Henry VI: Revenge in France, and: Henry IV: Revolt in England (review)

Director Leon Rubin's deft editing of Shakespeare's bloody Henry VI trilogy into two productions commissioned by the Stratford Festival gives the bard's episodic history plays a terrible relevance and coherence. Along with clarifying the political broils in fifteenth-century England for an audience not necessarily familiar with them, Rubin's two-part version creates a Machiavellian world peopled by ambitious characters embodying the human will to power. Their pride unleashes civil butchery in terms so savage that the contemporary audience feels uncomfortably at home. Using the betrayals, burnings, stabbings, and beheadings that proliferate in Shakespeare's dissection of human ambition exercising direst cruelty, Rubin's direction focuses on the visual and verbal ambiguity of blood that unites and separates characters. Blood signifies family pride and kinship bonds as well as the inhuman violence that humiliates and undoes those bonds through cruel, self-serving actions as Yorkists and Lancastrians grope for the crown in the oxymoronically named War of the Roses.

Stratford's adaptation streamlines Shakespeare but retains his epic scope, sweeping geographically between England and France and chronologically from the heroic Henry V's funeral to the rise of the House of York and the ascendancy of Richard of Gloucester, the future Richard III. Part One, Revenge in France, depicts the squabbling English nobility, unreined by a strong king during Henry VI's minority, losing Henry V's claims in France. Part Two, Revolt in England, opens with the barbarous Jack Cade's peasant revolt and chronicles the rise of York's white rose; it concludes with the lustful Edward IV's ascension and the ruthless plotting of his younger brother, the crookbacked Richard of Gloucester, who stands as the culminating emblem of the will to power shorn of any moral constraint but masked in the robe of family fealty.

Using a broad historical canvas and large cast of characters, these productions bore into the core of human power, presenting a parade of well-defined characters, each rising, then falling as Fortune's wheel turns them topsy-turvy. At the center of this wolfish parade of power-obsessed individuals are the royal couple, the politically inept Henry VI, played by the sweet-faced, diminutive Michael Therriault, and his audacious, cruel queen, Margaret of Anjou, played with vigor and venom by Seana McKenna. Wearing a simple monk-like gray habit, Therriault's Henry smiles with boyish charm and dangerous naiveté. As the action unfolds, his faith in God's benevolent will makes Henry's unwillingness to use power with force and purpose politically sinful, a great evil masked in religious fervor. McKenna's Margaret, though small in stature, looms large, both politically and emotionally. Scheming ambition spurs her charming manipulation of the sexually innocent Henry; later, in the absence of the too pious king, she takes the field in breastplate and skirt, an oxymoronic image of femininity. Both end pathetically: the feckless Henry stabbed and literally thrown headlong down by Richard of Gloucester; the grief-stricken Margaret humbled by York's triumphant sons, shuffling off, bereft of love and power, her illicit lover beheaded, her husband, and her young son stabbed.

Set designer John Pennoyer's metal trestle running above two-thirds the length of the Tom Patterson's long thrust stage creates a highly flexible playing area and links the contemporary audience with the historic action. Like a world dominated by power and bloody ambition, the set is stark, shorn of human touches, a cold network of steel that supports characters or imprisons them. The set functions literally to highlight the play's gory spectacle as gibbet, rack, and rampart in various battles, but it also works metaphorically as an emblem of power's inhumanity. It supports the powerful aloft; below, it imprisons in its steel web those about to fall. It serves also to set off the many...