The Histories (review)

There's a moment in Richard III which, for me, may be the most moving in the RSC's eight-play history cycle. Katy Stephens's former Queen Margaret has been "disputing" with the nobles, accusing them of all manner of treachery. Insulted by Wela Frasier's Marquis of Dorset, Margaret rises to retort: "Peace, peace, master Marquis, you are malapert." Facing him fully, Katy freezes, and my own blood runs cold as I realize she sees in front of her, not Dorset, but her own murdered son, Edward . . . whom Wela also played.

This realization is one of the most exquisite of many resonances rising from the ensemble company performing this cycle. It's hard to believe it is not written so. Can it be a coincidence that Shakespeare penned that same, curious word "malapert" in a line just before Edward's death in the previous play? Is it a deliberate echo? Is it possible that Shakespeare's own Edward and Dorset were played by the same youth, and that the playwright intended this kind of moment between his Margaret and that apprentice actor? I don't know. I do know that Katy Stephens's Margaret recognizes her dead child in the young man she now confronts, and I hear her crushed heart as she chokes on her pain—"Your fire-new stamp of honor is scarce current"—before falling to the ground again, embracing Edward's bones, and shrieking like a banshee in unbearable agony: "Alas! Alas! Witness my son, now in the shade of death, whose bright outshining beams thy cloudy wrath hath in eternal darkness folded up."

Michael Boyd said something wonderful during his "Playing With History" panel discussion on Valentine's Day 2007. Halfway through the cycle, having presented the Henry VI trilogy and Richard III, Boyd said that where the Histories were concerned the audience "dearest to his heart" would be the audience that would watch Chuk Iwuji and Katy Stephens on stage and see them as husband and wife—Henry and Margaret—no matter who they were actually playing at the moment. In Richard II, that audience will realize the significance of a wonderful, unspoken exchange, the briefest of silent flirtations between Iwuji's Gardener and Stephens's Lady-in-Waiting. They share only a few significant glances on the periphery of more important matters occurring center-stage, but while they're making eyes at each other, that audience is aware that eventually these two will indeed become the disastrous couple of Henry and Margaret.

Likewise, at the end of Henry V, when Stephens, as Queen Isabel, "blesses" the marriage of English King Henry and French Princess Katherine, that audience hears the words dripping with irony: "God, the best maker of all marriages, combine your hearts in one, your realms in one!" As a part of that audience, at the Glorious Moment marathon in March 2008, in "real world" time it's around 11pm that Stephens is expressing these admirable sentiments, but we know that in less than twelve hours she'll shatter this union of nations as Joan La Pucelle. Moments don't get much more glorious.