Henry VIII, and: Anne Boleyn (review)

In the summer of 2010, the Globe Theatre had some real fun with its "Kings & Rogues" season, which gave audiences an opportunity to see a lot more of a character who is, in one of the season's plays, Henry VIII, little more than a flitting, fleeting tease: Anne Boleyn. Anyone who bought a ticket for the new play by that title which Howard Brenton wrote for the season might fairly have concluded that Shakespeare is all right, but we should all really be buying more tickets for plays by Brenton.

The pair of plays benefited from a crucial casting choice, which was to have the same actress, Miranda Raison, play Anne Boleyn in both productions. I saw Henry VIII first, and was glad to know that when I returned I was going to get to see Raison in the same role. In Henry VIII, Boleyn is a teasing, tantalizing figure, who flirts with Henry, denies that she wants the "glistering grief" of being queen, and haunts the principal action from the periphery—indeed, in this production, from the recesses of the stage where she was in one scene nothing more than a nightgown clad figure departing from Henry. The delight of Brenton's play is that it frees this peripheral figure from the cribs and confines of her limited role in Henry VIII to let the actress playing her win us over to an idea of Anne that flouts all popular conceptions. But those Globe-goers who showed up for Anne Boleyn as well as Henry VIII were also treated to things they could not have possibly have expected from Brenton's title.

Not only does Brenton's play reclaim Anne from her ignominy so that she can matter to English history—or at least to Brenton's reinvention of the English history play—it also gives us a screamingly funny satiric portrait of that misogynist and demoniac known as James VI of Scotland and James I of England and Ireland. Making use of the very aspects of Anne's story that Shakespeare and Fletcher choose to leave out, Brenton has the English Reformation find its fulfillment in a bizarre alliance across time between two of the period's more notorious figures, a siren and a tyrant. His play serves up a comic fantasia that is an answer to so many of the problems of Henry VIII, which is not only—let's be frank!—too episodic for most theatre-goers' taste, but also—let's be franker!—hard work to listen to. I watched an audience take it in across a sweltering summer afternoon from paper visors that guarded their eyes from the

Dominic Rowan as King Henry VIII in Shakespeare's Globe's 2010 production of Henry VIII, directed by Mark Rosenblatt.

Photo courtesy of John Tramper.

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