THE TUDORS REINVENTED AS MODERN FAMILY IN THE LAST WIFE
Think of the six wives of Henry VIII and chances are your mind turns to Wife No. 2. Anne Boleyn’s story is generally considered the sexiest, the bloodiest and the most geopolitically consequential. By comparison, Katherine Parr, who is the subject of Kate Hennig’s 2015 Stratford Festival hit The Last Wife — which plays at Centaur from Feb. 12 to March 3 — tends to get treated as a footnote, or maybe a coda.
The most enduring image of Katherine in popular culture is that of a nagging nursemaid, thanks to Alexander Korda’s 1933 film, The Private Life of Henry VIII, in which she henpecks Charles Laughton’s aging Henry into nibbling a forbidden chicken leg when she’s not looking.
For Diana Donnelly, who takes on the role in Eda Holmes’s production opposite Robert Persichini’s Henry VIII, there was obviously more to the last Mrs. Tudor than that.
“She was an incredibly erudite, multilingual, powerful woman,’’ says the Shaw Festival veteran (and incidentally, daughter of previous Montreal Gazette theatre critic, Pat Donnelly) during an interview in a Centaur dressing room.
“Katherine was the first woman to be published in the English language under her own name. She wrote prayers and meditations and various religious writing. When she was regent (while Henry was away in the French wars), her correspondence was incredible because she was a master at business language and an incredible negotiator.’’ Perhaps Katherine’s most impressive skill was to keep possession of her crown, and her head, up to and beyond Henry’s death. Despite his image as a roly-poly merry monarch, as popularized by the famous Hans Holbein portrait, Henry’s subjects, courtiers and relatives were more apt to view him as a terrible tyrant whose changing whims often resulted in the most abominable and protracted executions. Katherine, a skilled chess player as well as an early champion of women’s rights (including her “bastard” stepdaughters Mary and Elizabeth’s right of succession), was able to stay one move ahead of her husband’s paranoid suspicions and prejudices. “What I love thinking about is this question: What if Henry VIII proposed to you?’’ Donnelly says. “That’s the hot water she finds herself in at the top of the play. It’s a terrible problem. She made him wait many months before giving her answer, which is a dangerous way to navigate this king. But she was cueing him to the power she was going to have in the relationship from the get-go. She wasn’t going to be subservient and he was going to have to accept that.’’
Commissioned by Stratford Festival (as part of their strategy of balancing out all those Shakespearean kings with new plays about female rulers) before going on to be a hit across the country and beyond, the play was originally inspired, Hennig has said, by the Arab Spring, which left her pondering about all those invisible wives and daughters behind the strongmen ruthlessly wielding power. This relation to contemporary events determines the look of the play: sharp modern dress rather than Wolf Hall-style doubletsand-hose. The language, too, is spiced with 21st century idioms — Henry, for instance, snapping at Katherine about “you and your liberal pals.’’
“Kate Hennig described the play to us in a beautiful email she sent as we began rehearsals: a contemporary play with historic content,” Donnelly says. “That’s been a great hook and anchor for us. It’s very freeing to play this language, which is completely natural and has a great flow to it.’’
Written just before the rise of the #MeToo movement, The Last Wife, which is part of a planned trilogy (the second, The Virgin Trial, played at Stratford in 2017), is also clearly reflective of one of the key issues of our age.
“Kate is wrestling with the boys’ club at every turn,’’ says Donnelly. “She’s dealing with Henry’s cronies, the ‘Council of Crocodiles’, his entourage.
Her strength becomes the thing that marks her as a target in the latter half of the play. It shows the history of women being persecuted for knowing too much, for being too much, for taking up too much space. I think there’s a lot of resonance in terms of contemporary feminism and the #MeToo movement because the personal is always political for women. That’s an old activist adage and that’s exactly what this play is dealing with.”
Donnelly knows whereof she speaks. She was entangled in one of Soulpepper Theatre’s notorious incidents, in which the all-female cast of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, including Donnelly, were “auctioned off” without their consent for dinner dates with prize-winning audience members.
Donnelly draws a contrast between those kinds of attitudes and those of her current director with whom she has worked many times at the Shaw Festival.
“Eda is such an intelligent, kind leader and makes a room that is joyous, and where there’s great conversation and food and fun.”