[In the essay below, Marks reviews the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1998 production of Henry VIII directed by Gregory Doran. He praises the traditional staging of the play and comments on the production's pageantry, including the bejeweled set and gold-flecked costumes.]

The English King's gilded throne positively shimmers at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, but gold is not all that glisters in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Henry VIII. Distinguished by the sparkling portrayals of Paul Jesson as Henry and Jane Lapotaire as the first of his six wives, Katherine of Aragon, this superb new staging brings out just about all the luster one could hope for in what has always been considered one of Shakespeare's lesser history plays.

The production, which opened on Tuesday night and runs through Sunday at the Majestic Theater, is an intimate, traditionalist treatment that goes in for none of the text alteration or contemporary commentary of the company's controversial new Hamlet. Under Gregory Doran's crisp, elegant direction, Henry VIII is played mercifully straight. Which means it pays homage to all the pageantry, posturing and human drama that drive this odd piece of monarchist propaganda, which by dint of its cheerleading is no doubt one of the most blatant early examples of political spin.

There is much here to please the eye, from the play's initial moments, when the King arrives on a gilt-edged stallion, surrounded by his court, until the final tableau, when his second wife, Anne Boleyn (Claire Marchionne), joins him at a celebration, nervously touching her throat in a nifty foreshadowing of the fate that awaits her.

This is a Henry VIII meant to impress with both the trappings and the traps associated with royal power. Robert Jones's bejeweled set, which unfolds like the pages of an illuminated manuscript, adorned by Gill Ross's gold-flecked costumes, is a reminder that with the reigns of Henry VIII, creator of the Church of England, and, after Mary, his second daughter, Elizabeth I (Shakespeare's benefactor), England was itself embarking on a golden age.

Still, for all its finery, Mr. Doran's Henry VIII is notable chiefly for the zoom lens it trains on the play's central characters, Henry, Katherine and Cardinal Wolsey (Ian Hogg), the overreaching prelate-politician whose downfall is a counterpoint in the story to the martyrdom of Katherine, the pious wife Henry casts aside in hopes of producing a male heir with Anne. Performed with an extremely economical total of 19 cast members, who double and triple in roles, the production never permits its leading players to drown in the pomp, as has happened in some versions of this rarely revived work.

In contrast to modern interpretations of the story of Henry, from The Six Wives of Henry VIII to Anne of the Thousand Days, which tend to emphasize the sovereign's brutal machinations and the melodrama in his domestic affairs, Shakespeare's Henry VIII concentrates on the power plays of which Henry was always the master.

With its repetitive plot, unremarkable poetry and sanitized portrait of Henry, this is not the most absorbing of history plays; directors always seem to have believed that the play needs the help of a lot of bells and whistles. During its run in the early 17th century at the original Globe theater in London, a stage cannon set the thatched roof ablaze and burned the place down.

Mr. Doran's human-scale production, however, places the emphasis on the psychological aspects of this political triangle. And nothing goes boom! here except, perhaps, for the robust performances by Mr. Jesson and especially Ms. Lapotaire.

Swathed in reverent black and engendering sympathy with each solemn sign of the cross, the doleful, sparrowlike Ms. Lapotaire, who won a Tony Award for her portrayal of Edith Piaf, could make an entire production out of manifestations of humility. In fact, when cornered by her tormentor, Wolsey—“Woe upon joo!” she declares in a Castilian accent—Ms. Lapotaire is so grandly put upon, so operatically aware of her shrinking fortunes, she might be playing Maria Callas of Aragon. It's a needle-sharp performance.

Mr. Jesson is an equally formidable Henry. In a play that never quite holds Henry accountable for his cruelty—Katherine unfairly directs her fury not at her husband, but at his surrogates—the actor does a terrific job of conveying a Reaganesque bonhomie while delegating the dirty work to the minions who will also have to pay for it. He's the Teflon Tudor.

Mr. Hogg, the third leg of the triangle, delivers a solid but not definitive performance. Wolsey's delusive grandeur is evident in everything from the luxuriousness of his blood-red velvet robes to the incautiousness with which he flaunts his status and curries favor; Mr. Hogg is adept in moments of thuggery, as in a bawdy party scene attended by the disguised King. But the soliloquy that follows his removal from office is stolid and undifferentiated. The pity it is meant to evoke never comes.

The wonder of Mr. Doran's production is that these three historical figures, who can often seem little more than puppets in a gaudy processional, are here imagined as feeling and thinking people. Even in the purple speech by Cranmer, Wolsey's successor, that ends the play, a politically expedient sendoff that extols the infant Elizabeth and the great age her birth symbolizes, there is a wellspring of real feeling. “Peace, plenty, love, truth,” Cranmer declares. He and, more surprisingly, Henry VIII leave you filled with warm thoughts.