STRATFORD is currently gearing itself up for nine hours of civil war. The accoutrements of battle—swords, chainmail, leather and assorted props—are being bashed out or stitched up in the workshops. Fights, speeches, prophecies, treaties, head spikings and sieges are being rehearsed for the opening of this medieval saga of feuding, civil strife and faltering kingship. Designer Bob Crowley and an eighteen week rehearsal period have been allocated to this company of over forty actors to perform the 100 or so named parts in the tetralogy which, as in the Barton/Hall version, is now a three pat show incorporating Richard III. 2 and 3 Henry VI have been compressed into one play and the plays retitled Henry VI, The Rise of Edward IV and Richard III, His Death.

For those who might have forgotten, the histories take us from the funeral of Henry V through to Richard III’s demise: a chain of nemesis linking Richard II’s murder—the original sin—to the horrors that occur after Henry V’s funeral, the starting point of the sequence. It is argued that Shakespeare was obliged to write in accordance with the Tudor Myth, the official history which, through bogus evidence, established Henry VII as a redeemer and peace-bringer, uniting through marriage the houses of York and Lancaster. Artistically encumbered with such propaganda, the young dramatist produced work of considerable inconsistency: a great cycle, but one punctuated with long, dull stretches. With Hall and Holinshed’s outline maps to guide him, Shakespeare does, nonetheless manage to unfurl in these chronicles a penetrating study of family psychology—a tale of domestic violence writ large—culminating in that magnificent and colourful study of political terror, Richard III; itself a story of villainy that owes much more to a successful smear campaign than to historical fact.

Perhaps from the sheer scale of operations it demands, the tetralogy has—even in truncated form—a rarity value. Enormously popular with Elizabethan audiences, it is only in the last few decades that it has since been dusted off as an actable commodity. Douglas Seale’s apparently stunning but largely forgotten Birmingham Rep production in 1952 was followed by the famous Barton/Hall version in 1963 (of which more later), and latterly Terry Hands’ production of the three parts in 1977, the last time the RSC showed them.

To recap on some principal landmarks: the Henry VI trilogy episodically treats of the death of the heroic Talbot in France, the death of Jean La Pucelle, and the marriage of Margaret of Anjou to the devout but meek King Henry; her love for the doomed Suffolk; the loss of France and the rebellion of Jack Cade; Henry’s disinheritance of his son and Margaret’s avowal of destruction on the House of York. This is all rounded off with Edward IV’s final victory, Henry’s murder and the ruthless path clearance to the throne by the Duke of Glouscester in Richard III.

It is revealed in Michael Billington’s biography of Peggy Ashcroft that Peter Hall, suffering from acute exhaustion, directed the plays from a couch with a doctor in attendance. This delightful image of a grandee in extremis is now updated. Engagingly, Adrian Noble, wears Hawaiian socks and swigs instant coffee behind the desk in Stratford’s chrome and leather executive suite. The Wars of the Roses, or The Plantagenets as we are now to call them, seem somehow remote. My first question related to a press statement he made about the cycle being one of ‘the greatest military parables ever written’. This, we felt, was bringing the howitzer questions in a little early so we turned to the Barton/Hall landmark and the business of rewriting and adapting the three parts of Henry VI into two.

Noble had seen neither Terry Hands’ nor Peter Hall’s productions, but he commented on the printed version of the latter: ‘Whereas there’s probably one line in ours not written by Shakespeare there were hundreds of thousands not by Shakespeare in theirs. I’m left with more of the rough edges, the contradictions and the clumsiness that John Barton smoothed into a more homogenous piece.’

Hundreds of thousands isn’t quite right, of course. To be precise, the tetralogy’s 12,350 lines were roughly halved by John Barton with 1,440 lines of fake Elizabethan verse added—a fifth of the entire production. For the purpose of reshaping the test of this new production the playwright Charles Wood’s (‘the greatest writer I know of, second to Shakespeare, on soldiers’) job was not that of pasticheur but as a ‘shaper’ of a version which has been evolving since January.

Are we not now entitled to see these plays as they were written longeurs and all? Noble replies with a question: ‘Do you believe that the Henry VI plays are incomplete without Richard III, or Richard III complete without Henry VI? My answer, like Peter Hall’s, is yes, they are incomplete. I think they are a tetralogy. Now if your say that, then how do you reveal that to the pubic? I have tried to create one play; but how long can that be? Fifteen hours is just not possible; you would miss the opportunity of the audience seeing it in one sweep. Who these days has got four free evenings in a row?’

Box office considerations aside, the works lend themselves to adaptation by dint of their own uneveness. On the page 2 Henry VI strikes the notes of a true masterpiece. But the young Shakespeare, probably with collaborators (Barton standing in for Nashe on the 1963 rewrite) was clearly churning it out, leaving behind decidedly dispensible stretches in the other parts. Richard III, formerly a piece of Brechtian Grand Guignol, will now emerge as an essentially serious analysis of terror with Anton Lesser assuming the crown, as he did in the Terry Hands’ production.

Noble and Wood have simply done what sounds like a viable compression job. For instance, the sieges have been reduced in number, the Horner fight in part two has been (regrettably) cut, certain events reported rather then enacted. For a contemporary audience problems are increased since familiarity with the genealogy of Edward III’s offspring can hardly be taken for granted. While Mortimer conveniently recapitulates the ancestry of the various claimants, Noble has cast he generations carefully so that the less sharp eared have a chance.

With Ken Bones as Edward IV, Oliver Cotton doubling up as Cade and Suffold, Robert Demeger as Talbot and Anton Lesser returning to the role of Gloucester, the parts have been thoughtfully allocated. ‘We’ve cast up in age—Ray Bowers, David Waller (the latter with Cherry Morris was in the Hall version, a vestige of continuity in a generally young company) are men in their fifties, so we’ll see theirs in an older dynasty—a generation of grizzled, brutal men, now with the nightmare of a nine month old baby the throne.’

Indeed the characterization is of crucial importance to the tetralogy. Chiefly in the part, more or less rediscovered by Ashcroft in The Wars of the Roses, of the ‘she-wolf’ Margaret. Dame Peggy was 56 when she took it on. The much younger and eminently capable Penny Downie now assumes this giant role, moving as it does from young bride to an aged hag, the sole Lancastrian voice spooking the Yorkist court. ‘The part is a King Lear for women,’ says Noble. ‘Penny is rising to the opportunity.’ Amongst its delights is the paper Crown scene in which Margaret wipes York’s face with the blood of his dad son prior to stabbing him. It requires a stamina and an imaginative feel for the psychosis of grief-born cruelty.

David Warner’s brilliantly feckless creation of 25 years ago will be taken on by Ralph Fiennes with the clues as to what Noble calls ‘Henry’s intensely active inner life’. While Margaret provides us with Shakespeare’s first great heroine, the plays also furnished the first of Shakespeare’s great families. The Yorks (David Calder, who has done some fine work this season, promising a strong performance as Richard, the duke) are presented as the precursors of the Macbeths, the Macduffs and the Lears. Caught too in special focus will be ‘The idea of France. I wanted to make France somewhere really worth having: a very rich place whose loss is a massive loss of power, status and money to the English. What I meant earlier in my ‘parable’ is that it seems necessary to recreate an enemy as the worst possible thing—a devil in this case—in order to control it. Having created it it then haunts you. Quite literally the French Margaret haunts those plays to the very end.’

For the protagonists in civil war, history is largely a case of what the other side did to you. For further contemporary resonance you have only to look at the issue raised in the plays about political voice and the expediency of extreme violence. Beyond this Noble points to the tetralogy as evidence of subtler casualties. ‘How much responsibility is there to the spiritual life in the midst of war? All three brothers, Edward, Clarence and Richard, are racked with guilt—they die in torment. The tetralogy deals with a spiritual as well as political world. It charts the complete transformation of civilization, how values get corrupted and changed; how a great hope becomes a terrifying club to beat people with; how the sun of York becomes the long night of Richard.’

The company has a unique opportunity to venture into relatively uncharted waters and to find a fresh dramatic expression of these linked texts. The taste of serials, soaps, and history cycles is part of a new appetite—‘they certainly seem to suit the time,,’ says Noble. The proof, of course, will be in the eating.

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