Interview with a scamp royal
The Virgin Trial Studio Theatre, Stratford
“I can’t believe” says a character in The Virgin Trial, “it took us this long to find tea — in England.” Others may find it easier to believe, since Kate Hennig’s play is set in 1549, a full century before anybody in England took to drinking tea and two centuries before everybody did. But then in this Tudor chronicle, people also express desires for Belgian chocolates and for inspecting one another’s bank statements. And when torture is called for, the interrogators favour up-to-date methods like waterboarding and electric shocks.
In a program note, David Prosser, the Stratford Festival’s literary director, likens these out-of-period details to the clocks in Julius Caesar, the billiards in Antony and Cleopatra. This strikes me as disingenuous. Shakespeare’s anachronisms are casual and occasional; Hennig’s purposeful and continuous. They go with the dialogue, which is aggressively contemporary, and with the costumes, likewise. The intention, obviously, is to make the audience see the resemblances between the 16th century and our own. We might, though, be capable of seeing them ourselves, without the nudging.
The Virgin Trial is a sequel to The Last Wife, Hennig’s play about Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth and final queen. That play’s last scenes showed us the widowed Katherine marrying her former lover, the Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour, and it showed him taking a possibly unhealthy interest in Katherine’s 14- year- old stepdaughter, the future Elizabeth I. It ended with Katherine’s death. The new play has no characters as compelling as Kate and Henry, but in some respects it’s a tighter work.
It hinges on a single off- stage incident. The Admiral, known as Thom — apparently resentful of the power of his brother the Lord Protector Edward, Duke of Somerset, aka Ted — has invaded the chamber of the boy-king Edward VI (Eddie to us). The exploit leads him to the executioner’s block because he was suspected of having treasonous designs. He was also suspected of carnal relations with the teenaged Elizabeth-call-her-Bess, who in turn is accused of having put him up to it, to ease her own path to the throne.
The play consists of Bess’s interrogation, interspersed with flashbacks to the preceding events. The dramatic project is to show her running rings around her grownup antagonists while nurturing the virgin reputation. The intention isn’t realized, though, as Bahia Watson’s Bess has hardly matured from the engagingly cheeky teen she played in the previous play. In fact, she’s regressed into angry petulance, rendered on one unvaryingly loud note. It’s hard to fathom what game she’s playing or what the stakes are.
The play is proficiently written and ( by Alan Dilworth) smartly directed. Nigel Bennett brings crisp and easy authority to Ted who plays good cop to the bad one of Yanna McIntosh, very scary and impatient. She’s the one who officiates in the torture chamber where she subjects Bess’s followers to the ordeals from which their mistress, by virtue of her royal blood, is exempt. Laura Condolln and Andre Morin give sympathetic performances as the victims.
Thom has mutated from the male ingénue of the prequel to a buccaneer, a role Brad Hodder plays with gusto. Bess’s older half-sister, the incipient Bloody Mary, is played, as before and equally well, by Sara Farb. The relationship we’re shown between the two future queens is barely credible, but theatrically it’s good value.
They share two scenes in which Mary’s function is to offer elder- sisterly advice. There’s a third instalment promised, and it will be interesting to see if this interpretation of Mary can be made to stick. In the meantime we have the pleasure of hearing her turn out to be an expert abortion-counsellor. Too many of the play’s anachronisms are merely jokey. That one has wit. The Virgin Trial is in repertory through Sept. 30.