Read King John & Henry VIII Online
Authors: William Shakespeare
King John & Henry VIII (52 page)
Dominic Rowan’s “trim, darkly handsome and enigmatic”
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Henry was praised for “wit, energy and sudden enlivening moments of menace,”
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while Kate Duchêne’s Katherine of Aragon as “a foreign-accented outsider” proved “awesomely fiery and confrontational.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Ninety years ago, when Britain 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.
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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 naïve 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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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Other critics were less complimentary. Irving Wardle referred to the set as “a permanent toytown backdrop of Tudor London.”
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He was one of many to be irritated by the self-conscious “series of newspaper headlines that flash up before every scene.”
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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.
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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”
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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.”
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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.
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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”
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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.”
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In retrospect, theater historian Hugh Richmond judged it “one of the most thought-provoking productions of this century.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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 Swan made “good use of the space’s opportunity for intimate spectacle.”
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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.
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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.
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In
Shakespeare in Performance
, Richmond argues that this is a play that, given its historical specificity, needs to be staged in “historically accurate costume.”
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The designers for all three productions have agreed with him and taken the well-known portraits of the chief protagonists as their inspiration, notably the Holbein portrait of Henry. Both Nunn’s and Doran’s productions were sumptuously costumed. Deirdre Clancy in Howard Davies’s production designed authentic period costumes but in subdued tones of gray and oatmeal suggesting “not Holbein’s oils but his drawings.”
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In his autobiography, Donald Sinden, who played Henry in 1969, recalls the assembled cast at the end singing a magnificent “Gloria.”
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In Doran’s production Henry had emerged in his first golden pageant to the magnificent choral singing of “
Exultate, Jubilate
.” The masque at the Cardinal’s took some by surprise: “Wolsey’s priapic house-party staggered some of the audience, but manifestly suggested the Cardinal’s vulgarity.”
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It took on demonic overtones as it emerged from and eventually exited via the trapdoor.
The most controversial and original music was by Ilona Sekacs for Davies’s 1983 production. Pastiche Kurt Weill, it acted as punctuation
between scenes and suggested a parallel with the decadent court of the Weimar Republic: “the music, content sometimes to endorse the pathos, is often sharp and derisive, alerting us to ironies.”
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The dance in the masque at the Cardinal’s was a somewhat anachronistic tango in which the fate of women in the play could be read from Henry’s brutality in “Haling Anne Bullen to her feet,” a fate “not only symbolized but determined in that court dance which whirls women round and throws them away. The men rise and fall, the women are taken and discarded.”
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