Henry VIII - The Globe (Review)
Review by Oli Burley
HENRY VIII is a play plump with plotting. It may lack the bloodiness of Macbeth but Mark Rosenblatt’s version at The Globe is none the less menacing for it.
The King’s court is a hotbed of politicking with Cardinal Wolsey, played with supreme authority by Ian McNeice, at its self-interested heart.
McNeice almost holds sway, sweeping disdainfully past Dukes and Lords alike as his power-base grows in the early stages of the work, thought to be co-written by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher.
His haughtiness is un-heavenly, his conspiring against the honourable Duke of Buckingham (Anthony Howell) and Katherine of Aragon (Kate Duchene) downright dastardly.
Yet it is Henry’s growth towards regal maturity and movement away from the “tricks” of Papal Rome that, as Tudor England would demand, holds court instead.
Dominic Rowan’s Henry is no aged, rotund ruler but a strong, merry fellow who, for now, is happier playing real tennis and model jousting than actively war mongering.
He can dictate decisively and knobble nobles when needed, but is no automaton. Upon divorcing Katherine his regret is raw, upon fathering a daughter with Anne Boleyn (Miranda Raison) his pride is persuasive.
On the whole, Rosenblatt succeeds in exposing the faults of Henry and Wolsey without vilifying them and does well to smooth the contrived corners of the Cardinal’s belated repentance.
He partly achieves this inclusion by opening up the corridors of power and private chambers to the audience, simultaneously directing action in both: as a collapsing Katharine learns her marriage is over backstage, Anne insists upstage that she will never become queen – highlighting the disparity of their immediate fates.
Raison’s Anne is young and alluring enough to justify Henry’s interest, while Duchene is at her best when fiery passion clouds purpose.
Both are rather eclipsed by Michael Bertenshaw and John Cummins – as downright-honest porters as you could wish to find – and Amanda Lawrence, whose lady-in-waiting does a fine line in mickey-taking.
Rosenblatt spoils the patrons with a couple of grandiose set-pieces that even by The Globe’s high standards are a spectacle.
Yet a dream sequence leaves the biggest mark. As a ruined Katharine sleeps, she sees the boy she never had approach and hand her a crown that is then nightmarishly plucked away forever.
It is proof, if it were needed, that for all mankind’s conspiring the permanence of power is an illusion for even Kings and Cardinals so long as nature and fate wish it so.