Two Rarely-Seen Old Plays

I was at the White Bear Theatre in Kennington on Sunday 20th, and the Roundhouse in Camden on Tuesday 22nd, to see two great revivals of plays that have hardly been staged in 400 years: Westward Ho by John Webster and Thomas Dekker, and Henry VI part I by Shakespeare.

Westward Ho was brilliantly done, in a production with minimal props and set. The set of almost-adulterous wives were brilliantly dressed and presented as modern day banker's wives, with modish clothes, haircuts and copies of Hello magazine. The exposition in the script was 'read' from that same publication, transmuting Jacobean to present-day gossip brilliantly - the word 'wag' in the Jacobean sense was seized upon by the cast and translated to 'WAG' in the sense of the perpetually dieting, perpetually crisis-ridden lovelies from the cover of Heat magazine.

Following the WAGS around was the huge Nick Smithers, in drag as the hyperactive brothelkeeper Mistress Birdlime, who not only had a lion's share of lines, but also did most of the scene-shifting, moving tables around in high heels whilst humming along to the cut-scene music: 'Love and Marriage' sung by Frank Sinatra. Having been cast out by the rest of the characters at the end, Smithers acheived an excellent coup de theatre by straightening up from his subservient stoop, yanking the wig off his head, and losing the falsetto, then stalking out - a great moment.

Part of the pleasure in seeing virtually unperformed plays is seeing what actors will make of parts that aren't haunted by hundreds of well known interpretations before them. Kevin Quarmby, playing a would-be adulterous Earl, had decided that it was a part fit for Olivier, and delivered his speeches in soft light and a musical baritone that almost made you forget the heart of the matter - i.e. that his character was an elderly banker trying to get his end away. In the second act, he describes spying on Moll Justiniano in the church:

....within the holy temple have I stood
disguis'd, waiting your presence: and when your hands
went up towards heaven to draw some blessing down,
mind (as if all my nerves by yours did move)
begged in dumb signs some pity for my love.

At points like this -thanks to Quarmby's excellent and sincere portrayal - we saw past the delightful wrangling and trickery of the farcical plot, to some weary, sick, and sacred vision of human existence. In other words, it was the morbid touch of Webster rather than the sharp satire of Dekker. Likewise in the second half of the play, Justiniano draws aside a curtain to reveal his apparently dead wife, poisoned to keep him from the lustful Earl. Webster strikes again. One of the production's great strength was the fact that it played the farce as farce and the tragedy as tragedy, not trying to darken the one or undermine the other to fit into some kind of unity.

Matt Baldwin's put in an excellent performance as Master Justiniano, who disguises himself as a schoolteacher and also, hilariously, as his own wife. Some other members of the cast could have easily taken a leaf out of his book, for example the abrasive Graham Townsend, who, believing himself to be in Wembley stadium, had the volume control constantly at 10 for his portrayal of Master Monopoly. Not wise, considering that he had one of those travelling accents that bad actors sometimes get, voyaging between Wales and France via Pakistan.

Why has I Henry VI not been performed more often? Or, to give the play its full title, why has The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, With the Death of the Good Duke Humphrey: and the Banishment and Death of the Duke of Suffolk, and the Tragical End of the Proud Cardinal of Winchester, With the Notable Rebellion of Jack Cade: and the Duke of York's First Claim Unto the Crown not been performed more often? The clue is in the name: this is not so much one play as a gallimaufry of different plots in an ongoing saga, a kind of Renaissance Eastenders, that would have delighted audiences over months in Shakespeare's time. In this play, written early in Shakespeare's career, you can see the playwright discovering situations and characters that would re-emerge later: The ambitious wife of Gloucester would be revisited as Lady Macbeth, and the madcap reforms of Jack Cade sound a bit like Lear in his hippy phase. It is the equivalent of Sketches by Boz in Dickens career - the melting pot, the author collecting his characters.

The reason that it has not been performed is also due, no doubt, to the fact that this is a Shakespeare play without a leading man. No place for Irving, Olivier, Branagh, Jude Law. But then it suits the times: I have seen the same company perform Henry V, and Geoffrey Streatfield (excellent in this production as Suffolk) had hard work with Hal's heroic speeches. Likewise, the war veterans on the front row weren't quite lifted into the stratospheres of patriotic rapture that they might have been in more optimistic productions in more optimistic times.

There is another reason that this production has probably been staged quite infrequently over the past 400 years: most of the scenes are full of public utterances. It is a play of proclamations and vows, threats and counter threats, justifications and plotting. There are not many soliloquys, there is no cosying up to the intimate thoughts of a Hamlet in this play. But these productions make the court scenes are genuinely thrilling: after seeing the slipping hold of the King, the lords rounding on Gloucester, the raving Margaret, you have forgotten the philosophical Shakespeare so beloved of literary critics, and are pretty wrapped up in whose throat gets slit next.

Then there is the top quality aerial business: men hanged on stage, dying bishops hauled up to heaven, and demons hoisted out of pits. This is the challenge for any director and company wanting to put on these plays- to find a presentation that does justice to the huge barrelling progress of history.

It is where these productions excelled against, for example, Nicholas Hytner's productions of the Henry IV plays at the National a couple of years ago. That particular director, with his genius for comedy, the human touch, and one-off bits of stage business, had enlivened individual scenes; but in the background, it seemed like history had stopped or was frozen. Who will be King next? Don't mind. France? What's the problem? Leave it alone, I have sausages to eat. What's that, you will spend a few years drinking and then reform yourself? Fine, go ahead. It was like watching a mechanic fit a spoiler and wheel rims to a car with no engine: there are more fundamental things which a director of the Histories must acheive.