THE ACTOR’s VOICE AND THE DIRECTOR’s CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH MICHAEL PENNINGTON, ADRIAN NOBLE, AND MICHAEL BOYD
Michael Pennington, born in 1943, was brought up in London and read English at Cambridge University. While at university he appeared with the National Youth Theatre. He went on to join the RSC, playing small parts in The Wars of the Roses directed by Peter Hall (1964). He has since returned to the RSC on many occasions, playing Angelo in Measure for Measure (1974), Edgar in King Lear (1976), Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost (1978), Hamlet (1980), and Timon in Timon of Athens (2000). He has numerous radio and television parts to his credit, as well as film roles. He has written books on acting Shakespeare and Chekhov. In 1986 he and Michael Bogdanov founded the English Shakespeare Company (ESC), dedicated to taking Shakespeare to new audiences. Their inaugural production, The Henrys, comprising the two parts of Henry IV plus Henry V, in which he played Prince Hal/King Henry V, was enormously successful. Richard II, the three Henry VI plays, and Richard III were subsequently added, and their Wars of the Roses toured the world to great acclaim. He launched his one-man show, Sweet William, about Shakespeare’s life and writing and his own relationship with those works, in 2006. He talks here both about playing the part of Hal and about wider aspects of the ESC staging of the two parts.
Adrian Noble, born in 1950, arrived at the RSC from the Bristol Old Vic, where he had directed several future stars in productions of classic plays. His first production on the main stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford was the acclaimed 1982 King Lear. Two years later, his Henry V sowed the seed for Kenneth Branagh’s film. Among his other major productions during his two decades at the RSC were Hamlet, again with Branagh in the title role; The Plantagenets, based on the Henry VI/Richard III tetralogy; and the two parts of Henry IV. Noble’s 1994 A Midsummer Night’s Dream was made into a film. He was artistic director from 1991 to 2003, since when he has been a freelance director. His production style is characterized by strong use of colors and objects (such as umbrellas), and fluid scenic structure. He talks here about his 1991 production with Robert Stephens as Falstaff, making reference to both Part I and Part II of Henry IV.
Michael Boyd was born in Belfast in 1955, educated in London and Edinburgh, and completed his MA in English literature at Edinburgh University. He trained as a director at the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre in Moscow. He then went on to work at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, joining the Sheffield Crucible as associate director in 1982. In 1985 Boyd became founding artistic director of the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, becoming equally acclaimed for staging new writing and innovative productions of the classics. He was drama director of the New Beginnings Festival of Soviet Arts in Glasgow in 1999. He joined the RSC as an associate director in 1996 and has since directed numerous productions of Shakespeare’s plays. He won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Director for his version of the Henry VI plays in the RSC’s This England: The Histories in 2001. He took over as artistic director of the RSC in 2003 and oversaw the extraordinarily successful Complete Works Festival in 2006–07. He followed this up with a cycle of all eight history plays, from Richard II through to Richard III, with the same company of actors. This transferred to London’s Roundhouse Theatre in 2008 and won multiple awards. He talks here about both parts of Henry IV.
These plays can be thought of as individual works, as parts of a pair, or of a tetralogy, or even of a longer cycle of English history plays. There are cross-references across the two parts, back to Richard II and forward to Henry V. Some audience members know the back-story and the forward-story, some don’t. How do you cope with all this?
MP: Each of the history plays has to stand alone—that’s how Shakespeare planned them—but it’s almost as if he had an idea that they might one day be seen in sequence, as they often are now, because each generally “trails” the next episode of the story at its end. So Part II closes by looking forward to Henry V’s French campaign, and indeed the end of Henry V to the reign of Henry VI. With the Henry IVs it doesn’t really matter if the audience doesn’t know Henry V since it’s in the future, except as general interest as to how Henry V became Henry V. The backstory of Richard II is more of a problem: you need to know about the shakiness of Henry IV’s claim to the throne and his own conscience—if he has any—about having usurped. The only real answer is to make sure the actors make the audience truly listen to Hotspur’s argument against Henry in Part I and what the king himself says, so that they miss none of it. It’s a matter of emphasis in the acting, of determination to get it across.
AN: In two ways. First of all one, has to start with the very simple premise that people are buying a ticket for one show, therefore it has to stand alone. But from the point of view of the acting company and as somebody involved at the RSC with the history plays for quite some time, I’d say it’s very hard not to appreciate the wider context, going back to the Henry VI plays. It seems to me impossible that Shakespeare did not have an architectural form in his head as he wrote them. The Henry VI/Richard III tetralogy was the first time since Sophocles and Euripides that someone had attempted a cycle of interrelated plays for the secular stage. It hadn’t happened for two thousand years. I cannot believe that, writing it as a man in his mid- to late twenties, Shakespeare wasn’t conscious of that. And of course they were enormously successful, so slightly later in his career, when his gaze cast upon the Henry IV plays, I think he must again have had some sort of ghost of the architecture in his mind all the time. But because the first tetralogy tackled events that chronologically took place after those of the second, you get a very strong sense of moving forward toward anarchy and chaos. If you look at all eight, you start with the formality of Richard II and end up with the butchery of Richard III. It’s a divine untidiness. In the second tetralogy you can see the architecture but also a maturity of construction and a depth of characterization within each play, which makes them highly satisfactory as individual plays.
MB: We conceived our Henry IVs as part of an eight-play cycle of Shakespeare’s history plays, and a large proportion of our audience saw them in this context. Clive Wood had not only played Bullingbrook in Richard II but, as Richard of York, had spent three plays trying to take the crown from Henry VI and failing. We staged the plays initially in the order of their writing so York was seen on a Sisyphean journey toward the crown, which faltered in Henry VI Part III and began again with renewed vigor and sophistication in Richard II. The Henry IV plays revealed the eventual fruits of his labors as bitter.
Shakespeare had five very successful histories behind him as he wrote the Henry IVs, and Henry V was a popular title long before Shakespeare wrote his version, so I think it’s fair to say that both author and audience were conscious of context as they experienced the events of Henry IV.
These plays move between very distinctive settings: royal court, rebels’ castles, Eastcheap tavern, Gloucestershire orchard, battlefield. How did you and your designer set about creating these contrasting worlds?
MP: On their own terms, eclectically. The court wore Edwardian dress, the rebels harked back variously to the eighteenth century and forward to twentieth-century warfare; the tavern was more or less 1980s, the Gloucestershire orchard perhaps a little pre–First World War, the battlefield went back to medieval chainmail and broadsword. All the time we were responding to the temperament of the characters and the atmospherics of each scene and asking the audience to accept unexpected contrasts. The plays are in a sense about the entire history of Britain.
AN: Bob Crowley designed the set and Deirdre Clancy the costumes. We started with a very beautiful wooden floor fringed with gold, that both functioned as a practical space and had a strong resonance that could operate as a metaphor. The second thing we decided was that we would spend a lot of our money (because in the end it comes down to that) on the Boar’s Head in Eastcheap, because we felt it was an aspect of the play that really needed to jump into the audience’s imagination. In any of Shakespeare’s plays, some parts
require what I would loosely call “social realism” and some don’t. King Lear does not require much social realism. The Merry Wives of Windsor requires a lot, because the plots operate and are triggered by different things. There are certain aspects of Henry IV Part I that require that social realism, and the Boar’s Head tavern is one of those.
The tavern in Part I was a well of life: it absolutely teemed with energy and life. The tavern in Part II was a much emptier place. It was a lonely and quite sad place, a place for losers, a place where folk were in danger, so everyone got out very fast when they were told there was another war starting. I used it for Henry IV’s great monologue, “How many thousand of my poorest subjects / Are at this hour asleep?” [3.1.4–5]. I had King Henry wander through the tavern, in which the down-and-outs and the losers were all lying drunk and asleep.
This relates to the structure of Part II, which is absolutely brilliant. It all works contrapuntally. It’s contrapuntal between town and country, between war councils and petty quarrels. And one of the great pieces of counterpoint is at the death of King Henry IV. Henry IV dies in the Jerusalem chamber in the Palace of Westminster and the next scene is in Gloucestershire. From the very beginning of Part I he has wanted to go to the Holy Land. He keeps talking about how he wants to go to Jerusalem and eventually he does go there, but he goes there in death. I had his sons and the courtiers lift his body and carry him, and as his bed was lifted aloft and he came weaving downstage then upstage, I did a transformation into the countryside in Gloucestershire. I had a huge canopy with ladders poking up through it and all you saw were the legs of the actors. They were up the ladders, throwing apples down, and the dead body of the king was carried up through the canopy, up through this orchard, the orchard of England. We did this strange picture in slow motion, so it was like he’d gone to heaven, and so we had this fabulous juxtaposition which I think completely fulfilled Shakespeare’s purpose. It was a wonderful juxtaposition of the realistic—we had real beekeepers and real apple pickers in the orchard—and the imagistic, the metaphorical. The man had finally found his way to Jerusalem: it was just eighty miles up the Thames in Gloucestershire. So we found a way in Part II of being much freer, much bolder, in the integration of the scenery with the structure of the play.
MB: Henry’s court was characterized by a simple silver bowl of water where he tried to wash his hands of the blood of Richard II.
Eastcheap was dominated by a battered old armchair that had taken the shape of David Warner’s Falstaff, and was framed by a large and tattered red velvet drape, which spoke of warmth, theatrical artifice, and backstage assignations. Staff and customers also emerged from and disappeared into a smoky purgatory beneath the stage.
Nearly all the castles from Orleans and Bordeaux in Henry VI Part I to Harfleur in Henry V were carried by our great rusty Louise Bourgeois–style tower, that rose from its hell mouth gates up past an “I’m the King of the Castle” balcony to an ambiguous spiral stair, which rose to and fell from the grid seven meters above the stage.
Gloucestershire was a bale of hay, some bunting, blossom, and a barbecue.
Our battlefields were the bodies of men fighting over the rusty body of England, which Tom Piper created. Our set suggested arms and legs and a head and viscera.
The plays dramatize the movement from feudalism (with the powerful barons of the North) to the early modern state (with an absolutist idea of monarchy). But they also speak to very Elizabethan concerns, such as the administration of the nation by means of a network of local justices (not all of whom are entirely free from corruption…). And at the same time, the idea of the education of a future leader is a timeless theme. So: medieval setting, Elizabethan, modern, or some eclectic mixture of them all?
MP: I’m not so sure about this education of Hal. I think he has a great struggle between his impulses and his duties; he realizes what he will have to sacrifice, and in playing the part I came to think it costs him something. Not that he lets on: in Henry V he hardly mentions his past and is completely ruthless about hanging Bardolph for robbing a church, the kind of thing he might once have done himself. So if this is an education, it is not a very inclusive or compassionate one, more a hard lesson in realpolitik.
AN: We chose to set it pretty accurately in its period. I think it becomes a nonsense if you take it out of its period, to be absolutely honest, because we all know too much about other periods in which you might set it, and its own period is itself so interesting and resonant. When you’ve got a wonderful company of actors and you do it reasonably well, relevance jumps out at you.
MB: We found ourselves more interested in Shakespeare as a storyteller for his own age than as medievalist scholar. After the corruption of the old world, the old faith, and the would-be absolutist Richard, comes the cold wind of religious and political reform. Elizabeth may have seen herself characterized as Richard II, but she is also the reforming Protestant ruler beset with a dissenting and unruly populace that we see in Henry IV. The Archbishop of York, who “Turns insurrection to religion,” can’t fail to have reminded Shakespeare’s audience of the Pilgrimage of Grace which threatened Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII with a militarized Catholic backlash from the North.
We opted for three generations: the glamorous remnants of Richard/Elizabeth’s golden age; the new black, simple, puritanical broom of Bullingbrook/Elizabeth; and the new generation of Hal and Poins willfully revisiting some of the decadent glamour of the past (with a little help from the saloon glamour of Westerns).
Prince Hal is sometimes one of the lads, sometimes coolly detached from his companions. Does this change over the two parts of the drama? Or, to ask the same question in another way: his first soliloquy, “I know you all,” is crucial, isn’t it? Do you see him speaking it essentially to himself or to the audience in the theater? Does it reveal him as a Machiavellian manipulator from the start, just playing a game in order to improve his own image, always intending to reject his companions when the time is ripe? Or is there much more ambivalence in the progress from “I know you all” early in Part I to the rejection speech, “I know thee not,” at the end of Part II?
MP: Yes, he oscillates—he’s tugged in two directions, as anybody might be. He pulls princely rank sometimes in the tavern, and in the court he plays the bad boy. He’s quite unresolved.
“I know you all” is a very unusual soliloquy in that it seems to be addressed not to the audience but to his offstage friends and is overheard by the audience. Shakespeare hardly ever does this. A soliloquizer normally confides in the theater audience more intimately than this, more trustingly. The effect here is to make Hal seem a little remote from us.
Playing him as what you call a Machiavellian is possible but it’s not very interesting theatrically, like playing the Duke in Measure for Measure simply as a manipulator.
Hal is very monosyllabic when he comes to the point—as in those two cases [his first soliloquy in Part I and the rejection speech at the end of Part II], and also “I do, I will” when he promises Falstaff he will reject him. I think what keeps the play and the part alive is that he has great difficulty in resolving his conflicting urges. He sets out his program at the start, but he doesn’t find it that easy to execute. He leaves the tavern and goes to the court, but is disappointed by his father, who is manipulative and self-absorbed; he goes back to Falstaff, but realizes he can’t truly be part of that world either. There is a lot of implied conflict in him.
6. “O polished perturbation! Golden care!” Michael Pennington as Prince Hal and John Castle as Henry IV in the English Shakespeare Company’s Wars of the Roses, 1986–89.
AN: He is all of those things. He’s very complex because if you try and play it as somebody who’s being manipulative and Machiavellian, in terms of a great scheme, it doesn’t sustain itself. It’s unactable and it’s incredible to the audience. The only way it works is if he thoroughly embraces the Eastcheap world and is a protagonist within it. You have to work back from that and from
the fact that he says “I know you all.” Some people find it necessary to have the character one or the other; I think he’s both. I think he’s a human being and human beings are extremely complex people. Young people, especially, live several lives: they live the life they live with their parents and they live a completely different life with other people. That’s part of growing up and of how you relate to your parents. Hal has, in a way, been very lucky, in the sense that he has two fathers who each represent the two aspects of his character, so again you get this counterpoint which is very creative and very abrasive; it creates intellectual energy. I think Hal embraces that world fully, and the key moment for him is when he finally answers his dad: “Do not think so. You shall not find it so” [Henry IV Part I, 3.2.130]. It’s a monosyllabic line and you can’t rush that line, because there are too many vowels in it. That’s a turning point for the character; that’s when he realizes he actually has to decide. It’s also, interestingly enough, when he finds a voice. I think it’s when he finds the voice that will attack Hotspur and will attack the French in Henry V. He embraces both worlds happily, and I think that’s part of his personality. It’s part of the education of the king, but it’s more particularly part of the humanity of the king. Another way of looking at it is to think of Hal’s time with Falstaff as a time of disguise; the disguise allows him the freedom to explore and develop and thereby achieve wisdom. The character is both with and outside the disguise at one and the same time.
MB: Hal’s genuine longing to be a hard-drinking, womanizing Corinthian is in tension from the beginning with his dark understanding that he is heir to the throne and therefore the target of flattery and envious rumor. He starts by flirting with the political theater of the deferred appearance of the sun from behind the cloud, and ends as the leading player in a much darker piece of political theater as he renounces Falstaff, and is groomed for war with France.
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