[In the following excerpted review, Smallwood comments on the excellently staged, designed, and performed Royal Shakespeare Company production of Henry VIII directed by Gregory Doran.]

Gregory Doran's RSC production of Henry VIII at the Swan Theatre made splendid use of that exciting space. Robert Jones's simple and effective set had large double doors upstage, beneath a gallery where the musicians sat, with the words ‘All is True’ engraved across them in large roman capitals. The doors opened at intervals through the play (thus obscuring their ominous legend) for its great public shows to spill onto the stage: a version of the Field of the Cloth of Gold at the beginning, bass drum thudding, the entire company singing ‘Deo Gratias’, and a resplendent Henry trucked down stage astride a golden horse; the elaborate coronation procession for Anne Boleyn in her golden robe; and the christening at the end, Henry again trucked in, enthroned, more of ‘Deo Gratias’ in chorus, lots more gold, drumbeats and pomp, and a little bundle (palpably not a baby) to prophesy over. It was all ‘sufficient’, as Sir Henry Wotton wrote about that fateful early performance, ‘to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous’—and that was clearly the intention, for as each of these glamorous, carefully orchestrated, public manifestations of power concluded, it was ironically undercut. In the earlier instances this was achieved by having the pieces withdrawn again upstage behind the doors, like so many toys being put back in the cupboard, as the real power play of sordid political manoeuvring took over the space again and the label ‘All is True’ (for truth is a malleable political commodity) returned; and at the finale, as Paul Jesson's Henry stood there for what seemed an interminable time, trying desperately to keep the paternal beam on his cheeks (and we were surely meant to be aware of the actorly effort), and gold confetti fell from the roof, we were suddenly aware that Anne Boleyn (Claire Marchionne) had appeared at his left, her fingers tremblingly touching the neck that was soon to be severed by the executioner's axe—a victim, like so many others we had met, of the monarchy whose continuance we had just been invited to celebrate.

The production's juxtaposition of these gaudy power shows with the everyday world of intrigue and jostling for position around the King was extremely effective. In contrast to the golden shows, the costumes in other scenes were mostly in subdued colours, greys, blacks, dark greens, a world in which the crimson robe and biretta of Ian Hogg's Wolsey, his podgy features and peering little eyes interrupting the silken sleekness, shone out like a beacon. This was a cardinal who took his power for granted and carried it without affectation, who spoke his native Suffolk accent plain and bluntly, who seemed strangely plausible when he came to plead with Queen Katherine to give her cause over to the King, and who accepted the collapse of his power (an event that is a lesson to us all in the perils of misfiling) with gently amused detachment.

His principal adversary, Queen Katherine, pulled, in Jane Lapotaire's excellent performance, and exactly as the authors must have intended, most of the audience's sympathy in her direction. She spoke with a slight Spanish accent, which marked her off as the ‘stranger’ which she so often feels herself to be, and moved through the play with the sort of commanding dignity which made her frequent references to herself as a ‘poor weak woman’ seem more than usually ironic. The trial scene was played as if the entire auditorium were the clergy and lawyers assembled at the Blackfriars and she commanded the space superbly in her impassioned self-defence, quite rightly upstaging Henry who sat on his stool centre stage staring glumly in front of him. The scene with her women—‘you find me here part of a housewife’—surrounded by the linen they are engaged in mending, took the singing of ‘Orpheus with his Lute’ from sedate madrigal style gently into Spanish rhythms and finally into flamenco dance, each of the women and, last of all, hesitantly, Katherine herself, joining in. It seemed to me a legitimate, and poignant, reminder of her native country which she now feels is her sole hope of comfort, before the arrival of Wolsey reasserts the English, and the male, hegemony. For much of this scene the director had Anne Boleyn on stage as one of Katherine's women, playing the lute for the song, sitting there through much of the interview with the cardinals, the youthful beauty of her silent presence creating further pain for the ageing Queen. For her final scene Katherine was stooped and pale, appearing (it was a drab, loose gown that did it, replacing the court dress of earlier scenes) emaciated and frail, as if she had lost half her body-weight since we last saw her. The problem of staging her vision was avoided by reducing it to a simple beam of ethereal light, a cop-out that, in an intimate space like the Swan, has much theatrical discretion in its favour. A final, pathetic moment of bitterness came, after she had been carried out to die, when Caputius (Rex Obano) ripped up the letter whose contents she had just been at such pains to recount, as if aware of the futility of expecting Henry to take the slightest notice of it.

Paul Jesson's Henry, round-faced, crew-cut, ebullient, was an admirably enigmatic creation—and a triumph for the costume department, which managed to make him seem half as wide again across the shoulders as anyone else on stage (or in Tudor England). His unquestioning trust in Wolsey in the early stages might have been mental laziness, or a sort of boyish naivety; it did not seem at all incompatible with an obvious affection for Queen Katherine, whose hand he took, tenderly and comfortingly, as they sat together to hear the Surveyor speak of the possibility of his dying ‘without issue’. ‘Go thy ways, Kate’, he shouted with Petruccio-like enthusiasm at the end of her speech in the trial scene, and if we hadn't already heard Suffolk speak of his conscience having ‘crept too near another lady’, his protestations of love for her, and of tenderness of conscience in himself, would have been perfectly believable, for Jesson presented them straightforwardly and at their face value—for (rightly I'm sure in this play) this was a performance that played every scene for what it was worth, without worrying too much about consistency. ‘Creeping’ was not, in any case, the word that would have come to mind to describe Henry's first approach to Anne Boleyn in this production, for the masquers who arrived at Wolsey's party were hardly ‘shepherds’, as the Folio proposes. They were satyrs whose masculinity stood jauntily erect before them, sweeping the women into a dance that threatened rape, asserting the ruthless male dominance of this world of Henry's court, a dominance to which Anne Boleyn had to succumb with as good a grace as she could muster as Henry directed her to the ‘next chamber’ (down through the trapdoor) that Wolsey had so thoughtfully provided for the fulfilment of the King's desires. And yet, for all the role's casual self-esteem and bullying self-assertion, for all the unthinking, unquestioning acceptance of absolute power, Jesson never allowed us the easy route to outright dislike of the man, for he, like the rest, was seen to be driven by the dictates of the power game, by the inexorable requirement that he beget an heir to continue the dynasty of which he is but the temporary representative. The expression of anguish on his face at the news that Anne's child was, after all, a girl, presented him, too, as the victim of history, so that all the carefully orchestrated enthusiasm at the christening came to seem like just another public performance. ‘As I have made ye one, lords, one remain’, he said fiercely at the end of the council scene, and added, thoughtfully, ‘So I grow stronger, you more honour gain’. It was as if he recognized, grimly and bitterly, that now, at this stage in the reign, after the deaths and executions of so many who had served him in the past, it was only the strength of his grip on power that mattered; the ‘honour’ was a superfluity that others might squabble over if they liked. This was an excellent performance at the centre of a thoughtful and impressive production.