By Judith Reynolds Special to the Herald Great Britain s Royal Shakespeare Company is the world s leading presenter of the Bard. Last week the company made history in America. Shakespeare wrote the Henry VI plays when he was a young man, and they became very popular in his lifetime. In modern times, however, Shakespeare s epic dramatization of the War of the Roses is almost never mounted in full, but produced only occasionally in condensed form 50 battles and hundreds of corpses in two hours. But last fall the RSC decided to mount the plays in their grand enormity first at Stratford, then in the United States for one March appearance, and then to London.
Rarity is one reason to go out of one s way to see the tetralogy.
RSC s reputation is another. Michael Boyd s brilliant direction with imaginative color-blind casting is yet another. Desperate political infighting during the bloody 15th-century War of the Roses provided Shakespeare with plenty of dramatic material. After mountains of arguments, lies, backstabbing friends, plotting wives, failed allegiances, splintered conspiracies, fights, murders, battles, exiles, and ghosts enough to populate a large Yorkshire village, England s political squabbling comes to an end with the ascendancy of Henry Tudor, signaling the beginning of the English Renaissance. In the hands of the RSC, the ride is as historically clear as it is staggeringly theatrical.