "one of the most thought-provoking productions of this century."140
Nunn's production was seen as radical and modern. Howard Davies's was if possible even more so and again the epithet "Brechtian" crops up repeatedly in discussions of his 1983 production. The play's politics were again emphasized, with the program notes' inclusion of an extract from R. H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. In Davies's view the play "is very much a modern play, dealing with taxes, unemployment and social divisions." His production was clearly glancing at the right-wing politics of Margaret Thatcher's government in the 1980s. The theme of the bureaucratization of a centralizing Tudor state was literalized in the opening scene. Nunn had cut both prologue and epilogue (as well as engaging in considerable textual pruning). Davies's production started with King Henry alone on stage scattering papers and speaking the prologue himself.
Irving Wardle describes the stage as "well and truly alienated. Hayden Griffin's sets consist of enlarged reproductions of Elizabethan street scenes and architectural perspectives, trundled along traverse rails and suspended well above the stage floor."141 Davies was keen to reveal the reality beneath the surface and like Nunn eschewed traditional pageantry, but "in passages like the masque of Katherine's dream and the staging of the coronation ritual with a group of robed dummies, it supplies something no less visually exciting than conventional pageantry."142 Katherine's dream was a ghostly dance lit by ethereal blue light. For Anne's coronation Davies incorporated the Folio's detailed stage directions as a dress rehearsal for the real thing. Its pace and energy succeeded as Wardle suggested but it also underlined the insubstantiality of the royal pageant. The Epilogue was delivered by Queen Anne amid more paper being thrown into the air and a whistle blowing "time."
Discussing Davies's 1983 production James Fenton argued, "Truly to shock a modern audience, one would need to go back to that old tradition of pageantry and choristers, historicism and authentic sets."143 Gregory Doran contrived to do this with his 1996 production explaining the theatrical context for doing so in the program notes:
Tyrone Guthrie directed a series of energetic productions of the play which re-emphasised the role of Henry.... Trevor Nunn's 1969 production by contrast ... reworked the play in an austere Brechtian frame which foregrounded the play's bleak politics. The most controversial twentieth-century production has been that of Howard Davies at Stratford in 1983 which offered a postmodern resistance to pageantry emphasising the play's profound ambivalence over the slippery concepts of "truth" and "conscience." It is arguably only in the wake of Davies's production and its deliberate resistance to the legacy of splendour that Henry VIII can be taken beyond these contrasting and controlling modes, recovered as a Jacobean play, and re-invented for the twenty-first century.144
Presumably the term "Jacobean play" implies one that combines spectacle and pageantry (as in the Jacobean masque) and yet is deeply political at the same time. Doran was largely successful. Michael Billington thought the production in the Swa
n made "good use of the space's opportunity for intimate spectacle."145 Shaun Usher was alert to both elements:
We begin with the splendid tableau of a gilded king out-dazzling even the Field of the Cloth of Gold--equal honours here to Robert Jones and Howard Harrison for set and lighting--but like the climactic set-piece of Elizabeth I's christening, the picture lingers only long enough to impress. Then it's on with the power struggles, Henry versus pious Catherine (sic), Cardinal Wolsey versus The Rest.146
Billington also describes the way in which politics and spectacle worked together in this production:
In its last outing in 1983 Howard Davies treated the play as a cynical Brechtian anatomy of power politics: a piece of mocked Tudor. Doran, presumably in a spirit of irony, blazons the play's original title, All Is True, across the back-wall and the Stratford programme; the result is not so much to heighten the play's documentary reality as to make you aware how everyone bends the idea of truth to his own purposes.... Truth, in short, is a malleable weapon rather than a fixed commodity.
Doran and his designer, Robert Jones, also seek to give the play visual unity by showing Henry periodically emerging from a recessed chamber in golden triumph while brutal realpolitik takes place on the forestage.147