[In the following excerpted review, Jackson lauds Gregory Doran's 1996-97 production of Henry VIII at the Swan Theater as a skillful balance of ceremony and stagecraft.]

At the 1996-97 Swan season the Shakespearean (or part-Shakespearean) attraction was Henry VIII, directed by Greg Doran. High doors at the back of the stage, with All Is True inscribed on them in large, elegant letters, opened periodically to reveal spectacular tableaux, beginning with a representation of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, with Henry on a golden charger, flanked by his queen and his cardinal. The space was later used for more intimate “discoveries,” but its association with spectacle was turned to good account for the final show, the christening of Elizabeth. Here Ann Bullen was brought onstage, to one side of the principal group, and the performance ended not with the text's epilogue but with the lights fading as she raised one hand to her throat.

Paul Jesson was a thoughtful, puzzled Henry, wrestling with his better feelings during the arraignment of Katharine (where he was placed centrally, his thoughts the focus of the proceedings); demonstrative with Ann Bullen, whom he kissed publicly during the scene at York Place; and clearly in need of a prop when Wolsey failed him. Ian Hogg played Wolsey's worldliness and appetite for fleshly pleasures (evident in his demeanor at the beginning of the York Place festivities in 1.4) and used a Suffolk accent that set him off from the smooth-mannered courtiers around him. In 3.2 he clung to his Great Seal until the last possible moment, and the farewell after his tormentors' exit was finely spoken: the direction of this sequence, and of the rest of the scene with Cromwell's arrival onstage and his “standing amazed,” showed the wisdom of Doran's use of the Swan stage. The play's counterpoint of private and public transactions was well served.

Queen Katharine (Jane Lapotaire, with an Aragonese accent) was played without sentimentality: this queen was a clear-sighted realist whose understanding of Henry and of her own situation was complete. Her story was skillfully intertwined with that of her successor. In 3.1 it was Ann Bullen who sang “Orpheus with his lute …,” which became a stately—then fiery—Spanish dance, interrupted by the arrival of the Gentleman. Ann was present throughout Katharine's interview with the cardinals, leaving only when the queen said “I am old, my lords”—that is, after she had admitted being banished from Henry's bed. (A particularly interesting choice was that of playing Wolsey's vulnerability during the confrontation.) In 4.2 Katharine was isolated in the center of an empty stage, the vision itself being represented simply by a shaft of light falling onto her face from above.

Even with some cuts and some simplification of the text (and the sensible ruse of having characters addressed by their office rather than their names), this was a long production, but it held attention through a skillful alternation of display and austerity, and excellent use of the Swan's thrust stage for the long sequences of argument and confrontation, or such moments of direct address to the audience as Norfolk's speech on his way to execution. The production benefited greatly from strong casting of minor parts (especially John Kane as Norfolk and Guy Henry as the Chamberlain); and by making more of the figure of Ann Bullen, Doran went some way toward overcoming a long-acknowledged problem of the play's structure, sustaining interest after the departures of Wolsey and Katharine. …