Peter Viney's Blog

By William Shakespeare

Directed by Owen Horsley
Designer Stephen Brimson Lewis
Costume Hannah Clark
Lighting Simon Spencer
Music Paul Englishby

Royal Shakespeare Company
Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Stratford-Upon-Avon
Friday 20th May 2022. 19.30

CAST
Oliver Alvin- Wilson – Duke of York
Lucy Benjamin – Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester
Richard Cant – Duke of Gloucester / Lord Saye
Daniel J. Carver – Lord Clifford / Horner
Angelina Chudi- Hume
Paola Dionisotti – Cardinal Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester / Humphrey
Felixe Forde – Bevis / Southwell
Minnie Gale- Margaret
Ashley D. Gayne – Smith
Conor Glean – Dick
Ben Hall- Duke of Suffolk
Jack Humphrey- Clerk
Nicholas Karimi- Earl of Warwick
Al Maxwell- Bolingbroke / Holland, plus Captain (understudy)
Peter Moreton – Earl of Salisbury
Georgia-Mae Myers – Margaret Jourdain, plus Stafford (understudy)
Sophia Papadopoulos- Prince Edward, Suffolk’s messenger
Mark Quartley- King Henry VI
Aaron Sidwell- Jack Cade, plus Master Sheriff (understudy)
Yasmin Taheri- 2nd neighbour
John Tate- Captain / Stafford (understudied in this performance)
Ibraheem Toure- Whitemore
Emma Tracey – Spirit
Daniel Ward -Duke of Buckingham
Benjamin Westerby – Duke ofSomerset

Ordinary people fill the stage for the crowd scenes.

SEE ALSO: HENRY VI- WARS OF THE ROSES review

The RSC is presenting two plays together, Henry VI Parts 2 and 3, with added titles. They can be seen separately and on the same day, though they were poor in planning the sort of ‘Evening for Play 1 / Next day matinee for Play2’ which travelling viewers like us prefer – one overnight stay. They will be touring so there is a chance to see the plays after Stratford. However, such strong use is made of the RSC’s diagonal entrances to the thrust stage through the audience, that it will be compromised by being pushed back into a face-on stage area.

RSC: Originally titled The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous houses of York and Lancaster and labelled Henry VI: Part 2 when first published.

RSC online

There is some confusion over the RSC’s avowed plans to do the Complete Works over five years. It all got delayed by Covid, but originally Henry VI Part One was on the schedule. No more, along with Pericles and Henry VIII it’s not made the cut. This play is what is normally known as Henry VI Part Two. Because the plays we now know as Henry VI Part Two and Henry VI Part Three were so popular at the time, the play Henry VI Part One is believed to be a later prequel, and some argue that Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe co-wrote it, hence its exclusion. However, both Henry VI Part One and Henry VIII are in the FirstFolio if that’s the criterion. Then The Two Noble Kinsmen isn’t in the First Folio, and is collaborative, but they’ve done it in the series.

I’ve had my say on this before, they are the three plays in the entire canon I like least (followed by Henry IV Parts One and Two). I’m a completist and will see anything the RSC does on Shakespeare. Do read my views of Henry VI: Three plays, and The Wars of The Roses, which expand on the intrinsic issues with the plays. As I pointed out, Winchester can be ‘Henry’, ‘Beaufort,’ Winchester’, ‘Bishop’ or ‘Cardinal.’ Then Gloucester addresses himself as ‘Duke Humphrey’ the first time we see him. Barton and Hall’s adaptation had a principle of one name per character. The play covers quite a time scale … Henry married Margaret of Anjou in 1445, the Cade rebellion was 1450, and the Wars of The Roses are dated from 1455.

It’s amusing to me at least that older productions listed characters by rank (King before Duke, Duke before Earl …) then men before women, as in my edition. It also helps with who’s who.

The characters were closely related through both maternal and paternal lines, either brothers, half-brothers, uncles, nephews or first cousins. That inevitably brings up an argument over ‘colour blind’ casting. Shakespeare’s Globe has pointed out in the past that just under 40% of Southwark inhabitants are BAME, but the Globe and RSC extrapolates that to casting, and while that represents Southwark, the “white British / white Irish / white other” percentage for the country overall is 86%. So a 40 to 50% BAME cast is way beyond positive discrimination, though as an actor confided to me, it may well represent admission to drama schools.That was on my mind before it started, but it dispelled. There’s a moment in the second play Henry VI: Wars of The Roses where York and his three sons stand glaring at the audience. Two white, two black, none look remotely alike, yet the power of the performance from all four instantly convinces, ‘This is a family.’

The popularity of the three Henry VI plays at the time is puzzling. Did the audience know the history that well? It was over a century later, though I guess less had happened. Was it like a modern audience who would know the Duchess of Cornwall, the Dukes of York, Cambridge and Sussex, and the Earl of Wessex and know that Edinburgh was father to two and grandfather to another two? Also that Meghan and Duchess of Sussex referred to the same person? Or did they just like a lot of sword fighting? Between 1583 and 1592, historical chronicles were the most popular theatrical form. The tag ‘The original Game of Thrones‘ has been over-used, but the similarities are obvious and George R. Martin has admitted that the Wars of The Roses was his source. The Lannisters are the Lancasters, the Starks are the Yorks. Margaret of Anjou (15 when she married) inspired Cersei Lannister. I could go on, but both feature a lot of violent closely related blokes vying for power and hard as you might try, it can be difficult to remember either the plot or which one is doing what to which. It lacks the Queen of Dragons though, and also the degree of naked bonking seen in of Game of Thrones.

This performance

It was filmed during this show which meant an empty stalls except for the sides so echoey sound, though you’d expect good sound for the film. We were in front row circle, an unusual place for us.

A major concept in the productions is the use of hand held video camera, in black and white, projected on the curtain screen. So there may be action in the front, with a large projected image above, as well as sound. It’s all done live. (It works better in the sequel).

This may go for all three plays, including Richard III, but all the lords wear white or red roses to show which sides they are on. Or rather, which side they will be on, because in the Wars of the Roses, conspiracies cross party lines.

The reviews are outstandingly good, see later, but in most cases the critics saw both plays in one day and gave a single overall rating across the board. This is significant.

Henry VI – Rebellion is an odd production veering on bizarre and misguided in several interpretations. They have cut Sussex’s opening speech entirely, which loses the back story about him going to France to secure Margaret as his princess, wedding her by proxy and accompanying her back. It makes a more dramatic start at the feast to celebrate her arrival, but at the loss of building the romance with Sussex. It doesn’t come out until later, but it should have been built in from the outset.

All three major female roles were odd. I guess they picked up on the history, that Margaret of Anjou was only 15, but she grimaced and gestured in the background like a teenager in a horror film who’s about to perform unpleasant acts in the cellar after too many alcopops. A touch of teenage was a defensible idea, but here it is too much. Her long speeches- she has one of the longer and powerful female roles – were drastically cut and this is common. Because she appears in four plays, she has more lines than any other Shakesperean character. The Royal Exchange, Manchester recognised this in 2018, by combining her four appearances in a single play, Queen Margaret.Throughout the plays, Margaret is scorned because her father, the King Of Naples is poor. Instead of receiving the customary dowry, the gormless Henry VI traded away two French provinces for her hand … the resentment here feeds the York / Lancaster competition.

Eleanor is the regal and pompous Duchess of Gloucester, wife of the powerful king’s uncle who had effectively ruled England for twenty-five years.

Margaret: Not all these lords do vex me half so much
As that proud dame, the Lord Protector’s wife.
She sweeps it through the court with troops of ladies
More like an empress than Duke Humphrey’s wife:
Strangers in court do take her for the queen:
She bears a duke’s revenue on her back
And in her heart she scorns our poverty.

Act i, Scene 3

Here Eleanor becomes a sitcom screechy character definitely downmarket from the duke.We see her sitting on his lap kicking her heels up girlishly.  While she does it all well, this makes it very difficult for her to bring out her later tragic banishment scenes. Eleanor is set up for consulting conjurors and witches and brought down.

There is some text argument on her as lower born here, as Margaret, the young Queen, calls her contemptuous base-born callet. A callet can simply be a scold, but here more likely a prostitute or a promiscuous woman. There is purpose. The country was being entertained during the first run of the play by the Footballer’s Wives Rooney v Vardy court case over petty matters. There is a literal slap and threats to scratch the other’s face in the play, so they’ve gone with that.

So then a woman is cast as the Cardinal, the Bishop of Winchester. She is referred to as ‘he’ and the Cardinal was the son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and grandson of King Edward III, great uncle of the king, so major royalty.  He was also the brother of Somerset, not that you’d know it. I owe this to the clever Family Tree in the Programme, which has photos of the actors in the production. A great idea and it really helped. It is a monumental piece of miscasting. The cardinal is now a thin, elderly wispy person (with poor stage projection). They have to cut the text references to him :

Salisbury: Of have I seen the haughty cardinal
More like a soldier than a man o’ the church
As stout and proud as he were lord of all,
Swear like a ruffian and demean himself
Unlike the ruler of a commonweal.

Act One, Scene 1

Then the actress, having died on stage (as well as for me as an actor) has to come back and be the authoritative Sir Humphrey trying to quell Cade’s rebels. She looks totally ridiculous in armour. Ludicrous to the point of undermining the entire scene. I do not blame her at all, as there is no question that I would be an appalling Cleopatra or Ophelia. But no one would be daft enough to cast me as Cleopatra. You have to have at least some concept of physical appropriateness.On which, Gregory Doran as Head of the RSC has suggested that as only black actors should play Othello, then only disabled actors should play Richard III, so there is a concept of appropriate casting. So Henry VI is played by Mark Quarterly who looks like a Henry VI … slighter of build, pale complexion.

They were perhaps trying to lighten the play with comedy, but being Shakespeare rather than his contemporaries, comedy is built in – the blind man scene will work on text alone, as will Jack Cade’s scene.

York, Warwick, Gloucester, Suffolk, Henry VI are all very good.

Oliver Alvin- Wilson as the Duke of York dominates the stage whenever he’s on, and this is nothing compared to the power of his performance in the sequel play .York is outstanding, but then so is the role.

Henry’s faint was brilliantly executed by Mark Quartely – straight down, and he looked right and sounded right. Nicholas Karimi is an authoritative Warwick, even more so in the sequel, but why the Scottish accent? Accent blind is a common thing, but Trevor Nunn’s Wars of The Roses had a point in making everyone RP.

Ben Hall is excellent as the Duke of Suffolk, though I’d play up the romance / sexual attraction to Margaret and vice versa even more. As both are red-headed, I think I might have given Prince Edward a red headed wig, which would still be enigmatic, but as the Prince of Wales is a patron of the theatre, perhaps not. Prince Edward is played by Sophia Papadopoulos … that’s not a casting problem though. Girls are good for playing young males on stage. We did some audio recordings where we needed young teenaged boys and there are a couple of actresses who have cornered the young boys audio recording sector.

Otherwise, the colour blindness was never an issue here, but the gender balancing is an issue. It was never going to be ideal in this play above any other- except it’s sequel, and there is far less in the sequel.   Poor Peter was too small and too pretty in spite of valiant efforts and good delivery. She is just physically miscast. Then women playing thugs bend over forward, grunt a lot and try to look as muscle bound as a prop forward. The women as thuggish soldiers, rebels and pirates are a serious mistake.

They needed a ten minute semi interval between acts 4 and 5 to shift set platforms. That’s simply poor set design – the set was never thar interesting , and it didn’t make much difference. I think it could easily have been avoided. While the towering erection of wood that Cade surmounted was great, that had nothing to do with the platforms and the side ladders could be permanent.

Everything is saved up for the high impact Jack Cade rebellion scenes packed with amateur extras looking like an outtake from Les Miserables. Cade is played as an over the top comedy combination of Malcolm McLaren, Johnny Rotten and Jools Holland. I’d prefer an added touch of sinister and Corbynesque, but then the scene has the best lines in the play. His cocky energy and physicality was an absolute relief from all the noble hollering. He was high concept and a very good Shakespearean clown, and in the end the best part in the play. Is it a clown part though, that may be an issue. He has the advantage of prose for his main lines which would have been marked in 1591.

Lawyers didn’t get a laugh, a different audience had  loved it at The Rose,  Kingston

The grammar school joke, and grammarian joke (verb noun) didn’t get laughs either except from me.

Cade: Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school … it will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a ‘noun’ and a ‘verb,’ and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear.

Act IV, Scene 7

The speech is laden with references. Cade loathes French speakers, a Brexiteer in making. He berates Emmanuel, the clerk with a book, just as Mao broke intellectuals glasses and sent them to labour in the fields. He wants the drains to run with claret . His economics are give everything free to everyone. I have friends who believe that an economic possibility.

The projected film with Cade in backstage corridors looked borrowed from the Old Vic Richard III, starring Kevin Spacey.

In both plays, there are multiple beheadings and they have realistic heads for the actors too. Still, I think Margaret carried Suffolk’s decapitated bonce around for too long.

The four and five star reviews perplexed me until I realize they covered both plays, not just Rebellion. There are some truly awful bits here, and it was never a great play though we thought the Trevor Nunn production at The Rose was truly superb, in a different class in every aspect.

I’m between two and three stars, Karen was on two at most, and thinks the cast and direction was below RSC standards and I agree that it is, partly due to weird casting decisions. We were so doubtful about the next afternoon that we seriously discussed not bothering (in spite of our premium price tickets). The thing is that they were chalk and cheese. It was to turn out that Wars of The Roses aka Henry VI Part Three was indeed a five star production. I suspect that the director was most at home with the action ad pageantry in the later play and on dodgier ground on the earlier.

SOMETHING TO TAKE HOME

The most famous line in this play is:

Let’s kill all the lawyers!

Dick the Butcher, Henry VI, Part Two, Act 4, Scene 2

This popular sentiment had got laughter / applause whenever I’ve seen it before, though not here. I’m surprised the RSC doesn’t add it to its T-shirt range. We bought our granddaughter a Though she be but little, she is fierce one from Midsummer Night’s Dream.I suggested getting Karen one as she is five foot tall, but the response was … well, fierce.

Perhaps they thought some lawyers would accuse them of a hate crime and try to earn some money. However, they have done a fridge magnet as you cannot surely be accused of fomenting hatred in your own kitchen.:

SOMETHING WE HOPE WE DIDN”T TAKE HOME …

The coughers and explosive sneezers were saving it up for a filmed production apparently.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
Reviewers saw both plays

5 star
Mark Lawson, The Guardian *****
4 star
Domenic Cavendish, The Telegraph ****
Patrick Marmion, Daily Mail ****
Gary Naylor, Broadway World, ****
Michael Davies, What’s On Stage ****
3 stars
Sam Marlowe, iNews ***
The Times *** (4 stars for the second play)

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

The Wars of The Roses, trilogy, Kingston, 2015, Barton & Hall adaptation

Henry VI (Henry VI Part I mainly)

Edward IV (Henry VI Parts 2 & 3)

Richard III (Richard III)

• Henry VI: Three plays, Globe on tour (Bath )
  – Harry The Sixth (Henry VI Part One)
  – The Houses of York & Lancaster (Henry VI Part Two)
  – The True tragedy of The Duke of York (Henry VI Part Three)
  
• Henry VI- Rebellion (Henry VI- Part 2), RSC 2022
• Henry VI – Wars of The Roses (Henry VI Part 3) RSC 2022
  
  LINK TO REVIEWS OF CAST AND CREATIVES

MARK QUARTELY
The Tempest, RSC 2016 (Ariel)
Strife by John Galsworthy, Chichester, 2016

BEN HALL
Henry V, Tobacco Factory, 2018 (Henry V)
Coriolanus, RSC 2017
Salomé, RSC 2017

OLIVER ALVIN-WILSON
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Young Vic, 2017 (Demetrius)

RICHARD CANT
Edward II, by Marlowe, Wanamaker 2019
My Night With Reg, Kevin Elyot, West End 2015