Stagecraft

Interview with Michael Boyd | Behind the Scenes with the RSC

Interview with Michael Boyd

Ralph Williams (right), Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, met with Michael Boyd (left), Associate Director of the RSC and Director of the Tetralogy in the interval between the playing of 1 Henry VI and 2 Henry VI on December 9, 2000, at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. They discussed the RSC productions of 1, 2, 3, Henry VI and Richard III.

Ralph Williams: Michael, having watched these productions in preparation, and now, seeing them presented, one of the things that strikes me is that though, as a read experience, 1 Henry VI (for example) seems to contain little of the poetic power that we associate with the later Shakespeare, the stage presentation is compact and enormously powerful. What sort of resources has Shakepeare deployed to that effect?

Michael Boyd: I don’t think that it has the familiar poetic power of the later plays of Shakespeare, but I think it has the less familiar power of the great speeches of Abraham to Isaac and Isaac to Abraham in the mystery cycle plays. Like the King James Bible, it has the power of the tremendous epic cast of the Bible; it has the astonishingly simple power of the morality plays, which were shamelessly didactic pieces that at the same time could be very moving in a strange sort of moral way. It has the rumbling narrative power of the kind of chronicle popular at the time of writing. England was beginning to get interested in its history at the same time as—and partly as a result of—increasingly sophisticated forms of publishing. There was a market for accounts of England’s history, and they had a kind of compelling power.

So, it has all of those forms of power. You know, people do take up 1 Henry VI, read it, and then treat it like a challenged play, like a dramaturgically challenged play: and I think that’s nonsense. I think that’s simply to judge it by the wrong criteria, coming with too much luggage to the play rather than just looking at the play and seeing what’s there. What you were noting particularly is the sort of theatrical power it possesses when it goes on the stage. What made Shakespeare popular, what put him on the map, wasn’t Romeo and Juliet. It was the least regarded of all the Henry VI plays, 1 Henry VI, which was one of the two most popular plays of the Elizabethan stage at that time.

Together with all of those sorts of aesthetic power I’ve already talked about, it does also bring to bear the aesthetic characteristics of films like Gladiator or Mission Impossible: spectacle, derring-do, fights, blood and gore: it does work as a theatrical piece.

RW: It certainly does: the power is huge. On another matter: I was struck today, as I have been struck these last months in watching the productions develop, by their terrifying depiction of the disintergration of community values under the pressure of remembered hatreds and violence, in the absence of effective central authority. As I watched this morning, I thought of contemporary events—of the breakdown of Yugoslavia, for example, when effective central power was lifted: what emerged was ramifying violence along lines of age-old hatreds, prejudices, and ambitions. Are there ways in which it seems to you as well that these plays are timely to us, in our historical situation?

MB: Yes, disintegration under pressure of memory: Israel, Palestine, Yugoslavia, and Northern Ireland. Disintegration as a result of the loss of the commanding authority of value systems: America, Western Europe. Disintegration in terms of a lack of commanding political authority: Eastern Europe, what used to be the Soviet Union.

People get very naive views and take sides on barricades about such questions as: “Is Shakespeare a reactionary or a radical?” “Are his plays mere propaganda for the Tudors—the dynasty his queen came from?” I think that Shakespeare is presenting, in part, a view of history for its own sake, in order to satisfy curiosity as to what it was like just 100 years before he wrote. But there is another way of understanding his presentation of history, and that is as a way of interpreting his own contemporary history—the Elizabethan history in which Shakespeare was embedded. The playwright writes about his own times through the history of the Middle Ages. The fragmentation of England with and after the Reformation is shadowed in the play by the fragmentation along dynastic lines of the Houses of York and Lancaster.

Anyone—anyone—even the unlearned among Shakespeare’s audience—would have read Elizabethan history into these plays. But the Censor would not have been able to say, “Shakespeare cannot put this play on.” This is an art at which playwrights in the Soviet Union became very clever under Stalin. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were very clever at it under Elizabeth.

So there is in these plays “real” history of the Middle Ages, and then there’s Renaissance history crafted to escape the Censor. It was only possible to give an honest view of one’s own age through the prism of a bygone age. Then there’s our own current response to the plays, in which a lot of contemporary history floods into the text—or the texts into that history. And in this sense, the plays are, as you say, timeless. Shakespeare finally is interested in an x-ray of the human condition that doesn’t necessarily refer to any one time, but is about the Fall and Redemption of man, about the redeemability of man.

RW: I’m struck, too, by the cumulative power and understanding which become available as the audience watches the individual characters create and suffer from play to play their personal histories. Shakespeare makes a sort of formal, if deadly dance: Henry VI enters the plays with a tainted title to the throne, and develops deep doubts about his own legitimacy as a monarch; the elder Richard of York enters with a tainted name and radically diminished rank as a result of his father’s execution as a traitor. These two and their allies struggle, first covertly, then overtly in pitched battle, for clear possession of “holy majesty.” In the Henry plays, the pattern is complex, and there are many characters with fine parts, and with rather balanced significance for the plays. Out of this complex set of balances emerges, though, in Richard III, a character who so wholly dominates his play that others seem in very low relief indeed in comparison to the roundedness of his presentation. Is Shakespeare moving from a concept of drama as the play of historical meaning to one of individuals as caught in history, a drama which focuses its energies on probing deeply into the psychology of individuals?

MB: Richard III is very pivotal in Shakespeare’s development, because while it belongs utterly to the Henry VI tetralogy as, if you will, 4 Henry VI, it marks the beginning of his portraits of a divided humanity: it is the first of his “close-ups” really. In many ways it is both a symptom, and a portrait, of the emergence of what is famously called “the Renaissance mind.” Memory, to return to that topic, is not just oppressive: it can also fade in dangerous ways. And as memories or value systems fade, the tyranny of individualism takes over. Hence Richard’s “I am myself alone.”

I feel there is a tremendous parallel with today; as skepticism grows and value systems fade while others proliferate, and chaos theory predominates, we take more and more refuge in the satisfying of the individual. And that, more and more, is what society is supposed to be for: to make the individual solvent and free to choose. Richard Is a portrait of a man who fights to gain control over his own life and to exercise the freedom to choose—to the extent of absurdity. The birth of the individual, independent of tribe, independent of religion, independent of country, as an existential landscape unto itself, is one of the most striking features of Richard III. And that is both its glory and its loneliness as a play, and his glory and his loneliness as a character.

RW: Especially after seeing these productions, it is impossible for me to conceive of experiencing Richard III effectively in isolation from the Henry VI plays, so dense is the prehistory of that play in the earlier ones, so implied that play by the earlier ones.

The response of the audience here today is obviously one of powerful engagement. When you bring the tetralogy to Ann Arbor, do you foresee any major differences in the understanding or reception of the plays (particulars of common historical knowledge apart) which might distinguish the American from the English audiences?

MB: I’ve taken quite a lot of work to North America now and I have found—and not just with Shakespeare—that North American audiences (though it’s a bit of a cliche to say it) are less emotionally embarrassed than British audiences. They are more willing to put themselves on the line as an audience and are not embarrassed to be the first one to laugh, even at what might seem an inopportune moment. I think American audiences tend to be a wee bit more like Elizabethan audiences, quite frankly—a little bit more up for it.

Another thing that’s good in this case about going to a foreign country is that the audiences will be freer to see these as more than just history plays. Of course, viewed as straightforward historical chronicles they are woefully inaccurate and inadequate. Shakespeare is not a great historian, but he is a great dramatist. Watching them without too much historical baggage, people might be freer to see them as historical tragedy rather than “just” history plays.

RW: Despite the famous British reserve and control, by the way, I understand that yesterday, in a performance of 3 Henry VI, two people were carried out, overcome by the bloodiness.

MB: Well, yes….I think that was just squeamishness rather than anything else. But in fact, certain scenes can be unsettling.

RW: These are exceedingly powerful plays. I’d like to take a moment to salute the whole project, and particularly you, your colleagues in directing the plays, and the cast. I hope that you will not be vexed if I observe that you have a style as a director that is godlike in at least one way—and I wonder how you came to it. You give to every actor, to every line, to every motion, a focus and a dignity which is complete. What results is the compelling creation of a plausible world, not to speak of a cast and colleagues who are enormously fond of you.

MB: That really is about the humble task of doing Shakespeare. He’s an organic writer in the sense that he realizes the irresistibility of variety, of pluralism, of possiblity, of the difficulty of moral judgement and of maintaining a moral or intellectual stand on any one position. He is incapable of not letting other people‘s existential visions leak into his own. There is another quintessentially Shakespearean phenomenon which is a slightly more binary one, a sort of schizophrenic one, and it is that of being almost incapable of thinking a thought without then thinking its opposite. So I’m just being a humble interpreter of Shakespeare there.

RW: Yes: well, Michael, I expected that you would find a good way of dodging a wholly deserved compliment and of making an important point at the same time. And you haven’t disappointed on either, or any count.

But let me end by observing that all of us at the University of Michigan are anticipating eagerly the arrival of the Company in Ann Arbor. It is a privilege and an honor for the University of Michigan to be your colleagues in this project, and we look forward to continuing collaboration in the months, and (dare we hope?) years ahead. The support for this collaboration has been massive: from President Bollinger, from Ken Fischer and his marvelous Board at the University Musical Society, from faculty and students and from the wider Michigan community.

MB: I know: it’s fantastic.

RW: Thanks so much for using this interval to discuss the plays. Long live our collaboration.

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