An experiment in theatrical alchemy
Theatre
King and Country
RSC, Barbican
Afriend, on learning that I was about to tackle four Shakespeare histories in three days, sent facetious commiserations, together with a handy cut-out-and-keep guide to the cycle: “‘For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground’, ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown’, ‘I know thee not, old man’, ‘Stiffen the sinews’. Er, that’s it.” Watching Richard II, both parts of
Henry IV and Henry V in succession over three evenings and an afternoon – even with David Tennant launching the cycle as Richard – might strike even the keenest Shakespearean as having faint overtones of an ordeal. All that politicking; all that relentless, sack-fuelled romping in Eastcheap, not to mention the heavyhanded jokes about the French, the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish. The prospect of Bard fatigue seems all too vivid a possibility.
Gregory Doran’s RSC productions of the King and Country tetralogy premiered at Stratford-upon-Avon between 2013 and 2015, but their staging as a single event at the Barbican, to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, in fact proves a remarkable experiment in theatrical alchemy.
Like Trevor Nunn’s recent revival at Kingston Theatre of Peter Hall and John Barton’s 1963 compression of Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses tetralogy, Doran’s bold juxtaposition of the histories offers potent proof that to see the plays in close succession can be an exhilaratingly different experience to that of watching them as single works.
There is a variety of reasons for this. Most unexpected, in a way, is the audience esprit de corps. The British, notoriously, don’t chat to people they don’t know. But when you find yourself obliged to clamber repeatedly over the same patient sets of knees as you make your way to your allotted place in the commodious Barbican sweep of brown velvet seats (their comfort pointedly contrasted with the frightful backstage privations – not so much as a handy loo, according to the Duke of Norfolk, in a jolly post-production Q&A with the cast of Richard II), even the most taciturn find themselves drawn into the powerful, if fleeting, solidarity of shared adversity.
This is, too, a production with an urgent insistence on involving its audience. The vast lateral expanse of the Barbican proscenium may lack the immediate intimacy of the Stratford thrust stage, but this tetralogy has no intention of allowing its spectators to settle into mere viewers of the action. We are, from the outset, involved – as straight men to the principals’ subversive asides, as appalled onlookers to Sir John Falstaff ’s chilly musters of poor, bloody infantry – and as the individually voiceless (but collectively eloquent) masses whose governance is the subject of these sublime plays’ dire conflicts.
In the opener, Richard II, Tennant unsettlingly combines the appearance of Albrecht Dürer’s Christ-like self-portraits with the wayward, frivolous manner of Russell Brand. Released to some extent from the impossible pressures of celebrity Shakespeare, Tennant offers a beautifully nuanced exposition of the fragile king in Doran’s fleetfooted production, from brittle, witty entitlement to tragic humanity.
The anticipation excited by this nimble preamble is wrongfooted by a strangely static Henry IV Part I, in which the collision of Alex Hassell’s charmless Hal and Antony Sher’s ruined Falstaff, mincing of speech and halting of gait, fails to ignite the anticipated spark.
The Eastcheap scenes, with Sarah Parks as a voluble but largely incomprehensible Mistress Quickly, seem lacking in spontaneity.
The connection restored by the tender melancholy of Henry IV Part II falters again in a threadbare Henry V, resolutely held together by Oliver Ford Davies’s masterly Chorus. Ford Davies, together with Julian Glover as John of Gaunt and Jasper Britton as Bolingbroke, is one of the great pillars of this tetralogy.
Their assured mastery of Shakespeare’s verse, with Stephen Brimson Lewis’s spare, eloquent designs and Paul Englishby’s ravishing score unites a quartet of plays whose questioning of nationhood, conflict, power and identity continues to trouble us as urgently as they did when they were written.
‘Seeing the plays in close succession can be exhilaratingly different to seeing them as single works’