Play That Never Was

No Edward IV appears in Shakespeare's first folio, and The Wars of the Roses is not found in his collected works. But both titles are prominently on display this summer at that most sanctified shrine of Shakespeariana, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford on Avon. And although Wars of the Roses is stuffed with lines that Shakespeare never wrote, it has won the unanimous praise of the London critics. "A landmark and beacon in the postwar English theater," said the Daily Mail's usually savage Bernard Levin.

Wars of the Roses is actually a collective title for a massive melding of the three parts of Shakespeare's Henry VI with Richard III. The inspiration for the production came from Stratford's brilliant young director, Peter Hall, 32, and his scholar in residence, former Cambridge Don John Barton, 34. Like even the most dedicated Shakespeareans, they were convinced that the old three-part Henry VI was too verbose, incoherent and confused to be staged effectively. At the same time, they saw in it an important unifying theme--what Director Hall calls "the dilemma of power: Can a man be 'good' and politic? Do you have to be a bad man to be a good king?" The final answer to that question is supplied by Richard III, the "crookback" who murders gentle Henry VI but dies ignominiously at last at the hands of Richmond. Boldly, Hall and Barton set to work reworking, re-editing and sometimes rewriting Henry VI and, to a lesser degree, Richard III. After nine months' labor they had completed the Wars of the Roses trilogy--which consists of two new plays, titled

Henry VI and Edward IV, carved out of the original Henry VI, plus a slightly abbreviated Richard III.

In what one critic called "Shakehall's Henry VI," the emphasis is not on rhetoric but on clarity, with speeches cut to their meaningful core and with action bared to the bone of violence. When writing bridge passages and interpolations, Co-Adapter Barton went back to Shakespeare's own source books--the Chronicles of Holinshed, Hall and Grafton. The Observer's Kenneth Tynan observed that the production "managed to reanimate petrified forests of genealogy so that within half an hour one knows which cousin is on whose uncle's brother's side." Barton, whose past efforts range from the successful Hollow Crown of the past Broadway season to an abortive dramatization of Les Liaisons Dangereuses called The Art of Seduction, made no effort to emulate Shakespeare's unmatchable imagery. But his purely expository passages have a convincingly Shakespearean ring, as when he inserts these lines to emphasize the weakness of King Henry VI:

Gloucester: My lord, you must not make my staff your crutch

But rather so assert your sovereign will

As best accordeth with your conscience.

King: But I have read in many holy books

Self-will is sin and much displeaseth Heaven.

Gloucester: A subject's vice may be a sovereign's virtue,

How think you we have kept the French in awe?

When the audience files into the theater for Wars of the Roses, the curtain is already up. In an open coffin beneath the vault of a medieval cathedral lies the body of Henry V surrounded by flaring torches. The trilogy that begins with this pageant of death swiftly becomes a chronicle of carnage. Within six scenes, Joan of Arc is brutally hustled to the stake, Gloucester strangled and Queen Margaret, her face smeared with blood, sits keening over the severed head of her paramour Suffolk. The heavy sense of menace is reinforced by John Bury's fine sets--bare and iron grey, with great metallic walls that open or shut to enlarge or enclose the action. Whereas Henry VI in conventional style often gives the impression of mere breathless rant, Wars of the Roses is taut, swift and implacable in its murderous catalogue of disaster.

Even with the Hall-Barton compression, the two-play production takes six hours--with the playgoer granted a leisurely interlude for dinner. Soon Stratford audiences will have an even stiffer test of their battle tolerance when Richard III, which is still in production, is added to complete the trilogy. Then the curtain will rise on Shakespeare's terrors at 10:30 in the morning and not fall until 11 at night.

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