>>REVIEW
HENRY VI PART III
Runs until May 6
The Shakespeare Company
(Calgary Opera Centre)
The path to the crown is littered with blood, betrayal and wood mulch. And for The Shakespeare Company’s latest production of Henry VI Part III, it’s a damn good thing. Taking the stage with one of its largest and most ambitious productions to date, the company delivers an evocative Shakesperean world whose edges may still be ragged, but whose core is as solid as bare earth.
Including a series of betrayals, reunions, and shifting alliances whose complexity necessitates a full synopsis in the production’s program, Henry VI Part III’s plot offers a complex spin on a relatively simple story. While the houses of York and Lancaster battle for control of the English crown, the titular King Henry (Andy Curtis) bemoans his life-long position, wanting nothing more than peace in his time and the freedom to spend his days in quiet piety. But in a time of civil war, Henry’s gentle nature cannot stem the tide of either the House of York or his own family, and so backs are stabbed in turn until King Edward (Tyrell Crews) assumes the throne beneath the shadow of his brother Richard’s (Stuart William James) avarice.
With the weighty tasks of the production’s set and costume design, Christopher Rouleau produces a medieval world of wood and leather whose central set piece may be one of the most original of the season. Scattered over the floor of the Calgary Opera Centre, wood mulch littered with an increasingly broken path of rose petals leading to the throne lends the play a tangible sense of earthiness. While its appearance is immediately striking, more evident is the incredible effect of the mulch’s smell on the production itself, evoking an atmosphere that is even more engaging because of its complete sensory effect. Though allergy sufferers would be well advised to bring inhalers or antihistamines (the dust kicked up often hangs in clouds), the originality of the production’s smellscape, as awkward as that term may sound, is nearly as striking as the skill of its central cast.
With 17 cast members, Henry VI Part III features no small share of central characters, including the various lords and princes of both royal houses. Curtis’s Henry is a convincing mixture of bewilderment and world-weariness, and Brian Martell infuses his Warwick with a dignity that allows even his shifting allegiances to seem noble. Crews, always a strong presence, grounds his Edward in an assured sense of entitlement and courage, and James is deliciously sharp as the conniving Richard. With the dramatic irony of Richard’s place as the titular villain of Richard III hanging in the background, James’s performance balances sneering contempt with a plausible competence that makes him indispensable to his future victims.
In fact, among the kings, nobles, princes and trusted vanguard whose personal ambitions drive the bloody War of the Roses, the production is a furious advance that never misses a step. Or at least nearly never.
Though her enthusiasm and laudable comfort with taking extreme risk on stage is palpable, Lorianna Lombardo’s wailing and gnashing Queen Margaret is rendered absurd by the relative restraint around her. Even accommodating for the heightened scale of Shakespeare’s world, Coulter has allowed Lombardo to deliver a performance so out of step with the rest of her cast that the result seems more like parody than intensity: an Amazonian warrior queen thrust suddenly into medieval history, spitting and cursing.
While the central corps of her army fight with considerable strength, its pawns seem under-equipped – small roles occupied by even smaller performances. As the play’s ubiquitous messengers, Trevor Matheson delivers every line as a quiet apology, only breaking remorseful stride when he takes an ill-timed and solitary stab at comic relief in the play’s fourth act. And neither Wil Knoll or Thomas Demkey have the weight to carry what is one of the play’s essential thrusts, as a father and son realize that they have killed members of their own family. Who knew patricide and infanticide could be so nonchalant?
Even in the face of the weak performances scattered among its far stronger ones, Coulter’s production is still invigorating – earthy as the mulch on the Opera Centre’s floor and aspiring to an epic scale it builds in sword-clashing battles and grand rhetoric. Navigating an often Byzantine political drama with a deftness that produces simply engaging theatre, Henry VI Part III is a stirring production whose ambition is nearly matched by its execution. With swordplay, the singular presence of a tangible smell to evoke its rough world and a core of actors whose strength is equal to the considerable parts they fill, the production is a rousing victory, even if Shakespeare’s characters never truly find their own. |
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