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.
Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company brought a refreshingly American buzz to Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Swan. Or maybe one should say ‘Indian’, for director Michael Kahn’s idea was that love should be foresworn by the young bucks at an ashram on which they descend (in the wake of the Beatles) as a rock band seeking the sitar and ascetic enlightenment. Scarcely are they robed and festooned with garlands than they’re invaded by the arrival on yellow, blue and orange Vespas of the Princess of France and her stunningly glamorous companions, making a stopover on their tour of the subcontinent. It’s all deliciously tongue-in-cheek and set an amusing scene for the riot of verbal and emotional sophistry that’s the heart of this exquisitely anti-intellectual comedy.
The doyen of American commentators on Shakespeare, Harold Bloom, complains that he has yet to see a satisfactory production. It could be that this would be the one for him. It pays him the back-handed compliment of creating the pedantic schoolmaster Holofernes in his spitting image, as becomes explicit when a placard credits the ‘pageant of the Nine Worthies’ to ‘Harold Holofernes, author of Shakespeare Loves Me’. If this doesn’t excite your curiosity about Bloom and his passionately opinionated Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1999), nothing will. The play’s other great fantastical invention, Don Armado, was played, in outrageous zebra-striped attire and with eye-popping aplomb and razor-sharp timing, by Geraint Wyn Davies.
As the presiding guru (aka the King of Navarre), Amir Arison was an irresistible picture of self-congratulatory gravitas collapsing into infantile exultation as he falls for the Princess. His rock-band guests had less far to fall. Instruction in the sitar and tabla can’t have gone too well, for they couldn’t wait to return to their guitars and drum-kit for noisy celebration of their new loves. You could object that the sonnet-lyrics were somewhat mangled in the process, and that Hank Stratton’s Berowne, the saving brains of the band, should have kept a cooler distance, but these performances had the edge over those of the girls who must have reckoned they had such great legs, luxuriant hair and sexy outfits that they didn’t need to trouble overmuch with their words. Never mind, this was a wonderful show and earned a rapturous reception.
What’s to do about Troilus and Cressida, which arrived in Stratford from the Edinburgh Festival? An exceedingly sour apple in Shakespeare’s barrel, its rare stage appearances are presumably attended by those hoping that some sense can be made of its relentlessly black vision: the futility of the Trojan war, the infidelity of Cressida, the pathetic fidelity of Troilus, the monstrous murder of Hector by Achilles, the ramblings of Ulysses and the gleeful shrieking of the pox-ridden Thersites that all’s nothing but ‘wars and lechery’. My colleague Lloyd Evans (19 August) reckons the play needs a rewrite. It’s certainly crying out for shameless re-interpretation for the stage. Maybe a musical version in the style of Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène? But director Peter Stein is so ernsthaft that little saving humour was mined from the oiled muscularity of the Trojans, or the down-and-outness of the Greeks. The play seemed lost on the large stage of the RST, as becalmed as its subject matter and the mystery of how Shakespeare came to write it.
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