Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Carol Chillington Rutter: The Henry VI Plays (Shakespeare in Performance)

• Nick Walton

In Changing Stages: A View of British Theatre in the Twentieth Century, Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright state that, ‘Each generation has to keep rediscovering ways of doing Shakespeare’s plays. They don’t have absolute meanings. There is no fixed, frozen way of doing them. Nobody can mine a Shakespeare play and discover a ‘solution’, and to pretend that style, fashion, and taste are fixed is to ignore history’ (Eyre and Wright 55). Throughout their study of The Henry VI plays in performance, Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Carol Chillington Rutter demonstrate the validity of this statement. The Henry VI plays have been refashioned, rewritten, repackaged and on occasion renamed: ‘The Wars of the Roses’, ‘Rose Rage’, ‘The Battle for the Throne’, ‘The Plantagenets’, ‘England’s Fall’. The plays have not appealed to all tastes, indeed ‘they are the plays least performed outside of England, and even, today, […] any spectators outside of England who have seen the plays on stage are likely to have seen them performed by an English company on tour’ (Reeves and Rutter 1). And yet, according to this study, ‘some of the most important Shakespeare productions of the last fifty years have been versions of Henry VI’ (Reeves and Rutter 1). In part, this book looks to account for the peculiar power that these, seemingly marginal plays, have had upon directors and audiences alike.

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