Henry VI, Part 1
1983: Jane Howell

This entry into the BBC Shakespeare Plays series is one of the last made, though it is one of first that Shakespeare wrote. It is rarely produced, and there are to date no other free-standing versions that I know of. Several are rolled into sequences of history-play representations, and they’re often quite compressed into the bargain. They are discussed elsewhere.

This one is highly mannered in its presentation. There wasn’t a lot of money to go around in the BBC Shakespeare Plays series in the best of times, and the producers doubtless realized that the Henry VI plays were not going to be their front-runners at all events; inasmuch as it’s one of the last made, the producers were probably scraping the bottom of the budgetary barrel at this point.

Accordingly there are many parts that are doubled up. Director Jane Howell, moreover, apparently preferred simple, superficial, stagey sets. For example: in a number of scenes, characters are supposed to be on horseback. There are no horses here: the characters wind up in hobby-horse costumes, representing the horses with a horse’s head and tail worn over the shoulders. It’s not quite the Monty Python trick of having someone follow along with a set of coconut shells, but it’s not too far from it either. Similarly, though it’s a production that could have supported expansive and elaborate battle scenes, it offers only the close-in representations of the conversations in most of the battles. Oddly enough, it works dramatically on its own terms, as do many conventional turns of art.

There are some very good performances in this shoestring production, and a number of noteworthy actors. Many may recognize Bernard Hill (Theoden in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings), Trevor Peacock (a veteran of many BBC productions, playing Titus Andronicus in the Shakespeare Plays’ Titus Andronicus and Feste in the same series’ Twelfth Night, as well as Jim Trott on the BBC series The Vicar of Dibley). Ron Cook makes several appearances here, too (he plays Simple in the BBC Merry Wives of Windsor and Richard in Richard III, as well as Henry VI, Part 2 and Henry VI, Part 3), as do Frank Middlemass (Pompey in the BBC Measure for Measure) and David Burke (the first Dr. Watson in the BBC Sherlock Holmes sequence with Jeremy Brett). All of them carry off their parts with style and finesse.

Peter Benson plays the eponymous king as an ineffectual naif, vastly out of his depth and mismanaged by a host of jackal nobles, which seems a reasonably accurate assessment of his kingship. The nuances of intrigue require a careful tracking of the characters.

Most of the the play is taken up with the French campaigns and the machinations of the English court that give rise to the Wars of the Roses. The concluding piece is the pathetic downfall of La Pucelle (Joan) who pleads this way and that for her life. Shakespeare’s account is more consistent with the narrative suggesting that she was a witch. Unsurprisingly, this play is not a great favorite in France. Nevertheless, it’s still an engaging story. It’s not quite at the level of much of the rest of the Shakespearean historical corpus, and in a sense we’re able to see Shakespeare as a relative novice playwright. But as presented by a lot of top-notch actors, one could do much worse.

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Buy the complete set of the BBC Shakespeare Plays or individual plays (including this one) in Region 1 format direct from Ambrose Video.