Stratford's Henry VIII

Henry VIII
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

‘I come no more to make you laugh,’ says Richard Griffiths, speaking the prologue to Henry VIII (Stratford), and his subsequent performance in the title role is a triumphant—though, one hopes, temporary—repudiation of his clowning past. His Henry is a serious young man working his passage from dependence to despotism. (Benevolent, says the play.)

At first overawed by Wolsey and by his queen, but intent on learning, he is erotically aroused by Anne Bullen (as most of the cast remember to pronounce her) and discovers his own strength in wrecking the divorce-court when the cardinals fail to deliver. From there it is an easy step to humiliating Wolsey; and his further progress is only checked by his encounter with Cranmer. ‘Poor man, he weeps,’ says the King, impressed, not accustomed to emotion in courtiers. 

This performance, developed from hints in a disjointed text, is the main prop of Howard Davies’s production; though how Mr. Davies works out that it shows the transition from absolute to constitutional monarchy beats me. Henry finishes a lot more powerful than he starts. True, he has a council; but he can wow them with an entrance. 

Mr. Davies’s production is the most thoroughgoing Brechtianisation of Shakespeare I have seen (and therefore rather old-fashioned). Ilona Sekacz’s music (‘How play the musicians?’ ‘Weill-ly, my lord’) underlines or, more frequently, sends woodwindily up. Hayden Griffin’s sets, toytown fragments hanging from rails, have belief suspended alongside them. Such patriotic irritants as the coronation procession are disposed of with playfully minimal pageantry. Question: if all the ironies assumed by Mr. Davies were really present in the text, would he have to labour so hard to bring them to our attention?

The answer is plainly no; but the treatment is generally lively enough to inspire interest if not conviction. Besides, Mr. Davies might plead (though I doubt that he would) divided intentions on the part of his authors. This may be the first production to give programme credit to Shakespeare’s presumed collaborator, John Fletcher. 

An earlier director, Margaret Webster, wrote for example that the character of Buckingham is ‘full of salt in his first scene (Shakespeare) and of sugar in his second (Fletcher),’ and maybe the production is backing the Bard against his apprentice in accentuating the arrogance and parodying this pathos. (David Schofield, previously obeying orders, goes to Buckingham’s death with a self-satisfied smirk.)

Katherine never gets off her high horse, and it is fascinating to see how unbendingly regal Gemma Jones can make her. Such apparently harmless supports as Lord Sands and the Old Lady (here, less endearingly, a middle-aged lady) are sternly placed as lecherous or envious: maggots, both of them. On the other hand the porter and his man (Roger Hume fuming and Paul Mooney tremulous) are allowed more extensive and affectionate treatment than the christening they precurse. 

John Thaw’s Wolsey, being a priest persecuted by nobles, gets space for his lamentations: and John Thaw’s authority in the role, like Mr. Griffiths’s flexibility, returns us from mere interpretation to the more important matter of technique. They have it; the others are mostly known to be talented, but listening to the play, as too often at Stratford these years, is like hearing an opera done entirely by tenors: short-winded ones at that.