Darkness and the gloomy shade of death

Henry VI at the Rose Theatre

A lovely, moody set for Sir Trevor Nunn’s epic staging of Henry VI at Kingston’s Rose Theatre last night. Shakespeare’s story of the tender Henry’s doomed reign is less of an arc than an unravelling, and Nunn plays it out to the desperate end in this fitting darkness that seems to become darker still.

Nunn is a generous director, badging Lancaster and York in their home colours in England and their away kit in France, and otherwise using all kinds of ingenious devices to make life easy for theatregoers such as this one – who might otherwise struggle to follow treacheries within treacheries. Right from the start this production is on your side, beginning with the reading aloud of the late Henry V’s will: an elegant idea that sets the scene and establishes the principals with efficiency and style.

Three parts of the sixth Henry make for a lot of material, pulled from a congested section of England’s timeline. Throughout the play Nunn’s style is to abridge without condescension, and to use the space this creates to pick out a few breathtaking moments from the chaos and invest them with an enormous emotional punch.

Brilliantly done is Mortimer’s drawn-out death from old age as he reveals to Richard Plantagenet his claim to England’s throne. So precisely does Nunn calibrate this momentous event, and with such clinical realism does Geoff Leesley play Mortimer’s death agonies, that the production immediately reaches that Shakespearean nexus: the highest statecraft meets the visceral, dirty, rattling last breaths of we mortal worms. The hairs were up on everyone’s arms. It felt that death was in the room with us.

Shakespeare sets out his stall early on: Henry VI is all about the dying. The comic turns of Joan and her dubious virginity; the pathos of poor helpless Henry (the excellent Alex Waldmann eliciting laughter and tears by turns); even the passion of Margaret and Suffolk – these ­are smooth stones skipping across the surface of a very deep lake of death. We know that they must soon sink, and we see how quickly we will follow.

The saddest death is Talbot’s, and on the page it rather comes across as Shakespeare phoning it in:

Come, come and lay him in his father’s arms:

My spirit can no longer bear these harms.

Soldiers, adieu! I have what I would have,

Now my old arms are young John Talbot’s grave.

Nunn give dignity to this dying and makes it the fulcrum of his play with an exquisitely tender performance from James Simmons – who is, up until the moment, utterly convincing as the athletic, indestructible, lionhearted Talbot. England’s selfless servant has been hung out to dry by the feuding Somerset and York. After all the divine auguring and the clash of kingdoms, Talbot’s death is small, personal and incredibly moving as he cradles his dead son in his arms. Up until now, perhaps the play let in some light. From now on, we expect the arrival of night.

It is often effective, and not necessarily wrong, to bring Shakespeare literally up-to-date on stage and screen. Nunn eschews it in this production, which he resolutely leaves where Shakespeare put it. He does honour to the audience by choosing the play and then allowing it to talk for itself. That the political machinations speak to our own time is evident. That death holds court after all is the awful, timeless joke.

Perhaps Nunn allows himself just one, incisive, contemporary reference in the brutal decapitation of Suffolk in the play’s finale. Suffolk’s murder by the mob, and the nastily accurate fast-twitch of his legs as the knife saws into his neck, call to mind the cruel videos and the unutterable fear of our age: of a centre that is failing to hold.

Henry VI is the first instalment of a Wars of The Roses trilogy (with Edward IV and Richard III) on at the Rose Theatre in Kingston (London, UK) until 31st October. I don’t have a connection with the theatre or the production. (I review books & theatre because as E.M. Forster put it, I don’t know what I think until I see what I say. I only publish reviews of things I enjoyed.)