King John & Henry VIII (54 page)

Gregory Doran
, born in 1958, studied at Bristol University and the Bristol Old Vic theater school. He began his career as an actor, before becoming associate director at the Nottingham Playhouse. He played some minor roles in the RSC ensemble before directing for the company, first as a freelance, then as associate and subsequently chief associate director. His productions, several of which have starred his partner Antony Sher, are characterized by extreme intelligence and lucidity. He has made a particular mark with several of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays, including
Henry VIII
in the Swan Theatre in 1996, which he’s discussing here, and
King John
in 2001, as well as highly acclaimed revivals of works by other contemporary Elizabethan and Jacobean writers.

Gregory Thompson
was born in Sheffield and studied mathematics and philosophy at the London School of Economics, before training
at Sheffield Youth theater, the National Theatre Studio and Theatre de Complicite. In 1998 he founded AandBC Theatre Company to create touring productions of classical and new drama. These included many productions for Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Somerset House in London. Other productions include
Mahabharata
,
The Winter’s Tale
,
The Rape of Lucrece
, and
The Tale That Wags the Dog
(a storytelling show about the relationships between men and women). He won a Young Vic’s Jerwood Director’s Award in 2006 and was named Best Director at the 2006 Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland for his production of Brian Friel’s
Molly Sweeney
at Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre. From 2006 to 2007 Gregory was director of Glasgow’s Tron theater. Here he’s discussing AandBC’s production of
Henry VIII
, commissioned by the RSC as part of the 2006 Complete Works Festival and performed in the iconic setting of Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon.

Henry VIII was seen traditionally as a great patriotic celebration and was often staged on the occasion of royal coronations; do you think perceptions of the play have changed and might that account for its relative lack of popularity today?

Doran:
Howard Davies tells a story about when he directed the play [in 1983]. There was a meeting in which all the plays were being divvied up for the following year and he went out to the toilet. When he came back he discovered that he was directing
Henry VIII
! When Adrian Noble offered it to me in 1996 various people suggested that it was a poisoned chalice and that it was the one Shakespeare play that doesn’t work. I knew that it had been an excuse for a lot of pageantry, that there had been great productions which had staged not only the execution of the Duke of Buckingham but also his journey to the tower by barge, with whole streets of cheering crowds following the coronation of Queen Anne, and spectacular flights of angels for the dream of Queen Katherine.

When you do plays at Stratford you are always aware of previous productions. I had seen that Howard Davies production with Richard Griffiths (Henry), John Thaw (Wolsey), and Gemma Jones (Katherine) and was fascinated by how they had eschewed that
pageantry. I remember that the coronation of Queen Anne was a sort of rehearsal: they had dummies dressed up as the various people and they read the stage directions out loud as dialogue. I shared their sense that pageantry had swamped previous productions of the play. It was my first Shakespeare for the RSC and it was a play and a period that I researched a lot. A very significant point about the pageantry is that it is political propaganda. Right at the beginning of the play the Duke of Norfolk describes the Field of the Cloth of Gold: how the French were “All clinquant, all in gold” and what a spectacular affair it was. But as Buckingham says, it’s “like a glass, / Did break i’th’wrenching”: in other words they had spent an awful lot of money on a Tudor policy of magnificence, and that magnificence was deliberately designed to display wealth and power.

That first scene seems to suggest that the point of the play is in part to demonstrate the hollowness of that policy of propaganda. I began to look at the play from a political perspective in overall terms, but also and particularly at how the pageantry was part of a policy of magnificence. The play also sweeps from the epic to the intimate in a very specific way. My designer, Rob Jones, and I both realized quite quickly that the Swan Theatre itself was going to help us to solve this problem, in that we could present some spectacular pageantry but then lock it away and become intimate.

10.
1996, Gregory Doran production. “[T]he pageantry was part of a policy of magnificence. The play also sweeps from the epic to the intimate in a very specific way.”

Thompson:
I think one of the problems with the play is that it is seen as a great patriotic celebration and without care the pageantry can obscure what story there is. The play deals with a tricky piece of our history: Henry VIII was a ruthless tyrant and, in the last fifteen years of his reign, an unstable capricious despot. In many ways the play is about how dangerous it is to be in the court of a tyrant.

Much of the impact of the play has been lost, of course, because for the most part the modern audience no longer has sufficient knowledge of Tudor politics to be aware of the absences and omissions of people and events. Even so, we still recognize today that in the play there is only a hint of Henry’s desperation for an heir; no real debate about the legality of his marriage to Katherine; no mention of him becoming Supreme Head of the English Church; four of his wives are missing and no wives are beheaded.

I think the relative lack of popularity of the play is due to its episodic nature and lack of narrative drive. It’s not
Hamlet
. Henry has only a few decisions to make: to judge the veracity of Buckingham’s surveyor, to remove Wolsey for feathering his own nest, to legitimize his attraction for Anne Bullen and to select and protect Cranmer. None of them are particularly difficult.

Unsurprisingly for a play written when the divine right of kings was a hot issue there is little criticism of the king in the text, saving a hint that his interest in Anne Bullen is merely sexual, but for a play regarded by some as a great patriotic celebration there isn’t much praise for Henry either. The play illustrates the trick used by rulers and governments for centuries: pageantry disguises that it’s dangerous at court.

Early performances seem to have used the subtitle
All Is True
; were you tempted by this strategy and would it make a difference to perceptions about the play?

Doran:
I am entirely convinced that the play is called
All Is True
. Henry Wotton’s letter about the burning down of the Globe says that the King’s Men were performing a play called
All Is True
, so it seems to me to be the proper title. But it also hints at those rather enigmatic Shakespearean titles like
All’s Well That Ends Well
,
As You Like It
, or
What You Will
. It struck me that the title is a bit like a comedian saying, “this is an absolutely true story”: the more the comedian emphasizes the truth of his tale, the more you question its veracity. I think the title comes with suspicion attached to it, in the same way that
All’s Well That Ends Well
always seems to me to require a question mark at the end of the title.

We took it a stage further and had in the designer Rob Jones’s set two huge doors, which opened to reveal the Field of the Cloth of Gold at the beginning. When they closed at the end of that piece of pageantry, you saw emblazoned in gold letters across these doors the words “All Is True.” It kept in mind a sense that there was an agenda attached to this dramatization. Was it all true? Can you be true? What is the historical fact? Is there a whitewash job going on? Is this a political gesture to rehabilitate Katherine of Aragon?

One has to remember that Shakespeare had already treated this subject, or at least been part of a collaboration on this very period of history, when he wrote
Thomas More
. The manuscript of that play suggests it’s in five different hands and it may therefore be that he was only one collaborator of many in that play, but in the reign of Queen Elizabeth that was an extremely subversive subject to discuss, a regular hot potato. In a way
Thomas More
canonizes the man who had refused the right of Henry to divorce Katherine, and therefore the right of the present Queen—the daughter of Anne Bullen—to reign. To write a play about that and put it on the stage during Elizabeth’s reign was an extraordinary thing to do. Coming back to that same period in history at the end of his career suggests that there was business Shakespeare felt he had left unattended. We blazoned “All Is True” on the walls to suggest to the audience that they had to keep a question mark in their minds.

Thompson:
The RSC used
Henry VIII
, which is a sensible marketing decision as it is how the play is known.
All Is True
is a great title,
though, as one of the driving ideas in the play is that in the court all is true. “All Is true” in the court in the sense that whatever is the current appearance, fashion or policy is taken to be the true and eternal will of the king. Of course, when there is a change in appearance, fashion, or policy then the new situation becomes the true and eternal will of the king. We see Anne shift from lady-in-waiting to heaven-sent queen and then go missing. We know that she becomes the whore that bewitched a king.

When all is true, words cannot be trusted. The members of the court survive and thrive through favor and position as all the power is concentrated in and flows through the king. Words are used to curry favor and maintain position and, as so often with strong government, the first casualty is the truth.

Speaking truth to power is, of course, a Shakespearean theme and the play begs the question: who will speak the truth to the king? The play opens with Norfolk and Buckingham complaining about Wolsey’s ambitious schemes and Norfolk warns Buckingham to be careful about telling Henry the truth. Wolsey sees to it that Buckingham doesn’t live long enough to influence Henry.

It is a rare person who speaks truth to power. Even the Lady who brings news of the birth of Elizabeth initially tells Henry that the baby is a boy. Katherine uses her position as queen to expose Wolsey’s tax gathering and to question the reliability of Buckingham’s surveyor as a witness against Buckingham. Cranmer is the only one who fears nothing that can be said against him when pressed by the king.

In Act 3 Scene 1 Katherine refuses to accept Wolsey’s scheme for a divorce: she holds fast to the truth, particularly the truth that she is lawfully married to Henry. In Act 3 Scene 2 Wolsey’s corruption is exposed and he tells Cromwell to fling away ambition. These two juxtaposed scenes, one where someone holds fast to what she believes to be true and one where someone discards all that is false, were what attracted me to the play.

There are more occurrences (twenty-one) of the word “truth” in
Henry VIII
than in any other Shakespeare play. (
All’s Well That Ends Well
has eighteen;
Henry IV Part Two
has sixteen.) The Chorus immediately muddies the water though:

Hope and belief are not usual signs of truth. The Chorus goes on to make clear that what is being shown has been selected and is a partial view:

There has been much criticism of the episodic nature of the plot; was it a problem to find a narrative line or did you detect a more subtle shaping of material in the play in the way it juxtaposes contrasting scenes, moods, and characters?

Doran:
I deliberately did not try to solve all the problems of the play before we went into rehearsal, but to see how the play unfurled itself during that process. It inevitably has an episodic quality, but then so does history. To begin with I thought that the potential downfall of Cranmer was one episode too many and felt that I should cut Cranmer from the story. But as we rehearsed and grew to know the play, it seemed to me that it is a learning process for Henry himself: he learns how to trust and who to trust. He trusts Wolsey and then the lords gang up against Wolsey, conspire against him, and bring about his downfall. The lords also conspire against Cranmer, and yet this time Henry, knowing Cranmer to be a good man, gives him his support and his blessing. There is an arc to the story in terms of Henry VIII himself learning how to deal with the people around him. The structure of the play emerged by us allowing it to emerge.