King John/Henry VIII (Signet Classics) Read online

  Costumes and Music

  In Shakespeare in Performance, Richmond argues that this is a play that, given its historical specificity, needs to be staged in "historically accurate costume."148 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."149

  In his autobiography, Donald Sinden, who played Henry in 1969, recalls the assembled cast at the end singing a magnificent "Gloria."150 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."151 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."152 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."153

  "Three Magnificent Acting Parts"154

  In Sir Henry Wotton's description of the burning down of Shakespeare's Globe when the thatch caught light from a celebratory cannon during a performance of this play, he voiced the objection that its realist dramatic qualities were "sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous."155 Many critics since have been disconcerted by its "low-key emotions and intimate verbal style"156 which creates a sense of the ordinariness and realism of the characters, but has subversive potential: "it images directly the contradiction between the sacred royal office and the fallible human individual who holds it, making historical actions intelligible as everyday transactions."157

  Historical productions of the play focused on pageantry and featured the roles of Katherine and Wolsey as star vehicles. The role of the king has tended to provoke controversy because Shakespeare's Henry is not the monstrous Bluebeard of popular myth. Richmond argues that "At this pivotal point in his career Henry's role must remain as unclear, even incoherent, as it probably seemed to its original audience--and just as bewildering as contemporary politicians often appear to us now, without the advantage of hindsight."158

  Despite describing the part of Henry as "a stinker,"159 Donald Sinden was able to utilize his natural charm and charisma in the part in Nunn's production and win over most of the critics. He believed that the play showed "only a veneer of the truth" and found "all the speeches ambiguous."160 Richmond thought that "This tension between surface characterisation and the latent reality known to the audience by hindsight is what lent memorable force to Sinden's performance."161 Many critics commented on the paleness of his makeup (and all commented on half his beard coming off during the trial scene on the opening night). K. E. B. of the Nottingham Evening Post found Sinden "a Henry of distinction and, praise be not over-padded. His gradual accession of authority from the time that Wolsey dominated and deceived him until he emerged as the ruler in fact as well as in name, bluff but not blustering, was a delight to watch."162

  Nunn had dispensed with Prologue and Epilogue. This is Sinden's own description of the ending:

  At the end of the play ... the assembled characters sang a magnificent "Gloria" and then left the stage in stately procession. Only Henry remained in a spotlight, holding the infant Elizabeth who had just been christened. Here I tried to do a most difficult thing. The end of the play is a cry for peace in the time of the future Elizabeth I and in a few brief seconds I, as Henry with no lines, looked into the future, saw the horror that was to come, questioned why, realised the failure of the hope, crashed into the twentieth century and pleaded silently that where the sixteenth century had failed, those of the future may succeed. Many people told me it was a most moving moment.163

  Richard Griffiths, who played the part in Davies's 1983 production, is on record as calling Henry VIII "a belting good play,"164 and was proudly proclaimed as the only actor to play the part without padding. He played Henry in a deliberately naturalistic way, in keeping with the downplaying of the pageantry. Ned Chaillot thought he made him "a likeable rogue,"165 while J. C. Trewin suggested, "There will probably be argument about Henry, as Richard Griffiths presents him; but it is a pleasure to have a King who is not simply an angry boomer behind a Holbein mask."166 Sheridan Morley, however, complained that he "never inspires the remotest terror or authority."167

  Paul Jesson in Doran's production, which played up the pageantry, attempted more bluffness while at the same time making Henry human. As Benedict Nightingale saw it, Paul "Jesson's splendidly bluff, blunt King learns to see through fake and value honesty," and he goes on to blame Shakespeare for Henry's lack of villainy, complaining that "The principals are all relentlessly good mouthed."168 Shaun Usher found it an impressive performance:

  Jesson has the presence to fulfil that wide-as-he-is-tall image from the school history books, and the skill to convey arrogant yet sentimental sensibility with deep veins of deviousness and humbug. Previously, Henrys have been upstaged by Catherine of Aragon, or dwarfed in surrounding pageantry; Jesson is never in danger of being deposed.169

  Queen Katherine

  Queen Katherine was played in the past by theatrical legends such as Sarah Siddons, Ellen Terry, Sybil Thorndike, and Edith Evans. The part requires intelligence, spirit, dignity, and pathos: a part "Dame Peggy Ashcroft seemed born to play."170 She brought great personal commitment to the role and, according to Trevor Nunn, felt the play did less than justice to Katherine's historical dilemma and hence attempted to incorporate extra material from the transcript of the trial, which he vetoed. Ashcroft, by common consent, triumphed. John Barber singled hers out as "the one outstanding performance of the night," describing how,

  When besotted with Anne Bullen, the King spurns his Queen; she reacts first with fire then with melancholy, at last with a pitiful pride. The actress finally came to resemble a Rembrandt portrait of a shrivelled old lady. She speaks always like a queen and even when dying and desolate can hang a word on the air like a jewel.171

  Keith Brace was also struck by her final scene:

  Dame Peggy more or less created her own play in the death of Katherine, where the emotions aroused were out of proportion to the actual emotional content of the words spoken. She carried the scene at her own slow, but never wearying pace. It was, ironically, more Brechtian as a statement about death rather than a re-enactment of death than all those silly headlines.172

  8. 1969, Trevor Nunn production. Peggy Ashcroft as Katherine who reacted "first with fire then with melancholy, at last with pitiful pride. The actress finally came to resemble a Rembrandt portrait of a shrivelled old lady."

  Gemma Jones, too, in Davies's 1983 production made a fine Katherine, intelligent and dignified in standing up for the rights of the people in council, committed to her husband. Davies offered a fuller staging of her celestial vision and, maintaining her dignity, she became a figure of pathos in her death.

  Jane Lapotaire played Katherine in 1996, emphasizing her status as an outsider by employing a soft Spanish accent and having her ladies sing and dance sevillanas to a flamenco guitar at the beginning of Act 3. Her Katherine was very human, vulnerable, and angry. Benedict Nightingale thought her "a fine Katherine of Aragon ... who brings patience, dignity and, in her final encounter with Card
inal Wolsey, a moving mix of queenly outrage and simple pain."173 The celestial vision was simply represented by a shining light playing across her, bathing her sleeping figure: "Hers is the pathos of the evening."174

  Cardinal Wolsey

  The chosen part of Kemble, Irving, and Gielgud; it was played in Nunn's production by Brewster Mason, a huge, intimidating figure and an RSC stalwart. Gordon Parsons thought he played the part "as a benign, scarlet slug of a man,"175 but Charles Landstone thought him "too coarse as Wolsey, bringing sarcasm in place of pathos to his famous dying speech."176

  John Thaw, fresh from his TV success in The Sweeney, played the part in Davies's production. His performance was not to everyone's taste: "John Thaw played Wolsey much in the role of a shopkeeper. Even in the lines where his downfall causes him to reject worldly ambition, you feel it wouldn't take much for him to open his shop elsewhere."177 Ned Chaillot, however, argued that, "With Mr. Griffiths going lightly from strength to strength, there is room for a touch of the tragic in the characters of Wolsey and Katherine, and John Thaw's Wolsey achieves the tragic in realizing how ill he has served his God."178

  Ian Hogg, Wolsey in Doran's production, discussed the play in an interview with the Birmingham Post:

  On the rare occasions [the play] is done it tends to be very highly dressed up, because people doubt the power of the text. But Greg Doran, who is directing this production, has relied a lot on the speed of the words, which moves it at a great lick. If you weigh it down with big scene changes you lose that momentum.179

  9. 1983, Howard Davies production. John Thaw as Cardinal Wolsey "achieves the tragic in realizing how ill he has served his God."

  Michael Billington saw him as "a chunky Ipswich over-achiever with a cottage-loaf face who undergoes genuine repentance,"180 and Naomi Koppel in the Evening Standard thought that "Ian Hogg steals the show as Cardinal Wolsey, charting the rise and fall of the butcher's son from Ipswich who cannot quite rid himself of his accent."181

  In all three productions, the three leads were strongly played and well-balanced. Each production also featured outstanding performances in lesser roles.

  Richard Pascoe played Buckingham in 1969. Philip Hope-Wallace argued that he delivered his "great speech of farewell to life ... as well as I have heard it."182 Emrys Jones's Cranmer in the same production brought "a hang-dog charm to the part of Cranmer--his hectic football game with the boys while awaiting questioning by the council is a masterstroke."183

  Queen Anne is a small part without a great deal of scope but in 1969, "Janet Key made Anne Bullen radiantly beautiful, which is about all the part allows."184 Davies had given the prologue to Henry to deliver and to balance out the proceedings, gave Sarah Berger as Anne the Epilogue. He also made the "Old Lady" younger and added a bevy of other young women in Act 2 Scene 3. Claire Marchionne in Doran's production made her seem less than demure in the masque at Wolsey's and brought her on at the end, where she put her hand to her neck, presumably to serve as a visual reminder of her ultimate fate. Cherry Morris's Old Lady in 1996 was Welsh (as one reviewer commented, there were a lot of accents in this production) and her performance was singled out for its vitality:

  as the Old Lady, Cherry Morris is brimful of sheer human essence. By some strange fluke, Shakespeare is at his best in the few lines he gives to this minor character. Listening to her, we are keenly alive in the moment as nowhere else in the play.185

  The Chamberlain does not generally get a mention, but Guy Henry's performance in 1996 was picked out by a number of critics for the sophistication and clarity he brought to the part: "There is plenty of wry humour, particularly in Guy Henry's Lord Chamberlain, and also in Cherry Morris's down-to-earth Welsh lady-in-waiting."186 Perhaps in recognition of their presence onstage as assets, Doran used Guy Henry to speak the Prologue and Morris in place of the Third Gentleman, enlivening the scene while commenting on events such as Anne's coronation.

  Conclusion

  Originating perhaps as an occasional play for the wedding celebrations of James I's daughter Elizabeth, Henry VIII was immensely popular, especially for the celebration of royal occasions, until the twentieth century, when, rather than being played on its intrinsic dramatic merit, it seems frequently to have been relegated to the status of a "festival play" and revived out of a sense of duty. All three RSC productions, though, have proved successful, if controversial, demonstrating that in the right hands it's still a play with real theatrical virtues:

  Truth to life is at once the problem and the fascination of Henry VIII. This play is a controlled and possibly cynical experiment. It may not be artistically great, but it is artistically interesting. Its structure and resolution may be "flawed" by ambivalence, divorce, and disjunction, but ... these "flaws" are patterned and full of meaning, controlled and deliberate. They comment on human truth and art, explaining how literally, objectively true to life great art can be.187

  THE DIRECTOR'S CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH GREGORY DORAN AND GREGORY THOMPSON

  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 shar
ed 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.