Theatre

This short run at the Roundhouse is a well-earned lap of honour for Michael Boyd’s ‘Henry VI’ trilogy, and for the 34 actors who’ve spent the past two years stabbing, sweating and sword-fighting Shakespeare’s eight history plays into thrilling presence. This blood-stained medieval soap opera (more than 13 hours long if you see all four parts) is revealed as a magnificent, episodic potboiler.

And it’s Boyd’s punchy direction, the wrap-around imaginative realisation, and the pace, conviction and mutual trust of his impregnable ensemble which make it so commanding.

Played separately, only ‘Henry VI’ Part 2 (in which the cynical lion-heart Duke of York fights the Lancastrian super-bitch Queen Margaret) and ‘Richard III’ (in which crook-backed  Richard murders his way to the crown) stand up completely on their own. Played together, with cross-casting which intensifies the eternal return of murderous ambition from father to son, and with rope-and-ladder battles which rip open the thrust-stage area, and you’ve got an emphatically theatrical answer to ‘The Sopranos’.

Boyd’s ‘Henry VI’ trilogy is, viscerally, very thrilling. Arranged around an acoustically excellent thrust-stage, the majority of the audience can feel the breath of the action, as military men, murderers, a rousing rabble and the foppish French pound through the auditorium. But Boyd’s production also intensifies and unifies the plays’ argument about the degeneration of a nation. England’s doughty military men (represented most movingly in the first part by Keith Bartlett as the gnarled, one-eyed, die-hard soldier Talbot) are betrayed by greedy politickers. Greed begets murder (Part 2). And murdered men’s sons become monsters (Part 3 and ‘Richard III’). Blood, and its bloodier consequences, are traceable everywhere – from the stained ghosts who return impassively to view the sins of their sons, to Tom Piper’s clanging rusty chamber through which they exit, and which squats at the back of the stage like England’s bloodstained iron womb.

The cross-casting adds nuance and tragic symmetries. Katy Stephens plays virgin, adulteress and hag as Joan of Arc, then Queen Margaret (Henry’s Machiavellian wife, who comes back to curse Richard III as a wild-eyed hag). The fact that Jonathan Slinger is cast in slithery bit-parts as a venal priest and the brutish Bastard of Orleans before becoming hunchbacked Richard, emphasises how far the moral and dramatic centre of their world has shifted. And John Mackay is a subversively comic treat as the state’s external and internal enemies: in Part 1, the French Dauphin, all blond ringlets and poncing about; in Part 2 Jack Cade, a vicious, languid Pierrot of a figure who descends to his fish-headed, ghost-infested rabble on a trapeze, long limbs inverted in a parody of the crucifixion.

Boyd makes it theatrically clear, by yanking murdered heroes like Talbot and Lord Salisbury out of the cellarage to join in the mayhem, that the misrule in which England eats itself springs from the blood which is spilled from progressively worse orifices. Played by Chuk Iwuji, Henry VI accquires a Zen-like calm, his despairing sorrow becoming the only possible moral response to the chaos which his weakness has helped create.

After Henry’s death, a stylistic update takes ‘Richard III’ into Tarantino-ish territory, in a sharply-suited, sinister, espresso-drinking production. It creates a stylish aesthetic of violence (the assassins Richard sends to his brother are soulless, geek-spectacled weirdos, who produce cartoonishly massive machetes from behind their modish lapels) which is called into question as the crimes committed become less slick and more sick. Jonathan Slinger’s Richard takes the audience with him on the nihilistic joke he’s playing at the expense of the world; and the pace and emphasis in his speaking is often as plausibly contemporary as the mafia-style costumes. It’s hellishly impressive, even though it’s the ‘Henry VI’ trio which deserve the crown.