Henry VI part 1

This is Shakespeare week for me;  After the first part of the Henry VI trilogy on Saturday, I'll be back in the Roundhouse another three times to see the other two parts and then Richard III.  Can you have too much of a good thing?  Absolutely not.  Michael Boyd's long-term vision for the RSC seems to have paid off triumphantly.  I always enjoy seeing the Shakespeare plays that I don't know very well;  being unfamiliar with the text permits me to look at the play as if it was a piece of new writing, and I can feel genuine surprise at the experience.  I was going to avoid blogging about Henry VI until I'd seen all three plays, but the first instalment was so thrilling that I decided not to wait.

I've never seen Henry VI performed intact before;  in fact the only time I've seen it on stage was in a two-part adaptation a few years ago by Edward Hall's all-male company from Newbury under the title Rose Rage.  That had its moments but the chopping up of offal on stage to make the point about England becoming a slaughterhouse was repeated far too often.  On Saturday, worried that I might once again get my Yorkists and my Lancastrians muddled up, I quickly read the first three acts on my way to the Roundhouse.   It's an all-action play, written relatively early in Shakespeare's career, and lacks some of the psychological subtlety of the later histories;  but the rumbustious battle scenes fit like a glove into Michael Boyd's highly physical staging, with lots of ropes, ladders, platforms and trapezes.  At the opening the dead Henry V, barefoot and white as a sheet, descends the spiral stairs at the back of the stage and, flecked with blood, falls into his grave.  Later on La Pucelle (Joan of Arc) meets an equally spectacular death.  Boyd's high-octane theatrical treatment seems to work better on this play than it did with the more intricate Henry IV.   One neat touch I particularly enjoyed as a former occupant of the House of Commons Press Gallery was the opening scene of Act 3, when the Bishop of Winchester and the Duke of Gloucester knock rhetorical lumps out of each other in parliament.  Boyd posts vocal supporters of both characters around the theatre to boo and cheer, and the result is a 15th century session of Prime Minister's Questions.  As in Henry V, the French are a bunch of bling-obsessed, self-admiring prats (I so wish Gordon Brown could have taken President Sarkozy to the Roundhouse...)  Boyd's production highlights Shakespeare's up-to-date insight that in politics and war, it's the perception of the other side, not the reality, that frequently determines victory.  Talbot vanquishes the French until his luck runs out because his reputation as a warrior has preceded him.  And La Pucelle doesn't have to be a real witch to frighten the English;  it's enough that they believe she is one.  Eventually her luck runs out as well and her shadowy 'fiends' ignore her calls for help.  The play ends with a botched peace between England and France, a cynical deal that seems to foreshadow further conflict.  Where have we encountered that sort of thing before?   As well as the balletic and bloodstained battle scenes, this production delivers some memorable acting.  Chuck Iwuji captures the wide-eyed innocence of the young and hopelessly ineffectual King Henry, and Keith Bartlett is brilliant as the old warrior Talbot, whose death scene after his son is killed is genuinely moving.  Geoffrey Freshwater is once again outstanding as the scheming Bishop ofWinchester.  Geoffrey Streatfeild (Prince Hal/Henry V) here gets to play the juicy part of Suffolk, who brings back the femme fatale Margaret of Anjou as a bride for Henry but really wants her for himself.  The ambiguity of the scene between the two of them seems to me to match anything Shakespeare wrote in his more famous plays.  Margaret begins as Suffolk's captive but two pages later, she has managed to slip a noose around him without him realising it.  Newcomer Katy Stephens brings off an astonishing double act by twinning the roles of La Pucelle and Margaret, with barely a minute or two to get her breath back and change dresses in between.  As Joan she's callous, brutal and slightly unhinged, a war groupie who is turned on by blood.  As Margaret, she slinks erotically around the stage in a beautiful red dress, clearly a man-eater who spells trouble, a 15th century Carla Bruni or a Charlotte Rampling.  I can't wait to see what she gets up to later in the week. 

Comments

[Colin Stephenson]

I did not see the Triology at the Roundhouse but at te Courtyard in Stratford back in Sept06 & again in March just before it came to the Roundhouse

Rope work & 3D effects were fabulous - more so I think 1st time round