Guest Post: Henry VI Parts 1-3

Yorkists and Lancastrians square off. Just another Manic Monday.

Well, you've read me bang on about Henry VI so it's about time someone else got in on the act. So I pass the blog torch over to my wife Cate, who had the pleasure (pressure) of watching the whole trilogy with me (start to finish!). So let's here the views of someone who doesn't always share my love for the creaky sets, slow pace and grandstanding acting of the BBC from the 1970s. Over to you Cate!

As a historian, I confess I’m often not a fan of Shakespeare’s history plays – I just can’t detach from the glaring historical errors and view them as fiction, particularly not since Shakespeare’s version has often over-written reality in the general consciousness. As a fervent Ricardian, I have even greater problems with his Wars of the Roses plays – seeing Shakespeare’s Richard of Gloucester gleefully murdering people at a time when the real Richard was a child of eight makes my teeth grind every time.

The Henry plays also have several substantial chunks which I feel could be cut entirely with no great loss to world literature. I get that Jack Cade is terribly thematic, but blimey he’s dull – and do we really need all that French action in Part 1? And – shameless personal prejudice – I’m also much less tolerant of outdated production values than Ali is! So really I ought to have hated these films, but in the end I found a lot to admire. The historical-pedant side of my brain couldn’t be stopped from screaming periodically, but the theatre-nerd part thoroughly enjoyed a lot of the stage-craft.

The slavish literalism of many of the previous films had been almost entirely done away with – no painstakingly constructed interiors or (still worse) trips out to film in a forest here. Intelligently tackling the sweeping nature of the plot, an abstract set was used not only to cover everything from English prison cells to French battlefields, but also to communicate and reflect the deterioration of the realm itself – fading gradually from hopeful primary colours in Part 1 into faded, muddy tones, to finally a bleak monochrome with sooty timbers and blackened armour standing out against a melancholic snowfall. Brilliantly, the costumes evolved in a mirroring fashion through the three plays. Not only did they echo the degeneration in colour palette – fading from the cheery pastels and bold primary tones of medieval illuminations into grim, scruffy tones of black and grey – but the styles evolved as well. 

By the time the saga concluded, the action had passed into the hands of a rougher, more brutal generation, corrupted by (or taking advantage of) the civil war and absence of authority around them: and accordingly, the ornate, brightly coloured and rather cumbersome costumes of the early players had been replaced by dark, brigand-like outfits cobbled together from rough armour, headbands and an awful lot of weaponry, solely designed for maximum effectiveness in a fight. By the middle of Part 3, we hadn’t seen a splash of colour in a long time, and the sudden rush of blues and silvers when the action moves to the French court, or the blood-red of Lancastrian banners at Towton, was a visual jolt.  

The filming too took a leap forward imaginatively. I enjoyed the trick of actors delivering their asides slyly into the camera, making the viewer complicit in their schemes and plots. Still more impressive was the effective use of stylized tableaux and sequences – the outstanding ones for me being Talbot’s last stand and the moment where mirrors were used to create a huge, synchronized, almost mythical-looking army from about three actual actors at Towton. 

The performances, though, were a mixed bag. In the lead roles, I very much enjoyed Peter Benson as the gentle and ineffectual King Henry – he managed to somehow be both hopeless and endearing at the same time. He also had a remarkable gift for making you stop noticing him right in the middle of a scene, fading away to the background while your attention was caught by more strident characters. It was a generous performance, as well as an accomplished one, allowing others to constantly seize the centre stage. On the other hand, from her first entrance I loathed Julia Foster as Queen Margaret – strident, grating and stroppy, she lacked the range to tackle either the romantic Suffolk scenes or her early subtler manipulation of Henry. In her hands, Margaret was a bully and a scold, without vulnerability, guile or complexity. All of this was particularly frustrating since Margaret is one of Shakespeare’s best roles for women – there are enough plays out there where women only get to play one or two emotions, to see a multi-faceted role like this reduced to a one-note caricature was painful.

Elsewhere in the cast, it was a similar story. While Bernard Hill made a charismatic and watchable York, and Brian Protheroe was good as a shallow Edward of March, Mark Wing-Davey failed to summon the inflated pride that would make Warwick pivot on a sixpence over nothing more than a thwarted marriage alliance and suddenly swear allegiance to the woman he’d spent the last 11 hours of drama fighting, and Ron Cook as Richard of Gloucester failed to convince as a villain who could smile, and murder while he smiled. But perhaps I’m being unfair on that last one. Like I said at the beginning, I’m never going to love Shakespeare’s most enduring piece of character assassination.

And with that, I’ll conclude my guest appearance on the blog!