[In the following review of Rose Rage, a two-part adaptation of the Henry VI plays by Edward Hall and Roger Warren, Shore contends that Hall and Warren “largely succeeded in giving us what earlier adaptors, such as William Davenant and Nahum Tate, are routinely derided for having thought possible—Shakespeare improved.”]

Orchestral music from the wings evokes the undulating English countryside, but what emerges on stage as the mist rises is not a vision of green pastures but the iron-mesh cages of a slaughterhouse. Jack-booted abattoir workers loiter threateningly, the lower halves of their faces moulded into feral snouts by protective masks. They stare out into the audience in search of potential troublemakers and busy themselves sharpening knives, the clash of metal gathering in volume until it drowns out the tranquil strains. Then, at a given signal, the meat-packers don top hats and coat tails and transform themselves into the nobility of Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy, gathering around the bier of the dead Henry V to pledge allegiance to his young son. Despite the new outward appearances, their deeds remain essentially those of the abattoir.

The crisis caused by the exhaustion in performance of the main Shakespearean canon has at least had the positive effect of refocusing attention on some of the “minor” works, in particular the early histories, traditionally dismissed as little more than exercises in Tudor propaganda. In fact, as the RSC's recent “This England” cycle demonstrated, the Henry VI plays are by no means unworthy of a place in the corpus, whether or not scholars agree they are wholly the work of Shakespeare himself. Now, in Rose Rage, Edward Hall and Roger Warren have cut and reshaped the trilogy to make a pair of two-hour plays that tell the story of the Wars of the Roses. In the process they have largely succeeded in giving us what earlier adaptors, such as William Davenant and Nahum Tate, are routinely derided for having thought possible—Shakespeare improved.

There are some regrettable losses—Joan La Pucelle is cut in her entirety. But from the opening toast to a beloved dead monarch “too famous to live long”—a curiously modern formulation that makes Henry V sound like James Dean—to the final scene in which the loutish Edward IV staggers drunkenly back to his throne, Hall's and Warren's vision of a state unravelling is never less than thrilling. It may not exactly be Shakespeare—the essentially tripartite structure is more reminiscent of the Oresteia—but Rose Rage is a magnificently dashing piece of theatre.

Hall's production offers a succession of dramatic coups: Gloucester garotted on stage immediately before Henry VI enters to affirm that, as monarch, he will ensure his uncle gets a fair trial; Lord Scales discovered beneath Cade's soapbox before his condemnation to death for speaking Latin; York's infant son strewing his bedroom with garlands of paper crowns as the claims to the throne multiply. The bloodletting is no less inventive: the abattoir workers slash at offal and spatter the stage with red cabbage as the body count rises. Despite this stylized displacement of the actual killings, the violence feels disturbingly authentic, perhaps because, although the victims are for the most part vegetables, the assassins' weapons are obviously real—and wielded with a ferocity which is usually thought inadvisable in ordinary stage simulations.

This is also a highly musical production. Bursts of close-harmony singing accompany the discordant action. Soldiers intone “Da pacem, domine, in diebus nostris” as they march into battle. And as tribal affinities triumph over ideals of political order, the warring parties find themselves chanting “Lancaster” and “York” in mutual defiance, squaring up like boxers at a weigh-in. Throughout the evening, knives, hooks and cleavers lying scattered about the abattoir are used to beat out changes in the tempo of the action.

Although this is essentially a single-concept production—the kingdom as slaughterhouse—it never palls. Michael Pavelka and Ben Ormerod provide atmospheric stage and lighting designs, while the small all-male cast attack their multiple roles with winning vigour. Jonathan McGuinness's Henry VI never quite attains the tragic pathos that might be expected of a dispossessed monarch and Robert Hands's Queen Margaret is more screeching termagant than Machiavellian vulture, but Guy Williams makes a lusty York and Richard Clothier is outstanding as “misshapen Dick”. Best of all is Tony Bell's donkey-jacketed Jack Cade, rapping about the government's failings to the accompaniment of a snare drum and sounding much like Bob Dylan in “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. What better recommendation could there be for a leader of the counter-culture?