Written for The Guardian
The Balkan states get a bum deal with Shakespeare's trio of Henry VI plays. Not only do they have to contend with the muddle of various dukes, their families and their shifting allegiances – a difficult enough feat even without a language barrier – each has to do so from scratch. By splitting the trilogy up between three companies, the Globe might get three languages into one narrative, but they diminish the epic sweep of its history, whereby sons settle scores started by their fathers.
This is a shame, because as the trilogy progresses, the crown, perversely, seems to grow less important. Each play begins with a throne on stage, which shrinks in each case from a gilded hulk to a wooden cross-frame and finally, a lowly stool more suited to milkmaids than majesty. Rivalry overtakes the impulse to rule. Hatred forgets its first cause. The flip side is a real sense of the inter-generational conflict that runs throughout. This is, after all, a time when fathers battle against their sons and vice versa. Youth repeatedly disrespects its elders and another set of grey-haired wrinklies gets bumped off. After more than a hundred years of war with France, Henry VI’s England is a country desperately trying to rebirth itself. The National Theatre Belgrade open the trilogy with a stageful of dead bodies unfurling themselves back into life.
Curiously, the Serbs ensure this remains very much English history. Their codpieces and leather jerkins could easily have come from a raid on Sherwood Forest, and an Arthurian-style round table dominates the stage, breaking up as the conflict with France wears on to its fractured conclusion and England turns against itself.
Nikita Milivojević directs a physically illustrative production with a sense of humour and, though the continual charades to convey details sometimes feel unnecessary, real clarity. Declaring allegiances as civil war kicks off, the dukes streak their foreheads with red and white war paint. As Henry, a chipper Hadži Nenad Maričić, spiritedly reconciles the two sides, but after a handshake as grudging as any by Luis Suárez, there's little sense of the seething resentment beneath this precarious coalition. Too often, narrative momentum is sacrificed in favour of individual stage images – though the last of these, a scene in which two bickering messengers frantically try to scoop Henry V's spilled ashes back into their urn, is telling.
It's ancient history, too, for the National Theatre of Albania doing Part 2, albeit in its own national garb of bejewelled cloaks and fustanellas. Static and statesmanlike in their purple robes, Henry's court looks the spit of Caesar's senate. Given the murmurs of conspiracy around Indrit Çobani's insipid school-prefect of a Henry, that's not inappropriate, but it is unfeasibly dull. It's far too reliant on the text, forgetting that barely half of the audience can keep up.
Bujar Asqeriu's rebel Jack Cade, a bucolic Rambo of a man, provides a much-needed shot in the arm, but the effect is spoiled by the acting of his rioting followers. We're "treated" to the full gamut of disabled stereotypes: one actor playing a one-armed character with a limb inside a jumper, someone else attempting to be blind, and an assortment of apparent learning difficulties. It's all a bit too 1950s for comfort.
Thank goodness, then, that Macedonia's National Theatre of Bitola brings things up to date in the final part of the Henriad with a bold, cartoonish production played in an assortment of military uniforms that feels somewhat reminiscent of theatre company Propeller. The American director John Blondell's staging is the first to capture the brutality of war – Clifford dies with a stake through his throat – but also the nuances of individual characters.
Petar Gorko's King Henry initially plays the tyrant. He has all the trappings, including a waggish Queen Margaret in killer heels (Gabriela Petrushevska), but relinquishes them for a life free from politics. His successor, Ognen Drangovski's Edward, is every inch the playboy prince, hoiking Lady Gray offstage. Martin Mirchevski and Filip Mirchevski are superb as his two squat, envious brothers; proper little Yorkshire terrors both.
Blondell's masterstroke is to recast two roles, Warwick and King Louis of France, as women. While the men fight for their own egos, dwelling on past enmities and personal ambition, Queen Margaret and these women think only of the future and whose children will sit upon the throne in the years ahead.
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