PIERRE BRAULT PLAYS THE FOOL ROYALLY WELL
To survive as a court jester, at least under Henry VIII, was to walk a balance beam. You were expected to point out, humorously, royal follies — but cut too close to the bone and your neck was the one being sliced.
You were a kind of confidant to the monarch without ever quite knowing where the invisible and shifting line of intimacy sat. You were to use words as currency in a world where innuendo and half-truths were the coin of the realm.
William (Will) Somers, Henry’s fool for two decades until the king’s death in 1547, navigates that beam with aplomb in Pierre Brault’s fleet, funny and sometimes dark imagining of the fool’s life under the monarch.
Virtually nothing is known of Somers, though plenty is of the bloody era when Henry’s growing intemperance and the conflict between Catholics and Protes- tants reportedly resulted in the death of 70,000 opponents to the king. The “most frightening man on the planet,” Somers calls his boss at one point.
Brault, who wrote and performs this captivating, one-man show, populates the stage with a dozen or so people, some fictive, some real. Aside from Somers and the king, we meet the humourless and conniving Thomas Cromwell, the sweet Anne Boleyn, the embittered future Queen Mary, the king’s hulking butcher-cum-executioner, and others.
Each character is trying to get by under a king whose paranoia and viciousness grow in proportion to his expanding girth.
Somers, a pert and intelligent man whose life is one of non-stop verbal bobbing and weaving — he kept his head “by never losing it,” he tells Mary at one point — cultivates and enjoys his deepening relationship, even friendship, with Henry (one can see why Somers’ reputation — he served under Henry’s successors and died in 1560 — has been rumoured as the model of Shakespeare’s greatest fool, the one in King Lear).
Somers also has a touching friendship with the ill-fated Boleyn and a loving connection with Henry’s young children, Edward and the already sharptongued Elizabeth, both future monarchs themselves.
Brault plays this nicely, never losing sight of Somers’ basic outsider status even as he makes clear that the Tudors are, increasingly, the family the fool never had.
Like the fool, Brault is also careful not to overstep his bounds. He does not, for example, try for the thorny richness of language that Shakespeare gives his fools. Instead, he opts for shorter, punchy lines, including “Marriage is a new leash on life,” the phrasing, if not the gist of which, sounds decidedly anachronistic and could belong to one of Brault’s routines in his other career as a standup comic.
There is, however, a delightful bit of era-redolent “capping” in which the fool, newly introduced to Henry, trades clever, rhyming lines with the monarch, each attempting to outdo the other, while stodgy Cromwell looks on as though he’s just wandered into a patch of quicksand.
A veteran shape-shifter, Brault, working with director AL Connors, has his character changes down pat. However, on Friday, the second night of the run, he stumbled over his lines several times, which is unusual for him and not what you’d expect from a fluid-tongued guy like Somers.
Brault locates much of the action in the main areas of the palace but adds dashes of contemporary colour with scenes in a raucous tavern, down in the bustling palace kitchen, and out on a jousting field.
Props are minimal, and costuming likewise, putting the onus on Brault’s performance and our imagination to create Somers’ world.
It works. Royally.