The Christian idealism to which the warring lords pay lip service was shown to be a sham, the remains of some residual memory like indelible learned behavior that has ritual actions but no active meaning:
both Yorkists and Lancastrians swear oaths on a Bible placed at the entrance to the Parliament and, in an extraordinary moment, both join forces in a Latin anthem outside the walls of Coventry before hacking each other to pieces. But there is no cynicism in Mitchell's constant invocation of religion. Instead she turns the play into a moving lamentation over the reduction of Christian amity to the temporary advantages of political power.30
Nature, too, played its part in the exposure of the warring factions, bringing extra dimensions to the play: the idea of England's "green and pleasant land" violated but ultimately enduring; and also the thought that the brutal behavior of the warring lords is something inherent, an animalistic instinct for survival perverted into violence and pointless destruction:
Heavy rain, snowstorms, bright, falling autumnal leaves and clear dawn light--the full gamut of the English climate was heard or seen. The production's meteorology was supported by hints of an animal world, birdsong and sheep bleating, sounds that were both reassuring in their normality and disturbing in their transformations into the sounds of horses in pain during the battles. There was a reminder of a natural world in the bark that covered the stage floor ... and in a pine-tree on the side of the stage from which Margaret tore a branch to serve as the mocking crown she put on the Duke of York before killing him in [Act] 1 [Scene] 4 ... Most strongly it was there most exquisitely, to the accompaniment of birdsong and a babbling brook, in the tuft of feathers Henry plucked from one of the wings that dangled on the belt of a gamekeeper and blew into the air: "Look, as I blow this feather from my face, / And as the air blows it to me again" [Part III, 3.1.84-85]. Suggesting continuity in a world beyond the political ...31
In 2000, Michael Boyd also found a vital contemporary relevance in the plays, in the "story of a world cracking apart along divisions of family and belief and value systems flooded out to embrace contemporary global cultures, from Israel and Palestine to Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union and Rwanda as well as the U.S."32 In this production England became an abattoir in which men and women constantly preyed upon each other. There was a vivid sense of the absence of God, with Henry VI himself the only advocate of his word on earth. David Oyelowo in his long white robes looked otherworldly, an angel of innocence among the dark costumes and settings, at odds with the corruption that surrounded him: "The first sight is of Henry V's corpse resting on a cross and lowered by a pulley into his grave--a trapdoor in the floor springing open. The rule of Christian assurance is over."33 The impression was one of a warrior hell, where the warring nobles were trapped in an inescapable circle of violence, destined to die and be born again into the same fight, to repeat the cycle:
Boyd treats the trilogy as, above all, an extended essay on time. The young, callow Henry VI is haunted by his grandfather's usurpation of the throne. But the characters also exist in a nightmare present. And death is seen as an entrance as well as an exit: corpses rise up to be guided offstage by a mysterious gatekeeper only to reappear, like the Duke of York, in the thick of battle. It's a very Eliotesque idea that time present and time past are both present in time future.34
The dark set was hung with chains, which actors clung to and swung on during battles, or dangled from when dead:
Boyd and his designer, Tom Piper ... re-aligned The Swan so that the stage-floor is an irregular oblong ... they have realised the virtue of the building lies in its height. Actors are constantly scaling ladders and ropes to remind us of the vertical nature of siege-warfare.35
The feeling of suspension, generated by much of the fighting taking place midair, was counterbalanced by the solidity of the large steel doors that dominated the set:
The action [of all three parts] takes place on a vast, bare stage with the audience seated almost all the way round. At one end are two great metal doors with a balcony above. This becomes a castle in the wars with France, but the doors are also the gates of death through which the trilogy's vast cast of casualties disappear. The play's vision of humanity preying upon itself may be bleak--and is often downright barbaric in Boyd's visceral, gory staging--but there is a strong underlying sense of the possibility of goodness, order and hope.36
The 2006 production developed this in the enlarged playing space of the Courtyard Theatre with its thrust stage and galleries--what it lost in intimacy it gained in breadth and the sense of a wider political backdrop to play across.
By cutting and rewriting the plays in 1963, Peter Hall and John Barton:
narrowed the focus of the plays to centre upon the workings of history as a grand narrative force, and John Bury's set was constructed as a giant steel cage, materialising these forces upon the stage as an oppressive trap for its participants. History was both the centre of the production, its "main protagonist," and its surface, its body and its soul, leaving the human subject to the desolate battleground constituted by its mise-en-scene.37
1. Michael Boyd's RSC 2000 production of Henry VI Part III with David Oyelowo as Henry VI: The dark set was hung with chains, which actors clung to and swung on during battles, or dangled from when dead.
This took the form of "a cruel, harsh world of decorated steel, cold and dangerous."38 As designer John Bury explained:
The Wars of the Roses was designed in steel--the steel of the plate armour--the steel of the shield and the steel of the broadsword ... the central image--the steel of wars--has spread and forged anew the whole medieval landscape. On the flagged floors of sheet steel tables are daggers, staircases are axeheads, and doors the traps on scaffolds. Nothing yields: stone walls have lost their seduction and now loom dangerously--steel-clad--to enclose and to imprison. The countryside offers no escape--the danger is still there in the iron foliage of the cruel trees and, surrounding all, the great steel cage of war.39
Bury described how the costumes for 1963 reflected the progressive disintegration of the country during the plays:
The costumes corroded with the years. The once-proud red rose of Lancaster became as a rusty scale on the soldiers' coats; the milk-white rose of York was no more than a pale blush on the tarnished steel of the Yorkist insurrection. Colour drained and drained from the stage until, among the drying patches of scarlet blood, the black night of England settled on the leather costumes of Richard's thugs.40
In Terry Hands' 1977 production each play was given a distinctive feel but with a progression prompted by the different styles of the plays; the closing down of the action and the sense of claustrophobia demonstrated by stage space and color:
First we see sombrely-dressed nobles round the tomb of Henry V. A black divider foreshortens the stage and gives it a cramped solemnity. But within minutes solemnity is kicked aside and the nobles are squabbling ... This scene, a dark egg of chaos, is cracked open when the divider lifts to display the full stretch of the battlefield at Orleans. From it crawls the rest of the play: in embryo we see how the child Henry VI's reign is ruptured by civil dissension and unsuccessful wars in France.41
For Part II and Part III a shaggy green carpet covered the stage floor and a red rope signified divisions within the country:
It cordons off the commoners from the king in the various official ceremonies. The festive connotation deteriorates in spectacular fashion and the implication of officialdom, order in the sternest sense, and bloody execution moves into the foreground as the rope turns halter for Jack Cade's followers ... Part III, from King Henry's pastoral speech in [Act] II [Scene] 5 onwards, is characterized by a more and more insistent use of the front of the stage at crucial moments. One feels that Henry and his supporters are about to be pushed over the side.42
Costuming in its color and texture also played an important part in emphasizing certain elements in the play:
The wicked French are dressed in black and blue, an inkling perhaps
of the military thrashing that the English are wishing on them. Alexander Iden, Cade's conqueror, looks every inch "the lord of the soil" when he sports in his orchard a furry green jerkin cut in the same material as the floor carpeting. The treatment of the red and white roses is likewise thoughtful. A deliberate progression is observed from the natural flowers originally plucked by the two opposing sides to badges in the shape of red or white neckerchiefs, or, obviously for better wear, as the conflict is drawn out, in the guise of breastplates in which the symbols are coined. Alone Richard Plantagenet affectedly sticks to a natural rose to the end.43
Those who survive are revisited in the subsequent plays: Margaret, Henry VI, and York are the center around which the other characters revolve. With limited casts but a large number of characters, the actors playing subsidiary characters who die in battle often return to play someone else. This necessary doubling can be disguised with makeup and costuming or can be used to advantage, promoting a sense of continuity with poignant relevance.
Michael Boyd was inventive in 2000 with his cross-casting of the three plays. Character continuity even extended into the afterlife, with the ghosts of those who had been murdered returning to haunt the subsequent plays in the cycle. In the 2006 revival he took this idea further: "the ghost of Henry V starts events memorably here, and introduces us to one of the staging's motifs: the walking dead."44 The most striking example of this, appropriately, was the father and son relationship of the Talbots:
Constellated within Boyd's metaphysical, supernatural world ... the Talbots remain in a kind of theatrical purgatory from which they repeatedly appear, both as themselves and as others. At Angiers, their bloodied figures appeared on ladders at either side of the catwalk, framing Joan's figure; descending, they walked off the stage, leaving her alone. In 2 Henry VI... [the image of] Young Talbot slung in a harness above the stage, his father looking up at him--recurs, for the spirit summoned in the conjuration scene from a trap beneath the stage was Young Talbot, again suspended, speaking the spirit's prophecy of violent death; his father was there, too, sword in hand, as though still trying to recover his son. Later, Talbot emerged from under the blue sheets that had covered the bed where the raving Winchester dies: now he is the Pirate Captain; Young Talbot, Walter Whitmore. As the father who has killed his son and the son who killed his father, the two apotheosise their own deaths as well as those of others. Haunting the Henry VIs like demented spirits, they leave the realm of the undead, coming back in Richard III as another father (in-law) and son, Lord Stanley and Richmond.45
Boyd also created a character named in the program "The Keeper," who acted as a guide to the dead. As keeper of the gates of hell he would guide the slaughtered through the large metal doors that dominated the set. As the dead reappeared to interfere with the action it reminded the audience of the terrible cost of civil war as well as its cyclical and self-destructive nature. These strong and willful characters refused to lie down and be forgotten, but played an active part in the world of the living and the future of their descendants. Now and again "Red and white feathers [fell] from on high symbolising both fluctuating fortunes, fickleness and human transience."46
Blood Will Have Blood
The violence in Henry VI is one reason why it was seldom performed prior to the twentieth century. As an expression of the futility and brutality of war the Henry VI plays have enjoyed a revival since the 1960s. The relatively fresh memories of the horrors of the Second World War and the emergence of the shocking footage of violence and its effects from newsreels of Vietnam on television made it inappropriate to shirk from the visceral effects of war. Maybe it was hoped that the graphic portrayal of violence in all forms of art, whether theater, film, art, or literature, would be part of the learning process--the fear of physical violence being one thing that might stop humanity from repeating the same atrocities. Peter Hall stated:
These history plays with their bloody heads, brutal carnage and sense of fate were not appreciated by the nineteenth century. This is not surprising, it was hoped then that such horrors were past. We know now that this optimism was premature.47
Of the violence in Hall's 1963 production John Russell Brown wrote:
The plays became a high class cartoon, a relentless horror comic ... horror and violence were presented by liberal splashes of blood, and by inventive business that elaborated every opportunity for the exhibition of cruelty and pain that the text suggested ... Joan of Arc cut her own wrist like a Tamburlaine with a very large sword; Young Clifford's head was cut off on stage and carried around upon a spear ... In the Paper Crown scene, the cruel humour of the lines was played close to hysteria. When Margaret stabbed York it was with a quick movement, and then she wept. Then the tears stopped with a wild, painful cry. In this scene the violence was emphasised as much as anywhere, but there was also rhetorical and musical control and a daring, emotional performance revealing depths of unwilled and conflicting desires.48
Many critics found the violence in this production excessive but it certainly spoke to a generation of theatergoers who never forgot the experience. The battle scenes themselves were staged in a minimalist way with the effective use of music and movement:
most of the fighting is relegated to musical representation, so that instead of being presented with the ultimately comic spectacle of hordes of sweaty actors convulsed in a succession of Douglas Fairbanks' sword fights, the thrust and parry is ominously represented by musical sound--complementing a visual impression of a few silhouetted figures in battle.49
Similarly, in 1977: "The battle-scenes are somewhat scantly populated, but director Terry Hands' aim is not to create a realistic illusion but to conjure up an effect that will bring the battles into our minds."50
In these productions, and those that have followed, it was the more intimate moments of violence that were graphically depicted. This difference in staging between battles and torture emphasized the anonymity of war as opposed to the very personal acts of torture and retribution. In a review of Peter Hall's 1963 production, one critic described how the production:
has three climaxes, each of them a curdling climax of bloodletting. The first is the capture and torture of Richmond with Margaret exulting in the indignities that precede his death. The second is the reverse of this situation, where the young brothers capture Margaret and her son and carve up the boy before her eyes. The last is where young Richard, the Crookback king-to-be, comes to the Tower with a curiously loving indifference and slashes the silly saintly Henry to pieces. In the part of the young Richard Ian Holm is deadly accurate and vilely terrible.51
Adrian Noble, in 1989, wrote: "As one reads the play in the twentieth century, one is forcibly struck by the potential for violence latent in most of the political confrontations."52 In 1977 this fact was especially evident in the rebellion of Jack Cade, which contained scenes visually reminiscent of recognizable historical atrocities:
The communion of the rebels in blood after their first killing looks like a popular action out of Brutus' exhortation to the citizens of Rome, whilst the gory Punch and Judy act performed by Dick the Butcher with two severed heads stuck on pikes fetches its inspiration from the worst scenes of the French revolution.53
The rebels' ineptitude is comic; they kill so badly, a group of them straining at ropes, botching each other's work as they labour for several minutes to strangle the clerk of Chatham. But their technique improves. Dick the Butcher wheels on the audience, his face a massive display of demented glee, his hands and face cleaver clotted with blood. Hands clasp his, faces are smeared, the mood grows maniacal. Cade has been played with an undercurrent of frustration. He is a man trying desperately to articulate real grievances, but illiteracy defeats him ... violence stands for words; the legitimate grievances get swamped in the blood-lust ...54
In 1994, Katie Mitchell used symbolic representations of blood and violence. In the allegory of the son who has killed his father and the father who has killed his son, the two men juxtaposed
onstage held a red rose and a white rose: "No blood-dripping corpses or medical materialism, instead each party unwraps a symbolic human fragment while Jonathan Firth's ... sweet-souled, quietly spoken king invokes heaven's pity."55 For the staging of the battles, Mitchell took the language used in the plays as her cue:
The animal imagery with which the battles are described finds its way into the soundtrack that resounds with the cries of wild beasts. The fighting is not staged but thrillingly implied as troops march on to intimidating drumbeats under swirling snow and then hurtle out to battle. At one point, in the tense pause before they make their deadly charge, the lovely drift of innocent birdsong drops into the moment like an ache of nostalgia and a moral judgement on the scene.56
She also emphasized the rituals of death inherent in the play with music and liturgies, but:
Instead of sentimentalising the play, these ritual moments highlighting the self-serving cynicism of the warmongering nobles, just as the Bayeux-like representation of St George slaying the dragon emblazoned on the back wall merely emphasises how, in a war that has largely degenerated into personal vendettas, national interests are increasingly overlooked. The production brings out well the black comedy implicit in much of this, as in the scene where the Yorkists are reduced to hurling taunts at the corpse of Clifford, who has tactlessly died before they could crow over him. Tom Smith's wizened skinhead of a Richard even plants a desecrating kiss on the dead man's lips.57
2. In 1994, Katie Mitchell used symbolic representations of blood and violence ... the two men onstage held a red rose and a white rose in her small-scale touring production of Henry VI Part III entitled The Battle for the Throne.
In the RSC's most recent productions by Michael Boyd the violence was far more visceral than symbolic: "nervous theatre-goers are warned to look away when Joan is pinioned to the stake and when Jack Cade's rebels prepare to execute their prisoner":58