[In the following essay, Jackson reviews Michael Boyd's December 2000-January 2001 Royal Shakespeare Company staging of Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 and Richard III. The critic contends that the production's greatest achievement “lay in its evocation of a world turned to chaos.”]

The three parts of Henry VI and Richard III, staged in the Swan Theatre during December 2000 and January 2001, were directed by Michael Boyd and designed by Tom Piper, with lighting by Heather Carson and music by James Jones. These artists should be credited in full, in honor of their achievement in providing a framework—physical, aural, emotional, and intellectual—for the cycle. The staging of these plays has proved, even more than the first part of “This England,” that the Royal Shakespeare Company can make a return to the principles of ensemble nowhere better than in its dealings with the English history plays. In particular, we see once again how effective and coherent these playhouse scripts can be, even without major revisions or additions, in guiding audiences through an exciting saga of ambition, passion, and treachery. In terms of the RSC's history, however, the event is not as reassuring as one might expect or hope—of that, more later.

For the winter season the warm woodwork of the Swan was swathed in matte black cloth, and the acting space was radically rearranged. What is usually the rear of the platform stage was occupied by a bank of seats with a musicians' gallery and a walkway over it. The audience on ground level sat around a cruciform platform, which occupied the center of the space, with its base at the old stage end. Entrances were made from runways on either side of the base of the cross, at each of its arms, and from either side of a bronze-colored metal structure at its head. This provided an area “above” at the level of the first gallery and double entrance doors at stage level. At the opposite end of the platform was a large trap with two hinged flaps. In addition to lights in the normal positions above and to the sides of the central acting area, the gangways behind the seating and the pillars and railings in front of the galleries themselves could be lit. Clusters of diffused lights were complemented by a group of sharply focused lamps suspended about ten feet above the platform, which allowed the lower half of the space to be illuminated like a boxing ring while the upper reaches remained in darkness. The importance of the director's being able to divide the entire theater space vertically and horizontally was revealed when the “rope work” began—sequences in which actors swung or hung from ropes, ladders, and trapezes.

The costumes for the male characters were variations on doublets and breeches, often worn under long-skirted coats or robes. The coloring ranged from black and gray through different shades of red and brown to the blue and gold of the French courts and the glittering brocades affected by Edward IV and his queen. King Henry wore a simpler golden robe of state, varied with a white, high-buttoned coat and a loose, some what monastic garment for his disguise in 3 Henry VI, 3.1 (the keepers' scene.)¹ At the beginning of Richard III the costume coloring was much darker, although Richard, hitherto in black throughout the series, did appear in silver for his coronation. The costume materials were rich and subtly colored. The women's gowns were high-collared and cut close to the body, with skirts flaring down from the mid-thigh (for example, Queen Elizabeth and Lady Bona in 3 Henry VI). Margaret of Anjou and her three ladies appeared at the beginning of 2 Henry VI in costumes replicating in blue the red ones worn previously by La Pucelle and her three “fiends” (played by the same actresses). The Talbot father and son wore doublets and breeches of gray, with a hint of the World War I army uniform in the puttees wound round their lower legs and their poilu-style helmets. They retained these for their various appearances throughout the three parts of Henry VI until the younger actor appeared (in a buff doublet and breeches) as the young Richmond and, in Richard III, the elder appeared first as a pallbearer and then as Lord Stanley. The actors first seen as the gunner and his boy in 1 Henry VI wore red as the various characters they played throughout the cycle.

The costumes (rich, not gaudy), the almost infinitely variable lighting, and the open stage with the various acting levels above it provided splendidly adaptable resources for what was in the strictest sense a visionary production. They enabled the audience to navigate a course through the plays by way of a series of visual parallels that reinforced the sense of repeated actions and situations. In Richard III (which, a colleague observed, was now effectively “4 Henry VI”) the coronation scene and the apparitions in Richard's tent were the culmination of a pattern in which the casualties of history returned after their demise to supervise the fulfillment of the plays' many prophecies and omens, all of which were signaled by subtle, eerie musical phrases. The effect was not so much of doubling as of persistence. As characters died, they were either ceremonially buried in the trap or ushered through the bronze doors into the other world by a red-clad figure, listed in the cast as “the Keeper.” The same actor, Edward Clayton, also played various messengers, the father of Margaret of Anjou, Dick the Butcher (acquiring a cleaver that he retained thereafter on his belt), and the lieutenant of the Tower. Given the curriculum vitae of its guardian and the hell-mouth associations of its bronze doors, it was hardly surprising that in 3.1 of Richard III the young prince should remark “I do not like the Tower of any place” when he was invited to lodge there. Edward Mortimer, already wraithlike when he appeared in prison, watched from above as his nephew was invested as duke of York. After his death and the displaying of his head on the gates of York in 3 Henry VI, 2.2, York stood in his turn above the bronze doors to preside over the battle of Towton: he looked steadily at Henry when the latter entered amid gently falling feathers at the beginning of 2.5. He appeared above again to face down Clarence (standing on the gallery opposite) in 5.1: when Clarence changed sides, crushing his red rose in his hand and letting it fall to the stage below, he seemed to have been shamed into the action by York's gaze. York joined his sons onstage for the battle of Tewkesbury in 5.4 and 5.5. York subsequently appeared at the coronation of Richard III, and in the final battle it was he and his duchess who removed the crown from the defeated usurper's head.

The production's skillful use of repeated and echoed actions was exemplified in the treatment of its most persistent living figure—and the only true survivor of all four plays—Margaret of Anjou. The doubling of this character with Joan of Arc was effected with a little shuffling of the scenes at the end of 1 Henry VI, so that a direct transformation was effected from one French sorceress to another. Joan was tied to a ladder, tortured savagely and “burned,” and descended into the trap (5.3 and 5.4, followed by 5.6, with the appearance of Joan's father omitted); Suffolk then addressed the first of his lines in 5.3 to Margaret as though she were hiding in another room. Margaret made her entrance—in a blue replica of the red dress worn by Joan and the three “fiends”—through the double doors where Joan had entered in her first scene. Regnier (i.e., the red-clad “Keeper” but with a coronet) appeared above before descending to stage level to negotiate for the terms of his daughter's marriage. At the end of Richard III, Margaret lingered even longer than the text indicates to participate in Richard's dreams and witness the triumphs of his nemesis on the battlefield. Joan's mocking laughter at the dying Bedford in 1 Henry VI, when she stood atop the walls of Orleans waving his severed arm in the air (3.5), and at the dead Talbot (4.7) were echoed in Margaret's taunting of York in 3 Henry VI, 1.3, and of the assembled court in Richard III, 1.3. Joan's magic commanded not only the three female fiends who attended her onto the battlefield in 1.5, swords wheeling in the air above their heads, but also the figure of Burgundy, whom she seemed to conjure up so that he might be made to “turn, and turn again” as he crossed the stage at 3.7. When Margaret, York, Somerset, Suffolk, and the cardinal plotted against the duke of Gloucester in 2 Henry VI, 3.1, the conspiracy took on the character of a conjuration, and the oath was emphasized by its musical accompaniment. Finally, in Richard III, Margaret, having at first observed the court from the galleries, came down to the center of the stage and threw down a sack. She emptied its contents of human bones onto the floor and arranged them as if to compose the skeleton of her dead son. Her curses and prophecies thus had the effect of magic spells as well as of a literal representation of the burden of grief—and it was this burden that, “hungry for revenge,” she thrust on the hapless Queen Elizabeth in 4.4.

The elder and younger Talbot returned again and again after their deaths. They were visible alongside the English army just as Charles the Dauphin comforted himself with the reflection “I trust the ghost of Talbot is not there” (1 Henry VI, 5.2.16). Emerging from the trap as the spirits summoned for the duchess of Gloucester in 2 Henry VI, 1.4, they reenacted the scene of the son's death (slung Icarus-like above the stage) as the agonized father uttered the prophecies. They then became the pirates who captured and killed Suffolk in 4.1, with the elder Talbot (as lieutenant) pouring contempt on his prisoner, blaming him for the parlous state of the realm, and promising him death—“Thy lips that kissed the Queen shall sweep the ground.” In their gray costumes they also represented both the son who has killed his father and the father who has killed his son, and finally they achieved a kind of apotheosis as Richmond and Stanley. Whereas Margaret/Joan, the duke of York, and the earl of Mortimer reappeared to witness the playing-out of their dynastic ambitions, the Talbots in their various reincarnations figured as representatives of martial virtue and patriotic feeling, betrayed by the frenzy of self-interest unleashed in the first play but ultimately triumphant at the conclusion of the cycle.

Other ghostly returns on the part of virtuous characters included the duke of Gloucester's return to hold down the dying cardinal's arms (preventing him from making a sign of repentance) and then hauling up the corpse to hang over the stage as a witness of the ensuing scene. Gloucester also appeared leading his dead enemies, a decapitated Suffolk and the cardinal, around the stage during the scene of Jack Cade's rebellion. In 1 Henry VI, 3.1, Bedford delivered his dying speech and then—now effectively a ghost—opened the trap to unleash the forces that finally take Orleans.

These reappearing figures helped to endow many of the events of the first three plays with a visionary quality, which was reinforced by patterns of staging and symbolic stage properties. The throne, a simple wooden box, was first seen occupied by Mortimer in 2.5 and then by Henry in the court scene that immediately follows (3.1)—in which the king remained silent and was ignored for 64 lines while the nobles argued. The wounded Bedford, another representative of English virtue, was carried to it in the next scene. In 2 Henry VI, Jack Cade struck it (as London Stone) and then stood on it—although his preferred seat was a trapeze. It was of course occupied by York in the first scene of 3 Henry VI and featured once again as the king's seat in the Tower (echoing Mortimer's prison scene) in 5.6. For his own coronation Richard III had evidently commissioned something more elaborate—a three-stepped throne, placed in front of the bronze doors—and he perched on it with a sense of gleefully achieved elevation. The throne was not the only means by which kingly status was conferred. There was a repeated pattern of ceremonial entrances, such as those in the first scene of 2 Henry VI and the entry of Edward with his new queen in 4.1 of 3 Henry VI. The final scene of the three Henry VI plays was effectively an interrupted version of this pattern: Edward and Elizabeth, splendidly robed, entered from the bronze doors to a stage dominated by a large pool of blood that had welled from the dying Henry's corpse in the preceding scene. In some scenes the court entered on the gallery above the seating at the “foot” of the cross-shaped platform; on occasion descent from this position was significant. Thus during the arraignment of the duchess of Gloucester (2 Henry VI, 2.3), Henry came down to speak mildly to the duke and receive his staff of office, while Margaret remained haughtily above. (At the end of the scene, for the trial by combat of the master and his apprentice, the court moved to a “royal box” over the bronze doors.) A similar pattern was adopted for the Parliament scene at the beginning of Act 3.

Battles, sieges, and assaults were handled with impressive energy and variety, sometimes using scaling ladders and ropes, often with phalanxes of opposing forces lined up at either end of the stage and advancing to pounding percussion amid swathes of mist. The production did not employ a council table as a recurring symbol and property—a notable feature of the 1964 Wars of the Roses cycle—but simply marked the council scenes by the position of the participants. The only other large stage property was the bed on which the cardinal died in Act 3 of 2 Henry VI. The ghost of Gloucester pushed this out onto the stage from the bronze doors. Positioned over the trap, it became the ship's hold from which the pirates emerged in the next scene. Finally it was pulled off again, attached to a billowing drape that became a tunnel through which Suffolk was led to his death—and, implicitly, to the fate awaiting him in the afterlife.

Smaller hand-properties carried a similar symbolic charge. A lone feather fell from the sky in 1 Henry VI during Joan's first combat with Talbot, and then a flurry of red feathers descended when Salisbury and Gargrave were mortally wounded in 2.4. Subsequent showers of feathers occurred in other battles, but a single feather was also carried through the plays by Henry—together with a pebble—as a sign of kingly authority. The pebbles had first been seen when Mortimer bequeathed his struggle—and a handful of stones—to York, who subsequently emptied a bag of them onto the stage and arranged them to illustrate his family tree and his claim to the crown in 2 Henry VI, 2.2. Henry walked through the shower of feathers (of both colors) during the battle of Towton in 3 Henry VI and was holding a single feather and a pebble when he was accosted by the keepers in 3.1. When he encountered the young Richmond in 4.6, he gave him a feather in token of his prophecy. In Richard III, 3.1, the young duke of York arrived in London with a bag containing one white feather and seven stones, which he arranged on the ground to form a cross. The final image of this series was provided by the ghosts of the two princes during Richard III's nightmare: they shook large pillows in front of their faces, showering feathers onto the king below. The white and red roses, first seen descending from above in the Temple Garden scene (1 Henry VI, 2.4) began as real-looking properties but soon became enamel badges. Although the crown featured of course in each successive king's ambitions and on his head, it was not charged with the same significance as it had been in the Summer Festival's productions of Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, and Henry V. The most interesting moment of stage business involving it came in the first scene of 3 Henry VI. After some two hundred lines of the peers' wrangling yet again over his sovereignty, the king departed, leaving the crown behind on the throne. Exeter retrieved it, making his exit line a wry expression of forlorn hope—“And I, I hope, shall reconcile them all.”²

The arrangement of the space, the technical resources, and the vocabulary of symbolism were impressively systematic and consistent, but they also provided the necessary framework for a production rich in human passions and spectacle. It is important not to lose sight of the emotional power of the productions, or the sensuous—at times visceral—effect of the staging. The first play focused on the struggle for France, the second on dynastic ambition and a sense of grievance fueling conspiracy, and the third on another, more desperate version of the struggle for possession and inheritance. (In the program the parts were subtitled The War against France, England's Fall, and The Chaos.) As usual when it is played in this sequence, Richard III, despite its stronger sense of tragic organization and the centrality of the title character, seemed less a bravura melodrama and more a continuation by other means of the three parts of Henry VI.

In this context there is no danger of the audience's being unaware of the sins of those who become Richard's victims, or the impact of the murders of Rutland and the Prince of Wales. Aidan McArdle, as Richard of Gloucester, emerged in the Yorkist saga as a sardonic, bustling participant in the feud. His avowals of personal ambition in 3 Henry VI echoed the earlier speeches of his father, with egoism replacing dynastic grievance as a conscious motivation. Margaret of Anjou had foreshadowed his sexual dynamism and charisma, and his wooing of Lady Anne had the character of a spell—combined with outright sexual assault as he pushed her up against the bronze doors. The action was echoed in his unsuccessful but equally physical wooing of Elizabeth for her daughter's hand. The conclusion of 3 Henry VI, seeming to promise the end of “sour annoy,” had Richard holding the infant prince, chucking the child under the chin and making babyish burbling sounds, then suddenly looking up and saying “Now” as the lights snapped out. The final play began with Richard alone at centerstage under fierce white lighting, with no reprise of the jauntiness of the preceding play's final moment and no sense of any remaining optimism. This Richard enjoyed his villainy but not grossly. While the impertinent young York, in 2.4, limped grotesquely round the stage to imitate his uncle, Richard remained stock still; and there was no melodramatic revelation of his displeasure. Individual triumphs were relished, including his condemnation of Hastings and the fooling of the mayor and aldermen (Richard appeared above the bronze doors in a white coat like Henry VI's, with a red-clad priest on either side). The high point, however, seemed to be the coronation. This was a vision of obeisance, with all Richard's earlier victims, together with his father and Warwick, doing homage to him. The culminating triumph was Henry VI's prostrating himself, arms spread wide, before Richard's throne. The ghosts departed, and the mortals were left to an edgy cocktail party, wandering round the stage and the auditorium with wine cups in their hands while Richard solicited Buckingham's help in disposing of the princes in the Tower. The flattering vision of his coronation was in fact a dress rehearsal for the nightmare on the eve of battle, when Richard would be made to suffer the tortures he had inflicted on others (including being drowned in malmsey) while Richmond knelt at the other end of the stage to be comforted by Richard's assailants and accusers. Like the conclusion of the play, in which Richard's father and mother uncrowned him and Henry VI led him off to the next world, this was an episode richly prepared for by the preceding twelve hours of drama.

The production's greatest interpretive achievement, however, lay in its evocation of a world turned to chaos. The program cover reproduced a detail from Hieronymus Bosch's “Garden of Earthly Delights,” invoking a grotesque vision of eternal punishment. The solemn ritual of the funeral of Henry V gave way to such macabre spectacles as the torture of Joan of Arc, the death of Cardinal Beaufort, and the topsy-turvydom of Cade's rebellion, which combined carnival absurdity with savagery. The use of ropes, swings, and ladders, particularly in the battle of Towton, filled the theater with writhing, agonized bodies in a way that earthbound conflict could not have achieved. Physical cruelty was represented both by stylized imagery—as in the cradling of Suffolk's head by Margaret—and by bloody literalism in the slaughter of Rutland and Prince Edward, the mutilation of Clifford's body (3 Henry VI, 2.6), and the pool of blood spreading across the stage from Henry's corpse. The production not only accommodated but enhanced the plays' stylized passages. A notable instance were the fathers and sons of 3 Henry VI, 2.5: it seemed entirely appropriate for Keith Bartlett and Sam Troughton, having played the elder and younger Talbots, to reappear here as both pairs.

Throughout the sequence, powerfully rendered human situations had been embedded in this way in a context of symbolism and significance. In 3 Henry VI, 1.3, the death of Rutland was made more affecting by his presence in the preceding scene, where he sang a Latin hymn while York played the lute: the emotional and rhetorical power of the death scene was enhanced simply and tellingly. Margaret and Suffolk said their farewells across the whole length of the stage: when she appeared with his head in 2 Henry VI, 4.4, she was singing softly and cradling the head of the actor himself, his body enveloped in her black gown. (Apart from a few bagged specimens, most of the severed heads were “played” in a similar manner, giving the dead characters an immediate touch of the afterlife.) In Richard III, 4.4, the laments of Margaret, the queen, and the duchess of York seemed to sum up the accumulated bitterness and anguish of victims in the whole cycle. Clive Wood was a forceful York: passionate and earnest in his exposition of his right to the throne, even after death his imposing appearance made him more formidable than his sons. …

The staging of the production allowed—in fact, obliged—the actors to address all the soliloquies and most of the passages of argument directly to the audience. As King Henry, David Oyewolo had a commanding stillness and softly spoken insistence on righteousness, without hackneyed outward signs of being “holy Harry.” He moved with dignified simplicity into prophetic mode to give his blessing to the young Richmond in 4.7 of 3 Henry VI, and in his death scene he confronted Richard of Gloucester calmly. His meditation on the relative values of the king's life and the shepherd's (3 Henry VI, 2.5) was delivered as an earnest persuasion to the audience. “Oh yes it doth,” he urged us, adding “a thousandfold it doth” (l. 46) just in case anyone doubted that the hawthorn bush might not afford a sweeter shade than a rich embroidered canopy. On a more mundane and ethically much lower level, King Edward was a smug, lazily lascivious monarch. He and Lady Elizabeth Grey (the elegant Elaine Pyke) took evident pleasure in their wooing scene, a glimmer of seemingly amiable (if amoral) humor soon chilled by Richard of Gloucester's “Would he were wasted, marrow, bones and all” (3.2.125). After the clamorous, rawly ambitious, and passionate Joan and Margaret of Fiona Bell …, this Elizabeth seemed an altogether less threatening figure. Compared with the duchess of Auvergne and the ambitious duchess of Gloucester, she was a less strident enchanter or would-be imprisoner of men. While Warwick was wooing on the king's behalf by showing King Lewis and Lady Bona an image of her suitor in a golden picture frame (lowered from above with the actor himself in it), the newly chosen queen walked in from the doors behind him and stood alongside Edward with smiling complacency. She was led by her ambitions for herself and her family (whom she was soon installing in positions of favor) and an evident relish for the trappings of majesty—and then suddenly the events of Richard III shipwrecked and tipped her into tragedy. Margaret, seasoned by a career of inflicting and receiving grief, seemed in her element there.

The deployment of the ensemble across the various roles of the four plays was often effective even when no symbolic correspondence or continuity was intended. Duke Humphrey (Richard Corderey), at first a confidently commanding presence in voice and stature, was revealed as vulnerable and humane in the hour of his wife's disgrace: their parting was especially moving. In Richard III the same actor appeared as Buckingham, an urbanely overconfident ally and victim—not so much doubling as the pointing up of a similarity between two authoritative and powerful magnates. As Suffolk in the first two parts of Henry VI, Richard Dillane was suave, plausible, and self-consciously dashing, the credible object of Margaret's passion. When he appeared as Rivers in the third part and Richard III, there was no direct connection but an echo of the earlier character's persona in the figure of the queen's newly promoted kinsman. Like the simple but immensely valuable fact of the company's having worked together so much—that seemingly instinctive sense of each other's physical presence—this was an advantage only ensemble work can give.

The sequence allowed actors to rehearse and play along with the same production team, sharing and understanding clearly identified aims and able to develop working relationships over a period of months. It was the kind of work the RSC was launched to accomplish—and, ironically, we were told that it was only possible on this occasion through substantial funding from American sources. While being thankful to the University of Michigan for doing us this service, it is hard not to be disturbed by the company's failure to achieve it without such offshore funding. This second part of “This England,” while exemplifying ensemble virtues the company too often seems to have lost, was effectively a road show passing through Stratford, pausing in Ann Arbor, and completing its run at London's Young Vic. Plans announced by the RSC in June 2001 which indicate that productions will no longer be identified with a specific location or calendar date—this suggests the company will not schedule coherent and regular Stratford or London seasons—are all the more dismaying in this light. At the same time, after years of exciting productivity in its two incarnations The Other Place will effectively cease to function as a theater. (The “academy” planned for 2002 hardly makes up for this loss.) Moreover, the company's production departments at Stratford will be scaled down; in other words, there will be many losses of experienced staff and reduced capacity for originating productions here. Company announcements and public relations exercises represent these radical steps as a sign of progress and renewed artistic vision, but it seems like a further retreat from the ideals that once made the RSC (in company-speak) a reliable brand name. On a bread-and-butter level, a degree of predictability in the product and its scheduling is vital to the encouragement of a base of recurrent playgoers, especially where (as in Stratford) the passing trade is, well, mostly passing. Such enthusiasts, especially those who travel long distances, need to know when productions will happen and what they might be. Of course there will continue to be plenty of good Shakespeare in the town, and some of it will no doubt be exciting; but what of the company's identity? The artistic director Adrian Noble has let it be known that it is people, not buildings, that count. “Despite continual change,” says a mission statement in the current Swan Theatre program, “the RSC today is still at heart an ensemble company, and the continuation of this great tradition informs the work of all its members. Directors, actors, dramatists and theatre practitioners all collaborate in the creation of the RSC's distinctive and unmistakable approach to theatre.” But then the same program note tells us that The Other Place “explores Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre alongside experimental and new work.” Perhaps the writer hadn't noticed that the studio theater's current season—an excellent one—consists in its entirety of three new plays by living authors? She or he certainly didn't know what the artistic management had up its sleeve for next season, let alone the even more sweeping changes in the theaters themselves to be announced this autumn. Ironically, the Swan program in question is that for Jubilee, a new work by Peter Barnes dealing with David Garrick and the beginnings of the Shakespeare industry. Early in the play Adrian Noble's predecessors as artistic director of the RSC—Peter Hall, Trevor Nunn, and Terry Hands—visit the actor in a dream to plead with him to take on the celebrations that will put Stratford on the map and secure their future.

Notes

1. Act and scene references in this review follow those in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford UP, 1986). The three Henry VI plays are referred to by the conventional part numbers adopted in the production, rather than by the Oxford editors' preferred titles.

2. Unscholarly, uncritical footnote for posterity: the Prince of Wales (a habitual private visitor to the theater) and Camilla Parker-Bowles attended the performance of Richard III on Saint Valentine's Day 2001, sitting diagonally opposite me on the ground floor (D17 and D18, I think). The party arrived once we were all seated and effected a quick retreat to the “Reading Room” as soon as the lights went up again. As the one member of the audience likely to get to wear the English crown, he seemed to take particular interest in the proceedings. She appeared to nod off occasionally during the talkier bits. Being predominantly a British audience, we all pretended they weren't there. Posterity may also like to know that audiences in Warwickshire in 2000-2001 were still amused by rude remarks about the French: “'Tis better losing France than trusting France” (3 Henry VI, 4.1.42) never failed to elicit a subdued but appreciative chuckle. Plus ça change. …