Wives and wooings

The programme gets it right in rating Henry VIII ‘at the edge of William Shakespeare’s drama and theatre’. It’s from the very end of his working life, co-written with John Fletcher, and is but seldom given. This, as became abundantly apparent in AandBC’s production for the RSC’s Complete Works, is because it’s a dry biscuit, and especially so when ‘staged’ along the length of the narrow centre of the nave of a church like Stratford’s Holy Trinity. Seated in raked tiers on either side, we were supposedly judge and jury in the machinations of Henry’s divorce of Katherine of Aragon and the battle royal between Catholicism in Wolsey and emergent Protestantism in Cranmer. But as, typically, long speeches were exchanged between Wolsey at one end of the aisle and Henry at the other, only those near the centre could have picked up the whole story.

With the first part running on for nearly two hours this was a strain. There was no more than marginal relief from fireworks outside the great West window heralding the rumbustious entry of king and courtiers as randy-ram masqueraders at the ball when Henry first falls for Anne Bullen. The ginger beer handed out for free in the interval was more than welcome, not to mention the almond cookies distributed at the end in celebration ‘of the birth of a Princess to King Henry VIII, 1533’. For, yes, the play concludes with the baptism of Elizabeth — astonishingly in the person of a real live baby — and a crushingly awful encomium by Cranmer about the golden age to come. Although there’s a powerful death scene for Katherine, the best of the speeches are effortful set pieces rather than integrated into a living drama. A shame that both Wolsey and Cranmer were so deficient in the necessary charisma, but Corinne Jaber was excellent as Katherine and Antony Byrne seriously impressive as Henry.