Boyd: It's impossible not to view these plays alongside Richard III. Few Hollywood movies have so obviously trailed a sequel as Henry VI Part III and a good third of Richard III is incomprehensible or looks clumsy and dull without the experience of the preceding trilogy.
My favorite moment of enhanced insight might be Katy Stephen's aging Margaret reassembling the skeletal remains of her murdered son as a vessel through which to channel her curses on the Yorks and the Greys, much as she had done with the bones of a bird in Henry VI Part I, as Joan of Arc, to channel her cursing of Talbot and the English. She passes her targeted curses around the room until she is interrupted by the young Marquis of Dorset, a small part, but played here by Wela Frazier, who had also played Edward, Margaret's son, in Henry VI Part III. Katy stops, is choked, and her aggression collapses into uncontrollable grief as she and the audience both see a vision of her slaughtered boy.
True: more members of the ensemble had a quieter time of it in Richard III, but when Stanley and Richmond are played by the Talbots (with Stanley handing Richmond the very sword that Talbot had handed to his son, three plays ago, as he went into battle), and when Richard can be haunted not just by Henry VI, Hastings, and Buckingham, but by his own father, Richard of York, it becomes an easy task to make the "small" parts count, and thereby tell the whole story of the play, avoiding the common error of limiting it to an undramatic monologue.
DESIGNING HENRY VI: TOM PIPER
Tom Piper was born in London in 1964 and graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, before studying theater design at the Slade School of Art. In 1990 he worked with Peter Brook in Paris on his production of The Tempest and then worked as a freelance designer. He won the London Fringe Best Design Award for Cat in the Ghetto at Tabard Theatre in Chiswick, West London. He first worked with Michael Boyd at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow on his production of Jack and the Beanstalk. They have worked together regularly since then and Tom was appointed associate designer with the RSC in 2004. His work there includes designs for The Broken Heart, Spring Awakening, A Patriot for Me, Much Ado About Nothing, The Spanish Tragedy, Bartholomew Fair, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, A Month in the Country, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Henry VI, Richard III, The Tempest, King Lear, Twelfth Night, Hamlet and The Histories, As You Like It, The Drunks, The Grain Store, and Antony and Cleopatra. He won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Costume Design in 2009 for his work on Shakespeare's Histories that he's discussing here.
Could you first explain what is the role of the designer and how your work relates to that of the director?
Piper: The designer works with the director through discussions, sketches, and models to create the world of the play--an environment in which the actors can tell the story dressed in clothes that reflect their nature, wealth, and status within that world. That world may alter over time as characters and their situations change. With a Shakespeare play especially, where so much of the sense of location is given by the language, the design needs only to be suggestive and does not have to slavishly create a real location. As the Henry VI plays move swiftly from England to France, street to tower to court to battle, the set design needs to be a springboard for the imagination of the audience, to transport them instantly from place to place. The director then works with the actors through rehearsal to discover the meaning of the text, and how best to tell the story in the created world.
In terms of Shakespeare's vision of the Wars of the Roses and the eventual resolution at Bosworth Field, with Henry Richmond becoming king and inaugurating the Tudor dynasty, the world of the play is very medieval, very fifteenth century. At the same time, the rise and fall of a tyrant is a perennial historical theme, and there have been very successful productions set in, say, 1930s Germany or the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein. What sort of a setting did you and your director choose, and why?
Piper: I tend to believe that there are broadly three periods in which you can set a play: the period it is set in, the time it was written, or now. Any other time-setting risks adding another layer of interpretation; for example, seeing a play set in 1930s Germany has all the layers of our twenty-first-century interpretation of that time and place imposed on a play written in the sixteenth century.
My initial research started with images of medieval battlefields, castles, and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, especially his depictions of hell with devils herding the damned through gaping hell mouths. But I also covered contemporary artists such as Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois, for their tormented figures and sculptural use of space. As an ex-biologist I am fascinated by the double helix of DNA and its echo in man-made forms such as staircases, and given that so much of the plays revolves around who is descended from whom, a subtle link to genetics seemed appropriate. The design was developed through many models, exploring the shapes of a tower, how the musicians would be integrated into the world, what the textures would be. The metal finish came partly from a response to the outside of the theater clad in rusty metal sheets, but also from the faceted panels of suits of armor. At one point in the design the tower was almost too literally a helmet with a visor slot. I still like to think of the stage as the body of England, the walkways entrances its arms and legs, the central tower its head with doors as the mouth (often the gates to hell), and the trapdoors its guts.
Staging either of Shakespeare's tetralogies is a mammoth undertaking. How did you manage to cover such a broad sweep of history and such different narratives from Joan of Arc to Jack Cade and ghostly visitations? Was the challenge as a designer to try to marry the plays to create a seamless whole or did you try to differentiate them in specific ways?
Piper: The plays of this cycle require too many different locations to describe, let alone design, but somehow the theater space must be capable of suggesting them all. The key is in the text and what we know of Shakespeare's own playhouse with its balconies, tiring-house, traps, and few entrance doors. Shakespeare always tells us where we are and the architecture of his space allows us suggestive possibilities for locations without requiring new scenery for each one. Was it possible in a single environment to create a versatile enough space in which we could imagine every scene required, without having to have endless scene changes? The plays have many different locations: castles, the Tower, numerous French towns which all seemed to need a higher level in which one group can lord it over another. Other scenes need gates or doors that can be broken down, or barred, within which traitors are imprisoned. Grand council chambers, parliaments, and battlefields can be the whole theater space, with the audience as fellow lords, commons, or foot soldiers. Ghosts or entrenched soldiers can burst from beneath the stage. The stage needs to be flexible and neutral enough to allow us to imaginatively leap from location to location.
Within the basic environment we still had to solve the staging requirements of particular scenes. The thrust space forces you to think as a sculptor rather than in a painterly way; every scene is viewed from multiple angles, so elements introduced have to work from all sides and be transparent enough not to create too many sight line problems. Most importantly it's a shared space in which both audience and actors are in continual dialogue. Within this space the clothes are vital to help tell the story. Joan's supernatural nature was enhanced by a chorus of three women in red who echoed her every move; the factions of York and Lancaster were marked by a clear color scheme of black and silver versus rust browns that chimed with the colors of the metal environment. Certain episodes within the plays needed a new visual language. The Cade rebellion was dramatized as a disturbing descent into a Boschian hell in which we mixed periods and the living with the dead. We suspended a cage within the space that became a climbing frame for rebels and an abstract tree for Cade to hide in at the end.
The plays depict brutal power struggles on a level surely unmatched elsewhere in Shakespeare, and reminders of death were ever present in the visuals of your production. Could you discuss that and give us an insight into the process of arr
iving at those design choices?
Piper: I looked at images from abattoirs and battlefields and we found, through the use of ropes and ladders hung within the space, a way of suspending bodies that could echo the twisted figures on the barbed wire of the trenches or hanging carcasses. The death of John Talbot was inspired in part by Rembrandt's Descent from the Cross. He was winched into the air in slings and then brought down to be cradled "pieta"-like by his father. Throughout there was an emphasis on the vertical axis in the space moving from hell below to the heavens above. The nature of the thrust stage makes the audience implicit witnesses to all the power struggles and political fighting, so the whole theater could become the debating chamber at court. I think that really helped the audience follow the shifts in allegiances. It created a sense of immersion in the whole rather than viewing it through a frame, as would have happened if we had been in a proscenium house.
10. In Michael Boyd's 2006 production of Henry VI designed by Tom Piper, "[t]he Cade rebellion was dramatized as a disturbing descent into a Boschian hell in which we mixed periods and the living with the dead."
How did you differentiate between France and England/the French and the English, or did you see them as essentially the same?
Piper: In Part I the French are very much the light entertainment, seen by Shakespeare almost as caricatures in quite a deliberately jingoistic way. So we emphasized this through costume: the French at the beginning are overblown and overconfident in the face of a famished English force led by Talbot. The French were all blue silk brocades and golden trim, while Talbot was in far more naturalistic filthy gray battledress. When we came to stage Henry V (after we had rehearsed the Henry VI plays) we took the idea even further: the French were dressed as exotic acrobats, almost birds of paradise with long-tailed coats who lived on trapezes floating above the world. The Countess of Auvergne was also seen through English eyes as a devilish temptress dressed in red. Later, by the time of Lady Bona's rejection by Edward, the French inhabited a more civilized and rational world that seemed very honorable in comparison to the madness of the English court. I kept with the blue color scheme, but made the clothes more muted and real.
And what about the women who often seem central and peripheral at the same time?
Piper: The women's journey through the plays was especially interesting and reflected Michael's strong through-casting. Each new role an actor took on brought with it the history of past characters they had played. So Katy Stephens who played Joan was reborn, so to speak, as Margaret; in fact Joan's attendant fiends were costumed in red velvet in the final preexecution scene, so when Margaret emerged onstage in the same dress, only two minutes after Joan had been lowered into her burning pit, it was clear that the spirit of evil had not been extinguished but was now taking on a new, subtler guise that the English, through Suffolk, were seduced into bringing into the English court. In later battle scenes we gave Margaret Joan's breastplate as a subtle echo.
And for all the blood, the murders, the choreographed onstage fighting: I suppose there's a basic choice between "stylization" (slow-motion battles, red silk for blood) and "realism" (the clash of metal, lashings of mud, and Kensington Gore): where did you aim to find yourselves on that spectrum?
Piper: We used many approaches within the plays, from naturalistic hand-to-hand fighting with broadswords through to large choric moments when the whole company acted as a stylized image of the flow of battle, for example lifting the defeated Talbots into the air. The choice depended on the dramaturgical needs of the moment. So it was important to see Joan of Arc actually fight and overpower Talbot, and the bloody brutality of the murders of York, Rutland, and Edward needed to be seen in their full horror to understand the vicious cycle of revenge within the plays. These were often moments of close-up action focusing on individual stories; to get the sense of the reality of the whole battlefield is far harder in theater, so we explored a more stylized language for these moments, sometimes in slow motion, or with nonnaturalistic swordfights, or through the use of ropes and aerialists. The fight director, Terry King, and movement director, Liz Ranken, worked very closely together on this fusion. Other moments became even more deliberately stylized, as for example in the battle of Towton, for which we decided to focus on Henry VI, alone in the tower hundreds of miles from the battlefield but feeling the battle fought in his name. So the only elements of actual warfare we used were the sounds of arrows, while a column of white feathers fell, through which Henry walked. The feathers turned red, as had the snow which fell in Towton.
SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER
IN THE THEATER
BEGINNINGS
William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.
Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare's childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a "star." The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.
Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer. It appears not to have been long before he realized that he was never going to grow into a great comedian like Tarlton or a great tragedian like Alleyn. Instead, he found a role within his company as the man who patched up old plays, breathing new life, new dramatic twists, into tired repertory pieces. He paid close attention to the work of the university-educated dramatists who were writing history plays and tragedies for the public stage in a style more ambitious, sweeping, and poetically grand than anything that had been seen before. But he may also have noted that what his friend and rival Ben Jonson would call "Marlowe's mighty line" sometimes faltered in the mode of comedy. Going to university, as Christopher Marlowe did, was all well and good for honing the arts of rhetorical elaboration and classical allusion, but it could lead to a loss of the common touch. To stay close to a large segment of the potential audience for public theater, it was necessary to write for clowns as well as kings and to intersperse the flights of poetry with the humor of the tavern, the privy, and the brothel: Shakespeare was the first to establish himself early in his career as an equal master of tragedy, comedy, and history. He realized that theater could be the medium to make the national past available to a wider audience than the elite who could afford to read large history books: his signature early works include not only the classical tragedy Titus Andronicus but also the sequence of English historical plays on the Wars of the Roses.
He also invented a new role for himself, that of in-house company dramatist. Where his peers and predecessors had to sell their plays to the theater managers on a poorly paid piecework basis, Shakespeare took a percentage of the box-office income. The Lord Chamberlain's Men constituted themselves in 1594 as a joint stock company, with the profits being distributed among the core actors who had invested as sharers. Shakespeare acted himself--he appears in the cast lists of some of Ben Jonson's plays as well as the list of actors' names at the beginning of his own collected works--but his principal duty was to write two or three plays a year for the company.
By holding shares, he was effectively earning himself a royalty on his work, something no author had ever done before in England. When the Lord Chamberlain's Men collected their fee for performance at court in the Christmas season of 1594, three of them went along to the Treasurer of the Chamber: not just Richard Burbage the tragedian and Will Kempe the clown, but also Shakespeare the scriptwriter. That was something new.
The next four years were the golden period in Shakespeare's career, though overshadowed by the death of his only son, Hamnet, aged eleven, in 1596. In his early thirties and in full command of both his poetic and his theatrical medium, he perfected his art of comedy, while also developing his tragic and historical writing in new ways. In 1598, Francis Meres, a Cambridge University graduate with his finger on the pulse of the London literary world, praised Shakespeare for his excellence across the genres:
As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love Labours Lost, his Love Labours Won, his Midsummer Night Dream and his Merchant of Venice: for tragedy his Richard the 2, Richard the 3, Henry the 4, King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet.
For Meres, as for the many writers who praised the "honey-flowing vein" of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, narrative poems written when the theaters were closed due to plague in 1593-94, Shakespeare was marked above all by his linguistic skill, by the gift of turning elegant poetic phrases.
PLAYHOUSES
Elizabethan playhouses were "thrust" or "one-room" theaters. To understand Shakespeare's original theatrical life, we have to forget about the indoor theater of later times, with its proscenium arch and curtain that would be opened at the beginning and closed at the end of each act. In the proscenium arch theater, stage and auditorium are effectively two separate rooms: the audience looks from one world into another as if through the imaginary "fourth wall" framed by the proscenium. The picture-frame stage, together with the elaborate scenic effects and backdrops beyond it, created the illusion of a self-contained world--especially once nineteenth-century developments in the control of artificial lighting meant that the auditorium could be darkened and the spectators made to focus on the lighted stage. Shakespeare, by contrast, wrote for a bare platform stage with a standing audience gathered around it in a courtyard in full daylight. The audience were always conscious of themselves and their fellow spectators, and they shared the same "room" as the actors. A sense of immediate presence and the creation of rapport with the audience were all-important. The actor could not afford to imagine he was in a closed world, with silent witnesses dutifully observing him from the darkness.