King John & Henry VIII (28 page)

Shakespeare made Prince Arthur younger than the historical character, presumably for his own dramatic purposes; what problems did this pose, working with such a young actor (or more than one) and how did you overcome them? How did you manage the harrowing scenes of his threatened torture and then his death?

Doran:
Initially I was very wary about it. I have been very wary about child actors on the stage. He does have to be young: it’s absolutely deliberate Shakespeare’s making him younger. I was very lucky that Barbara Roberts, who looked after the children’s casting, found and nurtured two particularly good young boys—one of whom, Joshua McGuire, is now playing Hamlet at the Globe. It was as important a role for me to cast as John, the Bastard, or Constance.

In this cynical world of shifting allegiances, Prince Arthur’s selfless love stands as a really important parameter. We had defined the
moment of Arthur’s death as needing to jolt the play, to be a real shock. The designer Stephen Brimson Lewis managed to produce one of the most spectacular moments of shock that we’ve seen in the Swan: Arthur, all of twelve or thirteen years old, seemed to walk along the rail of the top gallery and then to fall from there to his death, a distance of some eighteen feet (5.5 meters). I remember a lot of mothers in the audience clutching their neighbors, terrified by the vulnerability of this young child. Of course it was all a rather brilliantly devised trick of substituting a dummy just at the moment when the child fell with a sickening thud onto the stage. But it did cause a shock and often a scream in the audience, which I think was required in the play: it’s almost like you’re being slapped by that moment.

It has to bring home the reality of how politics can destroy the innocent. We had images in our heads of Kim Phuc, the little girl running from the napalm attack in South Vietnam—moments where innocence had been caught in the crossfire. It felt as though that was a key moment to deliver: to stop the play running away with itself as a political satire.

Rourke:
That’s interesting because after
King John
I went and did a Mamet play called
The Cryptogram
at the Donmar Warehouse, which had an enormous part for a ten-year-old boy in it as well. It was my year for working with ten-year-old boys! They were fantastic. It was one of my greatest experiences working with those lads on that role because I think Shakespeare understood something—and I realized through the play—about the incredible power of a child who is just at the point of losing his childhood. When I worked with those two boys on that play they were nine and ten. I saw them a year later and they were getting ready to be teenagers, they weren’t children anymore. There’s something about those liminal points in our lives, when we are between one thing and the next, that give this incredible dramatic potency. On press night there was an amazing moment when one of the boys went completely method, and when Hubert thrust the warrant at him was so angry he knocked it out of his hand—in the moment. He was feeling it so powerfully. Thank goodness that the actor playing Hubert was so ready to respond!

There was another great moment: I will never forget seeing an audience member, when Hubert was standing over Arthur with the poker, ready to blind him, holding his programme in front of his face because he couldn’t bear it. You really believed it.

In the play, Arthur throws himself off a high wall in order to escape imprisonment and dies. It was very important to us that we could actually fly the child—drop them and fly them forward—so we could do the descent. We worked really hard technically on that moment. There was a great moment where you thought that we’d dropped him because it happened so quickly and then he moved and groaned in pain and it was a great theatrical shock to people.

I remember when I was a kid, down at the bottom of my street there was a wall where the ground gradually fell away then inclined, and we’d dare each other to drop higher and higher off it. There’s a very basic, very human thing about a child misjudging a height. As we grow up we learn that we shouldn’t touch hot things, and that cold things are cold, we learn what distance means, and what we should do with our body. Arthur is not pushed. He doesn’t jump out of some kind of strange, tormented suicide bid. He genuinely believes he can have a go and jump it and survive, when he clearly can’t. I find that enormously moving.

The play’s language is dense and almost impenetrable at times; did your actors encounter problems in understanding what it meant and more importantly conveying that meaning to the audience?

Doran:
We spent a lot of time unpicking the text with the entire company, and then seeing how the conflicting rhetoric worked. Once the company had got an understanding of what the language meant, they really began to enjoy how people used argument: how they deployed and marshaled their arguments rhetorically. You could see how people twisted argument and in the Swan, which is a sort of debating chamber, it became particularly exciting; the sheer thrill of an argument well debated. We had great verse-speakers like Guy Henry, Geoffrey Freshwater (Philip of France), Kelly Hunter, Jo Stone-Fewings (the Bastard), and John Hopkins as the dauphin, so
the verse was in very good hands. If you didn’t attend to the complexities of that verse, and if you didn’t have somebody as brilliant as David Collings playing Cardinal Pandulph, then I could see how you could get lost, or as the Bastard says at one point, be “bethumped with words.” But there is great wit in how the argument shifts. When it suits him Pandulph can turn an argument completely upside down.

Rourke:
We did a lot of work on this in rehearsal. I had a friend of mine who is a barrister and a public speaking champion called Benet Brandreth who did some fantastic work with us. What he said about rhetoric is that it is the art of persuasion. What’s really interesting about the play is that people have the ability to persuade other people of their position; it’s a real muscular force within the play. The way we use rhetoric to steady, or to change, or to state a claim—all of those persuasive grounds are really fascinating. It would be great if rhetoric was to come back more strongly into the theater and a passion for how ideas work would be reignited—I think that is starting to happen now. In 2006 when we did the play something in British politics was deeply unrhetorical. Politics wasn’t about persuading people of your position; it was about continually canvassing opinion, trying to move along as smoothly as possible and taking as many people with you as you could. It was a different kind of persuasion; it was following the latest opinion poll. There wasn’t anyone taking a stand, or saying “This is what I think, what do you think? Let’s argue the point.” That had blown out of our culture a little bit, but I hope it’s returning now.

The play is sometimes seen as a debate as to who should be king and who the hero is; did you see it in those terms or as a more complicated exploration of legal and moral rights of inheritance and political legitimacy?

Rourke:
I really hate the term “problem play”; I think “problem play” is a term used by literary critics to analyze plays which do not have clear protagonists. The term problem play is as unhelpful to a play like
King John
as it is unhelpful to a play like
Measure for Measure
. Audiences don’t always need a clear protagonist. Audiences are
interested in moral relativism, in exploring behavior and choice through a clearly defined context. One thing that
King John
has really got going for it is that it’s a terribly clear world. It’s so clear that you can have a character like the Bastard slide through it with his particular perspective. I was most interested in figuring it as a struggle for power, and what happens when you gain advantage and then can’t play it. Constance, John, France, even to an extent the Bastard, take up all the oxygen in the room in order to persuade people that they are right, to get their advantage and gain position.

The Bastard calls the nobles “distempered lords”; is he right? Do they place morality above patriotism or is that a smokescreen for “that smooth-faced gentleman, tickling commodity”?

Rourke:
Within all Shakespeare’s plays you can see him asserting and reasserting his idea of Englishness. One of the things that is great in the writing of this play is that so many concepts (abstracts) are defined by people doing them badly, by Shakespeare showing us what they are not: motherhood; kingship; piety. Apart from the Bastard’s courage (and you could argue that was bloodlust) most things are defined by acts of rebellion, or departures from what is expected. So when the nobles remove themselves from loyalty to England we get a very clear and very beautiful overview in a rhetorical picture of what English loyalty is. Loyalty is more sharply defined by the lords rebelling than it is in their uneasy allegiance.

THE FAMOUS HISTORY
OF THE LIFE OF
KING HENRY
THE EIGHTH

MAJOR PARTS:
(
with percentage of lines/number of speeches/scenes on stage
) Henry VIII (14%/81/9), Cardinal Wolsey (14%/79/7), Queen Katherine (12%/50/4), Duke of Norfolk (7%/48/5), Duke of Buckingham (6%/26/2), Lord Chamberlain (5%/38/7), Thomas Cranmer (4%/21/4), Duke of Suffolk (3%/30/4), Gardiner (3%/22/3), Earl of Surrey (3%/24/2), Sir Thomas Lovell (2%/21/4), Old Lady (2%/14/2), Surveyor (2%/9/1), Griffith (2%/13/2), Anne Bullen (2%/18/2), Cardinal Campeius (2%/14/3), Thomas Cromwell (2%/ 21/2), Lord Sands (2%/17/2).

LINGUISTIC MEDIUM:
98% verse, 2% prose.

DATE:
1613. The first Globe Theatre burned down in a fire that started during a performance of the play on 29 June 1613. A letter by Sir Henry Wotton describes it as “a new play” at this time.

SOURCES:
principally based on the third volume of Holinshed’s
Chronicles
, probably in the 1587 edition; the Stephen Gardiner sequence in Act 5 draws on John Foxe’s virulently anti-Catholic
Actes and Monuments
(perhaps in 1583 edition); John Stow’s
Annals
(1592) and John Speed’s
Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain
(1611) also seem to have been consulted and there may be some influence from an earlier play in celebration of the birth of one of Henry VIII’s children, Samuel Rowley’s
When you see me, You know me. Or the famous Chronicle Historie of king Henrie the eighth, with the birth and vertuous life of Edward Prince of Wales
(1605).

TEXT:
First Folio is only early text. Good quality of printing, probably set from a scribal transcript of the authorial manuscript.