Propeller's staging of Rose Rage.(Articles)(Henry VI trilogy)

UNLIKE other English companies that have presented adaptations of the three parts of Henry VI, Propeller, founded in 1997 at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury, might best be described as a co-operative. Its twelve male actors, director Edward Hall, designer Michael Pavelka, lighting designer Ben Ormerod, and text adviser Roger Warren worked together at every stage of the production of Rose Rage. (1) This close communication between artistic team and actors distinguishes their work from the more well-known, large-scale adaptations by the Royal Shakespeare Company--The Wars of the Roses (1963-64) and The Plantagenets (1988-89)--and by the English Shake-speare Company, The Wars of the Roses (1986). (2) So, too, their approach to staging the adaptation, as well as unadapted Shakespearean plays, (3) sets them apart. Influenced by both Elizabethan and Brechtian practices, the company seeks to break down the barrier between audience and actor and to reveal in the course of the production how the performance is created. Strategies include (1) incorporating a "set piece" designed to draw the audience into an argument, played with house lights up; (2) doubling of roles; (3) casting all roles with male actors; (4) placing actors not directly involved in a scene as observers on the periphery of the acting space; (5) using actors to create lighting and sound effects, to sing and play musical instruments, so that they perform tasks more generally undertaken by stage management and professional musicians; (6) introducing contemporary cultural references. (4)

Another factor distinguishing Propeller's Rose Rage is that the adaptation of the Henry VI trilogy does not take its place in a cycle of Shakespeare's histories or, as did The Plantagenets, with Richard III. From Shakespeare's trilogy, Hall, Warren, and the company have shaped two plays; each play has two acts, with a running time of one hour for each act. (5) Rose Rage concentrates on the dynastic struggles in England between two well-defined historical moments--the deaths of Henry V, in 1422, and Henry VI, in 1471.

To achieve its sharp focus on England's royal family and the nobility, Rose Rage retains only those French scenes in act 4 and 5.3 of 1 Henry VI and 3.3 in 3 Henry VI; it eliminates characters, including the Duchess of Gloucester, Joan of Arc, the Countess of Auvergne, Edmund Mortimer; it also combines other characters, for example, expanding Exeter's choric role with lines from Bedford, Lucy, and Salisbury. It streamlines the plot by, for instance, reducing the proposed marriage of Henry to the daughter of the Earl of Armagnac to reported action immediately before Suffolk presents Margaret and eliminating scenes in which various retainers and servants loyally support their masters.

The seven scenes of the first act draw on fifteen scenes from 1 Henry VI and six scenes from 2 Henry VI to dramatize the quarrels between Winchester and Gloucester and between the Yorkists and Lancastrians; the deaths of Talbot and his son; Henry's marriage to Margaret; and the conspiracy of Suffolk and Margaret. The six scenes of act 2 carry the plot forward to Henry's flight from battle at St Alban's, where both Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI and the first play of the adaptation finish. Scripted as twelve scenes and drawn from twenty-two scenes of 3 Henry VI, the second part of Rose Rage opens with York's seizure of the throne and takes its interval after scene 19, in which Edward IV woos Lady Elizabeth Grey and sends Henry to the Tower and Richard eyes the throne. (6) The adaptation, which retains just over 30 percent (3100 lines) of Shakespeare's trilogy, introduces the lightest possible revision for bridging and clarity. Instead of writing new lines, the editors, Hall and Warren, select appropriate lines from another scene in the trilogy. (7) With three exceptions, Rose Rage has no interpolated lines. Henry V's will, as recorded in Edward Hall's Chronicle, opens the play. (8) Jack Cade's rap piece introduces his grievances. Richard closes the play with

 
               Now is the winter of our discontent 
               Made glorious summer by this son of York; 

and halts abruptly after the next word: "And." (9)

This brief overview of the script suggests what a careful comparison of the published script and the trilogy would reveal: losses that affect character and theme, losses that diminish the many parallels and juxtapositions, losses that exclude all but three of the eight women. My focus is, however, on the twenty-five scenes of Rose Rage and on Propeller's presentation of that script: on how twelve men in their thirties and early forties played twenty-eight men, three women, and the young Prince of Wales and Earl of Rutland; on how the company contributed music and sound effects, functioned as dressers and stage management, and played supporting roles--messengers, rebels, and soldiers; on influences upon and ramifications of the design, lighting, music, and sound; and on how an adaptation of early modern plays based on medieval English history worked in a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century setting for a twenty-first-century audience.