In Terry Hands' 1977 production, religious imagery emphasized this clash between the two:
When the two finally come face to face, it is for one to kill the other. A trap in the forestage opens; the king crouches on a grilled floor through which light streams upward. His hands are manacled to chains attached from above. His hair is grayed [sic]. Richard appears from below like some demon; his black against Henry's white smock is obviously emblematic. Richard grins, but... [he] is finally discomfited, and it is fury that makes him silence Henry by lunging forward to stab and stab again. The king sags into a crucifix.90
Alan Howard played Henry as if he wanted to die, goading Richard into killing him. Finally able to release the anger which had built up in him throughout, Henry let rip at Richard in shocking form, purging himself of pent-up emotion, cursing Richard with future prophecy, and also ensuring his own death.
Anton Lesser, who essayed Gloucester in this production, played Richard again in 1988 to Ralph Fiennes' Henry. Despite their differences there was an understanding between the two men, which Fiennes described as:
an understanding deriving paradoxically from their utterly opposed set of values. Because of this they can talk to each other quite easily. There is the possibility of an almost conversational start to the scene which builds into Henry's frightening prophecy and condemnation of Richard. It is as if Henry is taken over by a peculiar power: he knows he is going to die and is given the gift of prophecy which allows him to make a terrible judgement on Richard.91
Lesser explained how:
Richard decides he has had enough at the prospect of being told the significance of his own presence in the world. This is something that must not be uttered--like having the future read, even having one's fortune told. To know one's future destroys the sanctity of unknown destiny and for Richard (certainly the way I played him) his running condition depends upon experiencing the eternal now: every minute is fresh and full of possibility. Prophecy always panics him ... He suffers from the fear that someone who has vision, by uttering what that vision is, can make it happen--and, of course, it does. Henry's switch from past to future triggers that reaction. Richard kills him and utters one of his most remarkable statements of self-awareness and of present-tense self-assertion:
I have no brother, I am like no brother.
And this word 'love', which greybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another
And not in me: I am myself alone. [Part III, 5.6.80-83]92
What is left at the end of the three plays is a country in as much peril as it was at the start, but this time peril from within. Moving from wars with France, to wars between families, Richard of Gloucester points forward to a future in which the family will devour itself. Left at the end of the play holding Edward IV's baby, his nephew, the audience are already aware of his murderous intent. As at the end of Boyd's production: "we leave this sly, wry psychotic standing in a puddle of blood, [the blood of Henry VI] clucking over the swaddled nephew he'll be murdering in the final episode in the RSC's Bardathon."93 In 1988 the final word of the Henry VI plays was Richard's "Now!"--ominously pointing forward to the opening words of Richard III.
The tragedy of Henry VI's failure to rule was poignantly symbolized in Terry Hands' production. The long wars have so distorted civilian and private life that when Edward calls for music to lead his family in a dance: "they stand there confused. The wars are over, but no one can remember the steps."94
In set design, costuming, and casting these directors visually unified the plays so that through-lines were there for the audience to connect to. They also managed to express a level of connection between characters and events, which made these three very different plays, with massive casts, easier to follow. The emphasis of certain contemporary themes also helped to bring a direct level of understanding to a modern audience, and bring these neglected plays back to life. In their notions of absurdity, black humor, cynicism, and in their depiction of violence, the Henry VI plays stand up today among the best antiwar fiction. They ask:
7. At the end of Part III in Michael Boyd's 2000 production: "we leave this sly, wry psychotic standing in a puddle of blood, clucking over the swaddled nephew he'll be murdering in the final episode in the RSC's Bardathon [Richard III]," with Aidan McArdle as Richard Duke of Gloucester.
a series of disturbing questions about the nature of political power, questions that seemed to have been resolved with the advent of democracy, but that have now returned to haunt us with a vengeance; above all, the question of whether the exercise of power is always tainted with evil, murderous violence, coercion, dishonesty, and betrayal ... But this is finally a story about the endless, incoherent cycle of fratricidal horror that civil war becomes; and it is a measure of the greatest art that it can deal with such terrible subjects and still leave the audience, at the end, feeling exhilarated, uplifted, better able to endure and oppose the cruelties of the world.95
THE DIRECTOR'S CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH EDWARD HALL AND MICHAEL BOYD
Edward Hall, son of the RSC's founder Sir Peter Hall, was born in 1967 and trained at Leeds University and the Mountview Theatre School before cutting his teeth at the Watermill Theatre in the 1990s. His first Shakespearean success was a production of Othello in 1995, though he used the experience as inspiration to found Propeller, an all-male theater company with whom he directed The Comedy of Errors and Henry V, which ran together in repertory during the 1997-98 season, and Twelfth Night in 1999, all at the Watermill. In 1998 he made his directorial debut with the RSC on a production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and would go on to work again with the company on Henry Vin 2000-01, and, in the 2001-02 season, the production of Julius Caesar. In between Henry and Caesar that year, Hall returned to the Watermill to direct Rose Rage, his (in)famous and celebrated abattoir-set adaptation of the Henry VI trilogy that he discusses here. He left the RSC in 2002 and has continued to work with Propeller on such productions as A Midsummer Night's Dream in 2003 and Twelfth Night and The Taming of the Shrew in 2007. He became artistic director of Hampstead Theatre in 2010.
Michael Boyd was born in Belfast in 1955, educated in London and Edinburgh, and completed his MA in English literature at Edinburgh University. He trained as a director at the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre in Moscow. He then went on to work at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, joining the Sheffield Crucible as associate director in 1982. In 1985 Boyd became founding artistic director of the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, becoming equally acclaimed for staging new writing and innovative productions of the classics, including Macbeth with Iain Glenn and an award-winning adaptation of Janice Galloway's The Trick is to Keep Breathing. He was drama director of the New Beginnings Festival of Soviet Arts in Glasgow in 1999. He joined the RSC as an associate director in 1996 and has since directed numerous productions of Shakespeare's plays. He won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Director for his Henry VI trilogy with the RSC's This England: The Histories cycle in 2001, which he discusses here. He took over as artistic director of the RSC in 2003. In 2006 he revived the celebrated saga as part of the company's Complete Works Festival, going on to direct them along with the other five history plays that together form Shakespeare's two tetralogies, and presenting the entire sequence in 2008 as The Histories. The productions won The Evening Standard Theatre Editor's Award and Olivier Awards for Best Company Performance, Best Revival, and Best Costume Design.
Putting on the Henry VI saga means directing at least two shows, possibly three, or working hard to come up with some sort of mammoth adaptation. What inspired you to want to take on that challenge?
Hall: It started through wanting to direct all three plays. The sweep of the story is fantastic and I'd already directed Henry V, so I felt drawn to the next chapter. At the Watermill Theatre in Newbury I didn't have the luxury of doing a three-hour-long show, because the last train to London left at about 10:35 p.m. So, quite simply, my co-adaptor Roger Warren and I sat down and worked out that all three plays had to
be done within four to four and a half hours because we couldn't come down later than ten past ten. That was how I was constricted: the rail timetable had a lot to do with the creation of it. There is a mistaken view that people cut the plays because they think they are not good enough, but that certainly wasn't the case with us. I would have happily done much more of it if I'd had the time to do it in.
When we set to thinking about how to boil the text down it was much more a case of looking at what was there, rather than looking at what we would cut. With any great piece of work, cutting it is always painful and if you look back at what you have cut you'll never actually go through with it. You have to focus on the story you are telling. Essentially, the first part of Rose Rage was Henry VI Parts I and II squeezed together and the second part was Part III. In our first part we had a war abroad going wrong as a metaphor for how bad government at home was. Bad government at home was causing a war to go wrong abroad and the death of Talbot, the great hero, was a direct result of squabbling politicians in Whitehall. Within that you saw the rise of Suffolk, the splitting of York and Lancaster and the Rose Garden scene, the capture of Margaret of Anjou and the affair between Suffolk and Margaret, and the influence of Margaret and Suffolk on the boy king causing all sorts of factions to develop at court. That was broadly the sweep of the first two hours, finishing with Jack Cade's revolt. We began the second part with the Yorkists breaking into Parliament and York being crowned, rolling into the murder of York and Rutland and the arrival of Richard Duke of Gloucester. We did the whole thing with twelve people, so there was an incredible amount of doubling going on: I think one of the actors got killed five times. We weren't able to do Joan of Arc and France which was the part that suffered most. Audiences did one of two things: they either sat down and watched what was in front of them; or, if they wanted to take a belligerent view, they sat down and complained about what had been cut.
Boyd: For us, the Henry VI plays were to be the opening salvo of an eight-play cycle. In our 2000 productions the key inspirations were the Corpus Christi mystery cycles, Lincoln and Norwich Cathedrals, and the legacy of civil strife and cultural poverty left by the English Reformation. We worked on the assumption that Shakespeare was writing about his own time through the protective prism of the past.
By 2006, when we revisited the cycle, Britain was engaged in two wars, post 9/11, and I was now in charge of the RSC as artistic director, looking for a project of sufficient ambition and substance to headline our yearlong Complete Works Festival and open our temporary Courtyard Theatre. I was also looking to test the potential of the RSC as an ensemble company on the European model; a community of artists, with a long-term project, and working on the largest canvas the theatrical canon can provide.
All this colored our Complete Histories Cycle.
Do you think perhaps the scale of the undertaking is what makes them such rarely performed plays? Or are they, as very early Shakespeare efforts, inferior in some way?
Hall: In no way are they inferior. I think it's all to do with resources. Because what's the point of only seeing one part? You have to bring three plays together and you need a lot of resources to do that. It is a major event for a company to take on those plays because of their scale. If you squeeze them down to a cast of twelve you are pushing it, but that's still quite large. Even when you are doing a four-hour version of the three plays you need a six-week rehearsal period. So I think it's much more to do with resources and practical issues than it is to do with the quality of the writing.
Boyd: There has been an intellectual laziness and a sort of apolitical shallowness in the way these plays have been addressed which has led to them being misunderstood and underestimated as the naive work of a journeyman.
We respond very easily to the "modernity" of the Henry IV and V plays, and even "the birth of the interior monologue" with Richard III. We are so keen to see ourselves in Shakespeare that we always show him looking in our direction: the "First Great Modern" casts his searching but ultimately benign gaze upon his true inheritors. We twist his neck to make sure that he sees things the way we do and we torture Hamlet on Freud's couch to reveal the "First Great Modern Masterpiece."
But Shakespeare is not always looking in our direction. He looks away from us as well, envisioning a lost medieval Catholic England, banished and criminalized as recently as his father's lifetime--an England at one with itself, and able to share a common vocabulary whose meaning was still physically embodied in the coherent and magical symbolism and song of a shared faith. Perhaps Shakespeare is also the "Last Great Medieval," and his first tetralogy the "Last Great Medieval Masterpiece"?
Judged by the criteria of modern psychological realism these plays might look patchy, naive, and odd, but set them in the context of the great medieval cathedrals, the liturgy, and devotional drama and painting of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and they shine with precocious sophistication.
In performance the plays also consistently display the theatrical flair that made them the most popular of their time and secured Shakespeare's early reputation.
Many scholars now view Part I as a collaborative "prequel" (Shakespeare is thought to have written about 20 percent) and it's often seen as a bit of a misfit within the trilogy. What's your take on the play? Does it work as a coherent opening chapter, or do you need to work to bolt it on to the other two? Does the Joan of Arc/Talbot struggle inform the other two plays?
Hall: I never thought about it being a collaboration at the time. Part I begins the story with a very broad horizon that slowly focuses down and down. The pressure that it keeps up is intense. There might have been more than one person involved, but that never influenced the way we worked on material or chose what to cut. I don't think it makes Part I inferior to the other two: there is so much to set up and establish in Part I which pays off as you run through Parts II and III. If there were more than one author in Part I then I'd say Shakespeare was certainly clever enough and collaborative enough to bring their work to bear and use it to his advantage. Whichever way you look at it does, I think, put Shakespeare as an author at the forefront of the work.
Boyd: One scene in Part I that struck me as tonally alien to Shakespeare was Suffolk's wooing of Margaret. It felt self-conscious and brittle and so I loyally attributed it away from William to Nashe. But even here you are aware of a corrupt version of Harry's later wooing of the French Kate [in Henry V], and you have Shakespeare's trademark gag (almost overworked throughout the canon) of "Would he were here." Perhaps Shakespeare later stole it from Nashe.
For us, Part I was the theatrical blockbuster of the tetralogy: a grand set piece state funeral is followed by fighting on the streets of London, and then a cannonade at Orleans--great costumes, comedy, and bombast from the overblown French Court, magic and sorcery from the charismatic Joan of Arc, whose swordplay skillfully builds into major battles on the fields of France. We enjoyed the matrix of antagonisms between Gloucester and Winchester, Talbot and Joan, York and Somerset, all around the quiet vulnerable center of Henry and the English Crown.
The Corpus Christi plays provided us with one key to coherence throughout the tetralogy: their potent and efficient recycling of iconic characters, objects, and situations which thereby accumulate a sublime significance proved a valuable model for our aesthetic. Just as the Pharoah shares a rhyme scheme with Herod and Satan, and Isaac prefigures Christ, and the timber from the Tree of Knowledge returns later to provide the hull of Noah's Ark and the Cross of Christ's Passion, our characters and our objects and actions found powerful refrains. We noticed, for instance, that the French Court speaks the language and wears the clothes of Satan's vainglorious minions gathered outside the Hell Mouth and throwing sweeties to the children from their pageant wagon. Richard III later refers to himself as a Vice figure from the Mysteries. The actors playing the French court in our Part I became, in turn, the leaders of the Kentish Rebellion and the York brothers in Part II as they carried strife across the English Channel from
a seemingly defeated France. The Talbots recalled to us Abraham and Isaac and they in turn became powerfully reprised and tested as father and son throughout the entire eight-play cycle. Joan of Arc, in typically Shakespearean fashion, is both magical and fraudulent, and her last trick for us was to re-emerge from her own ashes to take vengeance on York, Warwick, and all the English who had brutally burned her alive, as the next and greatest scourge of England, Margaret of Anjou. The audience gasped, consistently.
Others among the greatest of Shakespeare's characters, who will stride across the later Henry plays, are also forged in the heat of Henry VI Part I: Humphrey of Gloucester (Richard Cordery), Richard of York (Clive Wood), Warwick (Geff Francis 2000/01, Patrice Naiambana 2006/08), Suffolk (Richard Dillane 2000/01, Geoffrey Streatfeild 2006/08), and the extraordinary Henry himself.
In the theater, this is a wonderful play.
What about Parts II and III; what's the essence of each one? Part II seems like a very bleak political satire in many respects while Part III has the feel of more straightforward tragedy. What were some of your experiences of the particular challenges of working on them?
Boyd: An excessively pessimistic and over-schematic reading of the Henries could go as follows: Talbot and the true values of chivalry are betrayed and killed by the politicking of a divided England in Part I, Humphrey and the values of benign pragmatic Humanism are murdered in Part II, Henry and England's "Spiritual Soul" are murdered in Part III.
Talbot and son played an important role in our Part II as the executioners of Suffolk. Not pirates in our show, but now embittered ghosts of the Talbots floating on the Styx in Charon's boat, they challenged and beheaded the selfish duke and sent his head to Margaret, who had earlier bedevilled them as Joan of Arc. Suffolk's headless body was then dragged ashore and abused by two fishermen who turned out to be Alencon and Orleans from Part I, who would now drum up the Kentish Rebellion with Jack Cade/the dauphin before reincarnating as Richard and Edward the sons of York.