[In the following review of Michael Boyd's 2001 Royal Shakespeare Company staging of Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3, Duncan-Jones admires the overall production, but finds fault with the lagging pace and confusing complications of Part 2.]

In a programme note to the RSC's Henry VI trilogy, Lisa Jardine connects the plays with Elizabeth I's “twilight years … the late 1590s”. The evidence is, however, that they belong to the first eighteen months of the 1590s. These were not twilight but golden years, both for Queen Elizabeth and for a high-flying “upstart crow” from the West Midlands. In a blaze of post-Armada triumphalism, the Queen's own players were touring up and down the country with such swashbuckling and xenophobic history plays as The Troublesome Reign of King John and The Famous Victories of Henry V. Meanwhile in London, or rather in Southwark, players who enjoyed Ferdinando Stanley's patronage attracted huge success with “harey the vi” at the Rose Theatre—a success which excited the envious wrath of established graduate playwrights such as Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe. On March 7, 1592, for instance, “harey the vi” brought £3 profit to the Rose's owner, Philip Henslowe, while a play by Greene performed the following day brought him only seven shillings. The popular success of the Henry VI cycle was chronicled by Nashe in a printed work dedicated to Ferdinando Stanley after severe plague had closed the public theatres in the summer of 1592.

How would it have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to think that after he had lien two hundred years in his tomb, he should triumph again on the stage, and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times)?

Later still in that same year, the cycle's poet was to be caricatured in a line adapted from the third play in the sequence, his “Tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide”, and vilified as the pushy “shake-scene” who “supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you”.

It is entirely appropriate that it was Henry VI that drew Shakespeare into a jealous quarrel between writers competing for the sustaining crumbs of aristocratic patronage, for the plays themselves offer an epic chronicle of men competing, often, for crumbs of power that seem barely to exist outside their imaginations. In Michael Boyd's ambitious and marvellously coherent production, this is made immediately apparent. Within seconds of the stately descent of Henry V's stiff corpse into the bowels of the understage, we witness a stand-up row between Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (a physically commanding, often witty performance by Richard Cordery) and the fascinatingly malevolent and faintly camp prelate, Henry Beaufort (Christopher Ettridge). This is no more than a gentle warm-up for Gloucester's violent assault on the Tower of London in Scene Three. Here, the stage is indeed “shaken” by Gloucester's men's noisy battery on the bronze metal gates that represent a succession of cities and fortresses, while “ambitious Humphrey” and the “peeled priest” Beaufort indulge in childish name-calling, with some beard-tweaking that struck me as appropriately reminiscent of the Nashe-Harvey quarrel. The Swan has been successfully converted into an in-the-round playing space in which the anger of warring characters, whether verbal or physical, is concentrated to almost palpable savagery, and where their daredevil stunts with ropes, pulleys and ladders representing assault, battery and, increasingly, dangling death, are more compelling than any circus.

Even characters who are trying to calm things down often do so furiously. The exception is the touchingly naive and well-meaning King (David Oyelowo), whom we see making all the wrong decisions out of pure innocence. He looks every inch the young boy that he should be in Part One—a boy actor may have played the part at the Rose. He is no performer of power roles, and the tears that we so often see him shed can never be suspected of being the “artificial” ones with which the histrionic Machiavel Richard, in Part Three, promises to wet his cheeks. Henry's emotional and physical collapse on learning of the death of his uncle and Protector in Part Two is entirely convincing. For the boy who never knew his father, “Good” Duke Humphrey had been at once father, tutor and deputy, and Henry never outgrows the sustaining pleasure in studious piety that he learned at Humphrey's knee. Only by Part Three, much too late, does he learn to stand alone, gaining sharper awareness both of the wicked ways of the world and of his own limitations. As an introspective pacifist, he knows he can play no part in the Battle of Towton:

Margaret my queen and Clifford too
Have chid me from the battle, swearing both
They prosper best of all when I am thence.

Oyelowo is consistent in his depiction of the unalterably contained “inner” bent of Henry's personality, which also makes sense of one of the text's puzzles, the question of whether the King ever notices that Suffolk is his Queen's lover. Perhaps he knows; perhaps he doesn't; either way, there is no danger that we shall ridicule him as a cuckold, for his preoccupations are evidently above and beyond sexuality.

Part One, the play celebrated by Nashe in 1592 for its reanimation of the tragedy of “brave Talbot”, is once again the most powerful of the three. It is here that Tom Piper's designs can be most fully enjoyed, with their incorporation of such ingenious small conceits as a white feather falling on the shoulder of the foppish Dauphin (Aidan McArdle) during his sexually charged sword-fight with Joan la Pucelle (Fiona Bell) as well as a splendid array of colour-coded costume designs. Lavish blue streamers transform the stage into the French court, where pampered courtiers parade their embroidered blue and gold costumes with swishing inserts of Fortuny pleats while being offered wine from golden goblets. Just as swiftly, the stage can become the Temple Garden, with sprays of red and white roses appearing at shoulder height. The perpetual variety of both visual style and of rhetorical tone makes this play a delight.

There is a surprising amount of humour, and not all of it is found in scenes in which we are invited to laugh at the fickle and cowardly French. Near the end, the complex asides of Suffolk (Richard Dillane) and Margaret of Anjou (Fiona Bell, again) during their first meeting charge the stage with a surprisingly electric mixture of erotic excitement and ambition. And as “brave Talbot” himself, Keith Bartlett is a tough and pugnacious fighting machine. The tragedy of his reunion with the son and namesake (Sam Troughton) whom he has not seen for seven years is devastating. It leads us, paradoxically, to one of the most “normal” images of familial love in the whole cycle. Desperate to persuade his son not to risk his life, Talbot prophesies that “In thee thy mother dies”. In the next scene, the mortally wounded father has the dead son presented to him in a swinging cradle with the words “lo where your son is borne”, and clasps him in death as if he were his newborn child. But young John Talbot has been “born” only into military heroism, which, with authentic Shakespearian ambivalence, is both celebrated and questioned.

Things fall apart somewhat in Part Two, and not just because of complex shifts of power between the parties of Lancaster and York. While Fiona Bell makes an effective transition from a coolly sinister Joan to a sexily ruthless Margaret in the preceding play, she lacks the range, either in voice or imagination, to develop much further. She neither ages nor matures, and modern audiences will not like her approximation to a shrewish stereotype. Her shrewishness also throws the later plays off kilter, making it too easy for Richard Duke of York (a mesmerizing performance by Clive Wood) to win our sympathy as the wronged and embittered claimant to the throne. Act Two, Scene Two, in which York maps out his complicated family tree with the assistance of a bag of large pebbles, is wonderful, and must work particularly well when seen from the upper balcony. Physical movement, timing and delivery of verse are excellent—this trilogy must be one of the best pieces of ensemble playing in the RSC's history. But the middle play is made needlessly confusing and far too long, at three and a half hours, by some gratuitous additions. As in Boyd's RSC Romeo and Juliet, major characters don't stay dead once killed, but roam across the stage as menacing figures of retribution. The percentage of every audience which has not read the play—which in the case of Henry VI must be high—will often be confused and misled. Rather than understanding that Suffolk, who has been foretold death by water, is killed on shipboard by ransom-hungry sailors, they may form the impression that he is killed by the (long dead) Talbot in a sort of box. Nor does the already crowded bustle of the scenes of Jack Cade's rebellion (a grinning Jake Nightingale who is smugly sure that he can “swing” it) require the presence of the figures of the dead Gloucester, Beaufort and a headless Suffolk egging on the mob. There are also pointless verbal additions throughout, such as bits of religious chanting and, in Part Two, the beginning of Shakespeare's Sonnet 74 chanted by Margaret and the severed head of her lover.

We may feel by Part Three that we have supped full of horrors. Fortunately, both pace and clarity pick up to whet our appetites for one more feast of death. The long rhetorical showdown between Margaret and York in Act One, Scene Four is as powerful as I have ever seen it, although, because of the strength of Clive Wood's presence and physique, Margaret's crowning of the dying man with a paper crown increases his dignity rather than undercutting it, as does Margaret's punning black joke:

Off with his head and set it on York gates
So York may overlook the town of York

The wooing of Lady Grey (Elaine Pyke) by the lustful King Edward (Tom Beard) reintroduces some humour, as, in a nastier vein, does the new Duke of Gloucester (Aidan McArdle again), who is speedily characterized by others as a true Demon King. Clarence's remark that he has gone “To make a bloody supper in the Tower”, capped by Edward's that “He's sudden if a thing comes in his head”, raises laughter, yet leaves us free to blench at the closing horror of his knifing of the saintly Henry. Having him cradle the Queen's baby during the closing seconds works beautifully as a lead-in to Richard III, which opens in London in April.