Saturday morning and we’re all starting to look a bit bleary-eyed, even if the buzz is still very much there. The “good morning” from the actor who came on before the play to caution us about mobiles was greeted by a cheerfully unison response, as we’re all raring to go.  We’re doing all three H6s today, which should mean that we finish on a strong note with 3H6, which I think is the best of the three. So a whole day of warring roses, and in honour of today’s theme I’m wearing little silver rose earrings. (spoilers coming up)

1H6 is in my eyes a mess of a play, but this is a very good production of it. Like in the two parts of H4, H6 isn’t the main character of any of the plays that bear his name, even if his part becomes bigger and somewhat more interesting as the plays progress through history. Chuk Iwuji’s fine interpretation of the saintly H6 has a childlike innocence, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it’s going to develop as events unfold.

But these are the early days of H6’s reign, and he’s very much the virtuous and righteous king for the duration of this play, which is so dull that it doesn’t exactly make me care all that much about him, his throne or whether he’ll hang onto it. Does anyone? Strange, as 1H6 is supposed to have been written after 2H6 and 3H6, where he at least shows a modicum of more interesting character traits, but then those two are plays often thought to have been collaborative efforts, so perhaps that input wasn’t Shakespeare’s. As Strindberg put it in one of his plays a few centuries later; “It is not our virtues, but our flaws that make us human”, but perhaps Shakespeare hadn’t yet come to that conclusion at this early stage of his career as a playwright.

Oh well, back to the production at hand. Yes, it’s good, and it really needs to be when the material itself is so weak. Some of the benefits of this ensemble idea are beginning to surface, as actors take on roles and characters that mirror or reflect the parts that they played in the earlier plays. We get Richard Cordery as Gloucester, yet another reliable uncle to the king, Roger Watkins as another dying man in a wheelchair, Clive Wood, previously the usurping Lancastrian Bolingbroke returns as York, another man with his eye on the throne, and Keith Bartlett and Lex Shrapnel again play father and son, Talbot and John Talbot, after portraying Northumberland and Hotspur.

The ghosts are back, and the play even opens with H5 haunting his own funeral, only to return later and lead the English in their charge to victory, and later on the ghost of Edmund Mortimer watches as Richard Plantagenet is made Duke of York and restored to his fortunes.

So far in this cycle there has been good use made of the whole auditorium, with characters entering and exiting on walkways through the stalls, people climbing down ladders from the circle and swinging in or rappelling down ropes onto the stage, and this play continues in that tradition. Whole sections of dialogue are performed by characters that descend suspended on ladders, which works better than it might sound.

The performances are quite evenly matched, with one or two exceptions; John Mackay again gives us an outrageously funny Dauphin, Katy Stephens is absolutely fine as Joan, Nicholas Asbury is excellent as Somerset, Forbes Masson and James Tucker provide some great laughs as the Dauphin’s sidekicks, Geoffrey Streatfeild is wonderful as a slightly oily Suffolk, and Keith Bartlett and Lex Shrapnel as the Talbots are simply outstanding, theirs are easily the most moving scenes in the whole production. The only performance that really dragged for me was Warwick, who was unbelievably stiff and formal in his delivery, his style so at odds with everyone else’s that he seemed to be in a different production altogether.

This was good, really, really good, now on to the next one.

//Jenny

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 2:14 pm and is filed under RSC Histories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.