Bristol Old Vic
I do wish we could have a moratorium on production ideas.Henry VI: Days of Rebellion is a sprightly three hour jog through Henry VI Part I, Henry VI Part II and Henry VI Part III, put on by students of the Old Vic Theatre School. (I assume its a graduation piece.) It's not a play I, or indeed anyone else, knows very well, but the adaptation stands on its own two feet. It pretty much focuses on the big court scenes, the battles, assassinations and executions, taking us from the death of Henry V to the accession of Edward IV. Subplots are necessarily pruned away.
The weak, pious Henry VI ("in infant bands crowned king") inherits Good King Hal's throne; the nobles pick roses to see which side they are on; Henry marries a French duchess and is forced to dismiss his regent, who is promptly garrotted; the duchess becomes the real power in the country. Richard of York decides he has a better claim to the throne than Henry; and incites Jack Cade to start a popular revolution, which falls flat. He raises an army and Henry foolishly concedes that the crown should pass to Richard when he dies. This effectively disinherits his own son and de-powers the duchess, and they start a revolution of their own. Richard of York is killed, and his son Edward presses the claim. There is a big battle, involving lots of lights and drowning the front row in smoke. Henry's son and his supporters are killed, the French Duchess is sent into exile, Henry is murdered and Edward of York becomes king. "Now we hope begins our lasting joy", he says, and the smart kids underline it and write "irony".
Now, the fact that I can understand and remember all of this without reference to Wikipedia is a major point in the production's favour. If I go see Hamlet for the fifty-fourth time I kind of want the actors to give me a new take on the play. If I go to see the Henrys for I think only the third time in my life, I basically want a clear treatment of the text. (The last time I was inside the small Weston Studio space at the Old Vic was to see the justly neglected King John for just that reason.) Although there was a lot of doubling going on, the cast was small enough for me to keep track of who was who -- not in terms of Humphrey Duke of Gloucester Fourth Son of Henry IV Part One Uncle To Henry VI Lord Protector of England (I did look that up) but in terms of "that nice but slightly weak one who sticks up for the boy king in council." Great swathes of plot are cut out: a full production of the trilogy wouldn't come in much under nine hours. (Isn't there meant to be a nasty French witch called Joan? Isn't there something about a crow that says "Mortimer"?) But what we have doesn't feel like an abridgement: it keeps us watching by force of momentum, although the seats are getting uncomfortable by the end. There are several very good characters: Duchess Margaret of Anjou steals the show, as well as the kingdom, being very convincing as, by turns, a clever politician, a nasty schemer, and a loyal wife and mother. Richard of York manages to be both quite nasty, nursing a genuine grudge, and quite honourable all at the same time.
Some of the characters are multi-faceted because Shakespeare didn't really mean the three plays to be a Trilogy. There is some unevenness of tone for the same reason: Jack Cade's rebellion has a pantomime quality that all the leather jackets and dry ice in the world can't disguise, and there is an implication near the beginning that the civil war started because the nobles quarrelled about whether red or white is a prettier colour.
Henry VI himself seems to get one of the rawest deals of anyone in Shakespeare, even poor Richard II. He is doing his best to do a job he is obviously unsuited for, manipulated and deserted by everyone around him. Not being able to remember the ending, I was actually rather hoping that it turned out he died peacefully in exile. SPOILER: He doesn't. He gets assassinated in the tower by the second son of Edward of York: who happens to be a hunchback, and gets all the best lines.
So far so really very good indeed. The first oddity was the de rigour gender swapped casting. I have no particular problem with this: I saw a rather decent show at the Alma last year about how Queen Lear split the kingdom between her two wicked sons. (She had a Fool who called her "Auntie".) But I was not completely convinced by, for example, a female Henry being addressed as "king" but referred to with female pronouns; having a partly dynastic marriage to a French duchess (also "she"). It just kind of jarred. One couldn't not notice it. I am not sure why it couldn't have just been gender-blind: in the story, the king is a "he" but in this production he happens to be played by a "she", in the same way that one of the English nobles happens to be played by an actor who happens to have an American accent.
The second oddity was that the play had been reimagined as being about The English Rose Company. There were little TV screens all round the theatre in which we saw fragments of news broadcasts about hostile takeovers, and when Suffolk first goes to meet Duchess Margaret, she is giving a talk about marketing. The Rose Garden scene (the first scene in this abridgement) takes place in a corporate board room. There are bowls of roses on a big white table which gets pushed around on casters between every scene.
Sticking everyone in modern-ish dress is perfectly good and fine -- that makes us think of the cast as characters rather than cos-players. (Henry VI as historical pageant would be all very well, but probably not in three hours in the round on the smallest stage.) And I suppose we can imagine one faction in a modern mega corporation hiring a ninja to garrot member of the opposing group. But the plot keeps being about trial by combat; about people raising armies in Ireland and demanding that other people be sent to the Tower. And long debates about whether the person whose grandpa was the third son of a definite King has more right to the crown than the person whose grandpa was only the FOURTH son, even if said King's first son's first son agreed he should be heir, albeit under duress..... (I bet I got it right.) Modern corporate take overs may be nasty, but they don't generally involve battles, sieges, banishments and beheadings.
Pacino Voice "Now who's being naive?"
So, once again, the Big Production Idea disappears by about scene three, and we just do the play, albeit in modern dress. Which works fine. It works sufficiently fine that it makes me want to see an unexpurgated version of all three plays. And to wish that Shakespeare had given Richard Of York Jnr a play of his very own.
Pacino Voice "Now who's being naive?"
So, once again, the Big Production Idea disappears by about scene three, and we just do the play, albeit in modern dress. Which works fine. It works sufficiently fine that it makes me want to see an unexpurgated version of all three plays. And to wish that Shakespeare had given Richard Of York Jnr a play of his very own.
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