Blanchett triumphs, but this war is unwinnable

Wednesday, 21st January 2009

The Sydney Festival compendium of Shakespeare’s history plays is director’s theatre at its worst, says Peter Craven

No, Cate Blanchett is not doing a stage version of the old Kathleen Turner film. But this medley of Shakespeare’s history plays, from go to woe, is a severe abridgment that brings them in at an eight-hour marathon.

And although the magnet for many will be Blanchett as Richard II, the drama queen of a king who lost his crown, this is Blanchett, not just as actor, but as joint head of the Sydney Theatre Company, subduing herself to the Actors Company whose last hurrah this production is.

The cycle kicks off with Richard II and apart from a couple of apparitional walk-ons as his ghost Blanchett doesn’t appear again until Richard III where she turns in a superb performance as Lady Anne.

The Sydney War of the Roses is bookended by the Richard plays and by gender-bending casting. Pamela Rabe’s Richard III — looking like a psychopathic trailer park sister of the late Susan Sontag — complements Blanchett’s golden and glorious incarnation of the scene-stealer who had his crown seized from him.

In Benedict Andrews’s production (which he has adapted with Tom Wright), these two are given in truncated but still more or less ample versions, whereas the whole of the two parts of Henry IV, plus Henry V and the three parts of Henry VI, are compressed to the same approximately movie length. This is most drastically diminishing with the plays about Hal who, before he becomes Henry V, annoys his father by hanging out with the fat old reprobate Falstaff. Falstaff is Shakespeare’s counterpoint to the world of blood and iron, of white roses and red, and he gets short shrift in Benedict Andrews’s War of the Roses.