A brief chronicle of the time : staging Shakespeare's English histories, 2000-2010 WILKINSON, Katherine Available from the Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive (SHURA) at: http://shura.shu.ac.uk/16821/ A Sheffield Hallam University thesis This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. Please visit http://shura.shu.ac.uk/16821/ and http://shura.shu.ac.uk/information.html for further details about copyright and re-use permissions. 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Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 A Brief Chronicle of the Time: Staging Shakespeare’s English Histories, 2000 - 2010 Katherine Wilkinson A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Sheffield Hallam University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy October 2010. Abstract This thesis uses the approach of performance criticism to study the place of Shakespeare’s history plays on the English stage during the first ten years of the twenty- first century. Although there have been numerous productions of Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies during this period also, the history plays opened the decade in Stratford as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s millennium project and concluded the decade at Shakespeare’s Globe. The history plays were to some extent based on English chronicles, and this thesis acts as chronicle, setting out to address the interpretations and meanings of the productions in a decade which has seen in Britain social, economic, and political upheaval. The thesis looks at different aspects of the history plays in production: the idea of the plays as a cycle; productions that engage with the present moment; adaptation; Shakespeare’s histories on film. In so doing the thesis considers how far the productions engage with and comment on the conditions in which they have been produced and in which they were written; and whether it is necessary for them to do either in order to be successful. The introduction offers a review of existing performance criticism. Thereafter the first chapter addresses influential film adaptations of Richard III; productions of Henry V at Manchester and the National Theatre, Richard II at the Old Vic, and Richard III: An Arab Tragedy are discussed as twenty-first century history plays; Northern Broadside’s Wars o f the Roses is looked at in relation to other productions of cycle adaptations; and the RSC’s The Histories is discussed in depth as a modem cycle production before the final chapter addresses the history plays on the stage of the new Globe theatre. In an area dominated by theatre history and analyses of production techniques, this thesis offers an original contribution to knowledge in its application of these approaches to recent productions of history plays, creating a chronicle survey of the history plays in these ten years on the English stage. Contents List of Illustrations. Acknowledgements. A Brief Chronicle of the Time: Introduction 1 Chapter One: An Interwoven Pattern of History and Legend: Richard III on Film 20 Chapter Two: ‘History shall speak freely of our acts’: Shakespeare’s 34 twenty-first century history plays Chapter Three: Shakespeare et al or The Wars o f the Roses 71 Chapter Four: ‘Same sh*t, different decade’: Michael Boyd, the Royal 94 Shakespeare Company, and the Glorious Moment ‘What art thou/That counterfeit’st the person of a king?’: Kingship 106 in Boyd’s octology ‘My dream was lengthened after life’: Ghosts in Boyd’s octology 134 ‘A Woman’s Hide’: gender in Boyd’s octology 153 The Glorious Moment? 174 Chapter Five: Staging History at the New Globe 176 Conclusion 194 Bibliography 196 Appendices: Cast list i Doubling table showing the characters played by members of Michael Boyd’s Histories company iii List of Illustrations. Between pages 70 and 71 1 Elliot Cowan as Henry V, directed by Jonathan Munby, Royal Exchange Manchester. 2 Elliot Cowan as Henry V outside Harfleur. 3 Opening scene of Loncraine’s Richard III. 4 Citizens welcoming Richard as king, Loncraine’s Richard III 5 Andrew Whitehead as Henry VI, directed by Barrie Rutter, Northern Broadsides Wars o f the Roses, West Yorkshire Playhouse. 6 Maeve Larkin as Joan, directed by Barrie Rutter, Northern Broadsides Henry VI, West Yorkshire Playhouse Between pages 105 and 106 7 L - R: Bagot (Forbes Masson), Duchess of York (Maureen Beattie), York (Richard Cordery), Richard II (Jonathan Slinger), Bushy (Nicholas Asbury), Gaunt (Roger Watkins), Queen Isabel (Hannah Barrie). Front: Ghost of Woodstock (Chuk Iwuji). Richard II directed by Michael Boyd, Royal ■ Shakespeare Company. 8 Clive Wood as Henry IV, 2 Henry IV directed by Richard Twyman, Royal Shakespeare Company. 9 Clive Wood as Henry IV, 2 Henry IV directed by Richard Twyman, Royal Shakespeare Company. 10 Background: Henry IV (Clive Wood). Foreground Hal (Geoffrey Streatfeild). 2 Henry IV, directed by Richard Twyman, Royal Shakespeare Company. 11 Chuk Iwuji as Henry VI. Directed by Michael Boyd, Royal Shakespeare Company. 12 L - R: Ghost of John Talbot (Lex Shrapnel), Ghost of Talbot (Keith Bartlett) on the barge of the dead, 2 Henry VI, directed by Michael Boyd, Royal Shakespeare Company. Between pages 133 and 134 13 L - R: Alexia Healy, Hannah Barrie, Ann Ogbomo as Joan’s fiends, Katy Stephens as Joan against Keith Bartlett’s Talbot, 1 Henry VI, directed by Michael Boyd, Royal Shakespeare Company. 14 York (Clive Wood) laying out stone to illustrate his claim to the throne, 2 Henry VI, directed by Michael Boyd, Royal Shakespeare Company. 15 York (Clive Wood) proves Joan’s (Katy Stephens) virginity on the stake, 1 Henry VI, directed by Michael Boyd, Royal Shakespeare Company. 16 Joan (Katy Stephens) grieves for her dead son Edward (Wela Frasier), 3 Henry VI, directed by Michael Boyd, Royal Shakespeare Company. Between pages 193 and 194 17 L - R: John of Lancaster (Joseph Timms), Henry IV (Oliver Cotton), Hal (Jamie Parker). 1 Henry IV directed by Dominic Dromgoole, Globe Theatre. 18 Falstaff (Roger Allam) and Hal (Jamie Parker), 1 Henry IV, directed by Dominic Dromgoole, Globe Theatre. Hotspur (Sam Crane) and Mortimer (Doan Broni, background). 1 Henry IV, directed by Dominic Dromgoole, Globe Theatre. Acknowledgements My thanks to: director Sulayman al-Bassam for allowing me access to the unpublished text of his adaptation Richard III: An Arab Tragedy and sending me production photographs. director Barrie Rutter for allowing me access to the unpublished text of his adaptation Henry VI. director Michael Bogdanov for talking to me about the English Shakespeare Company productions of the Wars o f the Roses. staff at the National Theatre Archives, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (Royal Shakespeare Company archive), Shakespeare Institute library, Ravenshead library. the Development and Society Graduate School for financial assistance. my examiners - Dr Tom Rutter and Dr Emma Smith. my supervisors - Professor Lisa Hopkins and Dr Matthew Steggle for their guidance, support, encouragement, and generosity. Therese Stokke and Gordon Wilkinson for unfailing support. Richard Wood: ‘His heart and hand both open and both free; / For what he has he gives’. A Brief Chronicle of the Time: Introduction Good my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do ye hear? - let them be well used, for they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time. After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.1 In this instruction from Hamlet to Polonius on the arrival of the players to Elsinore, Hamlet illustrates the idea that actors and plays record and detail the moment in which they exist: they are ‘brief chronicles of the time’ with the power to ruin reputations through their ‘ill report’. Shakespeare was well aware of the power that plays possess to speak to or of the moment in which they are produced, as is evident, for example, in his use of accounts of ancient Rome to talk about Elizabethan politics. This is also true in his history plays, which in themselves draw on chronicles and early English histories to tell the story of medieval England, but to some extent talk about the 1590s when they were first performed. This thesis itself is a chronicle of the performance of Shakespeare’s history plays in the opening decade of the twenty-first century. Although there have been numerous productions of Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies during this period also, the history plays opened the decade in Stratford as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) millennium project, and the Globe theatre closed the decade with productions of the Henry IV plays. The opening decade of the twenty-first century has been dominated in Britain by war, terrorism, political power wrangles, concerns about immigration, the rise of far-right political parties such as the UK Independence Party and the British National Party, and, from 2008, social turbulence caused by recession.