Of crowns, and memory machines: Druid reimagines Shakespeare’s histories

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Of crowns, nations and memory machines:

Druid reimagines Shakespeare’s histories

Marty Rea as Richard II. Image by Matthew Thompson.

Druid Shakespeare, in co-production with the Lincoln Centerfestival NYC

Richard II, Henry IV, Parts I and 2, Henry V, The Castle Yard,Kilkenny Arts Festival, 6 – 15 August 2015.

Director Gary Hynes, with adaptation by Mark O’Rowe

Cast and production details: http://druid.ie

Review Essay: DruidShakespeare at theKilkenny Arts FestivalPosted by dunnede

Aug

19

Review Essay: DruidShakespeare at the Kilkenny Arts Festival... https://shakespeareinireland.wordpress.com/2015/08/19/revie...

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/druidshakespeare/about#fndtn-introduction

Reviewed by Stephen O’Neill

“What ish my nation”?, asks Captain MacMorris in Shakespeare’sHenry V, in a scene that brings together an Irishman, a Scotsman, aWelshman and an Englishman supposedly united in the king’sambitions to conquer France and thus expand his empery. It’s ascene that is frequently cut from modern productions of the play,perhaps because for directors it smacks of a Shakespeare too muchthe Elizabethan dramatist for modern sensibilities, or that it seemstoo easy a form of political symbolism. Druid follow suit in cuttingthe four captains scene and with it Shakespeare’s only Irishcharacter in their ambitious production of Shakespeare’s Henriad(Richard II, Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V), all adapted anddeftly redacted in the careful hands of the contemporary Irishplaywright Mark O’Rowe, with Gary Hynes’ directing. OmittingMacMorris might seem surprising considering how the pre-publicityfor DruidShakespeare foregrounds the Irish subtexts toShakespeare’s Henriad. Gary Hynes has been quoted as saying that“At the time when Shakespeare was writing these plays, Irelandwould have been to England as Afghanistan is to the U.S. today”. Inhis preface to the programme, Fintan O’Toole remarks that theTudor state’s bloody Nine years War against the revolt in Ireland“looms large in Shakespeare’s history plays”. It is the Tudor period’sVietnam, he suggests, in that Ireland and the Irish warssimultaneously haunted and are refracted in the literature of theperiod, sometimes by indirection and sometimes – as in the instanceof MacMorris and his resonant question – by overt, topical direction. Shakespeare’s play is alert to the risks of such topical allegory,parodying it in the character of Fluellen, whose fondness forelaborate parallels is treated comically. Other mentions of Ireland inthe cycle remain – ones that are true to Shakespeare’s sources butthat become charged in the context of the Elizabethan wars inIreland. In Richard II, the capricious yet vulnerable king talks ofsupplanting “rough rug-headed kerns” (an Anglicization of the Gaelicword ‘ceithern’ meaning foot soldier but here a derogatory catch allterm for the native Irish), a line that at once encodes Elizabethanconstructions of the Irish as barbarous and also expresses Richard’sown desire to demonstrate resolve, to do what English kingshistorically do. The peat-covered stage, a key visual element ofFrancis O’Connor’s evocative set design, reinforces connectionsbetween Richard’s intent to uproot the Irish rebels, his kingly image,and his mortality too. Indeed, in the post-performance interval atKilkenny, a hooded man hastily buries Richard’s body out the back; Follow


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as he piles up the soil, we audience members become silentwitnesses to usurpation and murder. Such are the “sad stories of thedeath of kings”.

Marty Rea as Richard II. Image by Matthew Thompson.

Precisely how DruidShakespeare understands itself as responding tothe coincidence of Shakespeare’s great cycle of history plays withthe Nine Years War is not absolutely clear. Why cut Mackmorricefrom Henry V but retain Richard’s talk of usurping the Irish fromtheir land? But the lack of clarity is ultimately a good thing. Previousproductions in Ireland of Shakespeare’s histories struggled to makesuch topically and ideologically charged allusions work in a moderncontext. Ouroboros Theatre’s Richard II at the Abbey in 2013 soughtto make sense of play’s Irish subtexts via more recent Anglo-Irishrelations, with visual cues to IRA hunger strike and inclusion of U2’sSunday Bloody Sunday. But ultimately these felt forced.

Druid and O’Rowe don’t seem concerned with forcing throughconnections between hundreds of years of Anglo-Irish relations (bythe time Shakespeare is writing his plays, English interventions inIreland are already three centuries old) as these are condensed andre-presented in literary texts like Shakespeare’s histories. Nor arethey concerned with producing an overtly reactive post-colonialismby Hibernicizing Shakespeare’s cycle. Hynes has spoken of creatingan emotional and physical landscape for the plays, an approach thatshe and the company also applied to their highly regarded Syngecycle. The production works because it allows us to consider howthese plays make meaning on their own terms. DruidShakespearerecognizes too how a Shakespeare play is a spectral thing, made up Follow


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of the ghosts of past performances, of critical interpretations, ofaudience expectations. Experiencing the plays over two consecutivenights (alternatively, one could see the four plays on one night),amplifies these sensations – going back to Castle Yard on theSunday evening felt like a return to a group of people that one hadgot to know, and of whom you wanted to learn more.

Charlotte McCurry as Blunt, Clare Barrett as Bardolph, Rory Nolan as Falstaff and AislingO’Sullivan as Hal. Image by Matthew Thompson.

This is, then, less an Irish Shakespeare than a production consciousof doing Shakespeare in and from Ireland. So, we hear Irish accents– both rural and urban – and one effect is to make plays that readlike roll calls of English aristocratic families seem foreign. That senseof distance is created through the production choices more generally– from costumes with hints of current fashions to the welcome useof gender-blind casting to shake up what can otherwise seem like arelentlessly patriarchal, masculinist world. The audience is madeconscious of the body beneath (especially in the deathbed scene ofHenry IV Part 2 when Derbhle Crotty’s breasts can be seen throughthe nightgown). Such elements contribute to the feeling that theplays are being treated as representations, as self-reflexiveconstructions of history and historical figures.

To frame DruidShakespeare as an Irish approach to the plays wouldbe to do the overall production and performance a disservice. Thecycle deserves to be remembered for several standoutperformances. Marty Rea is captivating as Richard II. Avoiding anotable tendency of modern productions to play him in high camp oras suffering from a Jesus complex (as in Ben Whishaw in the BBC’s Follow


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The Hollow Crown, 2012), Rea brings a subtlety to the role. HisRichard is a man of many colours, despite his white face that recallportraits of Elizabeth as the Virgin Queen or perhaps the 1980s’Dublin street artist The Dice Man. Rea also makes a memorableappearance at the opening of Henry V as the war mongeringArchbishop of Canterbury, decked out here in graphite robes andmitre and with a delivery by Rea that recalls the booming auditoryof Ian Paisley, the late Ulster Unionist politician. Derbhle Crotty’sBolingbroke is played as proficient, intellectual and current by wayof contrast to Richard who seems not fit for the times (aninterpretation that may recall W. B. Yeats’s 1901 essay on theHenriad, “At Stratford-on-Avon”). Aisling O’Sullivan’s mischievousand mysterious Hal provides a foil to Rory Nolan’s genuinely funnyFalstaff. In the tavern scenes, the production captures the play’scomic energy, and its recurring interest in this subversive terrain ofHenry’s kingdom, as if to say this is home before any court scenesor battlefields. Gavin Drea as Poins and Clare Barrett as Bardolphbring a real presence to these supporting roles. At times, however,O’Sullivan’s Hal seems to spit out his words, and the vowels becomeso long and over-worked as to begin to sound like Felonious Grufrom Despicable Me. The hyper-accent would make more sense interms of Hal’s motivation to pass in Eastcheap among Falstaff andcompany, were it not for the fact that his soliloquy at the end ofAct1, Scene 2 in which the prince compares himself to the sunobscured by clouds has been cut, perhaps to make his relation withFalstaff as surrogate father (and indeed mother) seem moreenigmatic to audience members. O’Sullivan’s delivery is moreeffective when applied to Henry V, particularly his more jingoisticrhetoric. O’Sullivan brings an immediacy to “Once more unto thebreach” which can all to easily lend itself to parody, directing thecall-to-arms to the audience in Castle Yard – a space otherwiseunder-used in the production – as a small band of soldiers move instylized, choreographed poses behind the young king.

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Aisling O’Sullivan as Henry V. Image by Matthew Thompson.

Movement is another highpoint of this production. The bare stageand scaffold set is used very effectively, with the balcony put togood use especially in Aaron Monaghan’s energetic Chorus in HenryV. Mark O’Rowe’s adaptation also brings momentum to these historyplays – pace and speed are achieved without the language beingredacted too severely. O’Rowe’s adaptation foregrounds theessentially episodic structure of the plays, with rapid scene changesperhaps offering insight into Shakespeare’s own approach to theproject of staging the complexities of the historical past.

O’Rowe’s style of adaptation is of the reverent kind. Yet, there isevidence too of a bolder, less respectful approach to theShakespearean text. Henry V offers its audiences a double closure,the first with the king’s marriage to the Katherine of France, thesecond with the epilogue lamenting how Henry’s victories werequickly overturned during the reign of his son. In O’Rowe’s hands,however, we end with an interpolated, imagined scene that returnsus to Eastcheap where in the company of Mistress Quickly, Pistol,Bardolph, Nym elegize Falstaff before setting off to war. The NewYork Times reviewer felt that this postscript over-sentimentalizedthe sacrifice of Falstaff to Hal’s political ambitions. Yet, the closingscene is less about sentimentality that about showcasing theaffective intensities of Hal’s decision to reject Falstaff in the pursuitof power. The affect is all the more poignant given that the scenecoincides with a darkening in the sky over Castle Yard that brings astillness and focus to the stage.

In the postscript, we sense what has been lost, and watch withforeknowledge that further loss and suffering await Pistol andcompany on the “vasty fields of France”. We sense the casualties ofwar, the perils of treating a crown as a sign of immutable power, ofhistory returning and repeating itself, and the violence done in thename of the nation. In this elegiac postscript, O’Rowe and Hynesdistill the larger themes of Henry V and the entire cycle into morehuman terms. DruidShakespeare at once confronts and gives the lieto arguments that Irish theatre has an attenuated relation toShakespeare. This is not an Irish appropriation of Shakespeare’sEnglish histories so much as a rich dramaturgical and theatricalexploration of the dynamics of Shakespeare’s Henriad, and of the Follow


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ghosts of history therein.

Marty Rea, Garrett Lombard, Aaron Monaghan (centre) and Bosco Hogan. Image byMatthew Thompson.

Dr Stephen O’Neill is a lecturer in English at Maynooth University.He is the author of Shakespeare and YouTube (Bloomsbury 2014),Staging Ireland: Representations in Shakespeare and RenaissanceDrama (Four Courts (2007) and several essays on the reception ofShakespeare. Twitter: @mediaShakes

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Posted in Review

Tagged Druid, Henry IV, Henry V, Kilkenny Arts Festival, Richard II,

Stephen O'Neill

Review:DruidShakespeareat the KilkennyArts Festival 2015

Report:DruidShakespeareSymposium,Lincoln CenterFestival, NYC

Theatre:Shakespeare'sHistory plays fromDruid

UPCOMING EVENTS

Mary O’Dowd (QUB), ‘Marriage in Ireland, c. 1660-1800’February 22, 2016 at 4:00 pm – 5:00 pmLong Room Hub, TCD

Screening: "As You Like It" - National TheatreFebruary 25, 2016 at 7:00 pm – 9:00 pmLight House Cinema, Market Square, Dublin 7, IrelandNational Theatre live screening of ‘As You Like It’ starring Rosalie Craig

Screening: "As You Like It" - National TheatreFebruary 25, 2016 at 7:00 pm – 9:00 pmCork Opera House, Emmett Pl, Cork, IrelandNational Theatre live screening of Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’ starringRosalie Craig.

Symposium: Ireland & ShakespeareMarch 4, 2016 – March 5, 2016Lewis Center for the Arts, 185 Nassau St, Princeton, NJ 08542, USA Follow


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Marc Caball (UCD), ‘Reading the Americas: books on the newworld in the libraries of Edward Stillingfleet and NarcissusMarsh’March 7, 2016 at 4:00 pm – 5:00 pmLong Room Hub, TCD

Lecture: Dr Andrew Power "Boy Actors in Shakespeare’s EarlyPlays" - School of English seminar seriesMarch 9, 2016 at 3:00 pm – 4:00 pmUniversity College Cork, Western Road, Cork, Ireland

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Of crowns, and memory machines: Druid reimagines Shakespeare’s histories

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