The story so far of the RSC’s Complete Works marathon has been largely that of performances, some wonderfully rich and strange, coming in from abroad. Unable to spend an entire summer camped out in Stratford, I have still to catch up with some of the reputedly stronger offerings by the home team. But even the prospect of having to battle for hot water and breakfast at one of Stratford’s more reputable hotels couldn’t keep me from the inauguration of the new Courtyard Theatre with Michael Boyd’s Henry VI trilogy, or from Patrick Stewart as Prospero in the unsatisfactory cinematic 1930s theatre which is shortly to be disembowelled (not before time) and reconstructed.
The Courtyard Theatre is a crucial transitional step. Built at a cost of £6 million (or the price of Sir Paul and Lady McCartney’s disputed villa in St John’s Wood), it’s to house the RSC while the old theatre and the (thankfully largely unaffected) Swan become a building site. Intended as no more than temporary, the Courtyard is highly significant as a prototype for the reborn theatre on the river. Let it be said at once that the relationship of the audience to the stage in the 1,000-seater Courtyard is so perfect that the RSC will be lucky indeed if it is able to build a better auditorium just down the road.
Erected inside a brutalist cube of rusting steel sections that looks as though it might house missiles or nuclear waste, an elegantly proportioned horseshoe of stalls and twin-gallery seating wraps around a large thrust stage. As at the Swan, the actors make much use of the gangways through the stalls, to say nothing of rope, trapeze and ladder-work invited by the dizzying Big Top space above the stage. At its rear is a tower and spiral stair, down which the radiant shade of Henry V slowly descends as visual prologue to the chronicles of his successor. The seating is so comfortable that even the ten hours or so required for the Henry VIs when given in a single day left no lasting ache or pain. To judge from my seat near a front corner of the stage, the acoustics are superb. Doubtless this is at least partly thanks to the utilitarian plywood lining of the vast metallic cube.
No better venture to inaugurate this dream space than Boyd’s reworking of the Henry VI trilogy, which so deservedly won him an Olivier Award in 2001. The production is still built, rightly, around Clive Wood’s and Richard Cordery’s superb performances as York and Gloucester, with Keith Bartlett again memorable as the doughty Talbot, but many of the cast are new. As the otherworldly King Henry, Chuk Iwuji has real presence and speaks his lines beautifully, though he as yet misses something of his predecessor’s sense of the youthful monarch buffeted between a divine vocation and the political demands of the warring Yorkists and Lancastrians.
If there was a touch too much of the bossy gym-mistress about Katy Stephens’s Joan of Arc, in her resurrection as Henry’s wife, Margaret, her frustration and anger were as authentic as you could wish. There are terrific performances from Geoffrey Freshwater as Cardinal Beaufort and Patrice Naiambana as Warwick, a handsomely sharp Suffolk in Geoffrey Streatfeild, agreeably over-the-top characterisations of the Dauphin and of Jack Cade by John Mackay, and a tremendously exciting performance as the embryonic Richard III by Jonathan Slinger, already giving us a demonic jester of insatiable malignity.
Something of the tightly focused energy and edge of the original production has perhaps been dissipated in its expansion from the Swan to the larger Courtyard. The metallic sound effects now seem overdone. There’s a surfeit of rushing around with drawn swords — far less theatrically effective for my money than Boyd’s occasional ritualistic stylisation of the violence. But, all in all, this is as powerfully intelligent a Wars of the Roses trilogy as you’re likely to see. It yields an unforgettable final image of the trailing white robes of the heedless King Edward and his queen painting a great circle on the stage with the blood still oozing from the pathetic corpse of the murdered Henry.
In the main theatre, Rupert Goold’s staging of The Tempest is a very strange animal indeed. It must surely be the first to have imagined Prospero’s isle as north of the Arctic Circle, never mind that it would have taken a supernatural Gulf Stream to have swept his wretched barque and Alonso’s ship quite so far from the Mediterranean. The conceit opens up a picture of Prospero as the Magus of the ice floes, maybe a metaphor for that chill side of him which has to learn humanity and forgiveness from Ariel. But in this peculiar and arresting instance, Ariel, with sepulchral blackened eyes and whited face, stalks lugubriously through the show like a figure from German Expressionist theatre or the horror movies of Murnau and Pabst.
It’s a tour de force by the appropriately named Julian Bleach, mournfully rasping his lines and whingeing out ‘Where the bee sucks’ in a vocal range from falsetto to basso profundo. Against the dominance, in Goold’s conception, of this weirdly wonderful portrayal, even the resourceful Patrick Stewart was hard put to convince us that he was truly in command. His masterly shaping of Prospero’s farewell movingly brought out all the agony of the renunciation of his magic powers. Mariah Gale’s cheekily forthright Miranda strode briskly around the stage in her work-boots, resembling a Norwegian girl far more efficient at bringing in wood than John Light’s demented polar explorer of a Caliban. I have to say that I enjoyed the provocative perversities but wondered whether they amounted to more than an insubstantial vision.
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