Kings of War

adapted from William Shakespeare

seen at the Barbican on 29 April 2016

Bart Van Den Eynde and Peter van Kraaij have fashioned a long (4.5 hour) play from Henry V, the three parts of Henry VI (mainly parts 2 and 3), and Richard III. Ivan van Hove directs members of the Toneelgroep Amsterdam; the production is in Dutch with English surtitles.

The undertaking is ambitious and really striking; it is especially fascinating to have familiar speeches adapted and spoken in a foreign language. The setting was modern - for the scenes relating to Henry V, there were computer screens with military displays, and large maps to chart the progress of the French campaign; in effect we were in a modern military headquarters. Later we were in a sort of public reception room (for the reign of Edward IV) and finally in an empty but somehow rather claustrophobic space (yet still the whole expanse of the Barbican stage) for Richard III. Video cameras, both positioned around the stage, and a hand-held camera wielded by a technician, were liberally used with the image projected on a large screen suspended above the back wall of the set. This allowed the se of a number of corridors backstage, where various confrontations and deahs occurred.

At the beginning of each reign there was a coronation, staged in an identical fashion with the characters identified on the video screen in order to help differentiate the names, since everyone (except Richard and Margaret of Anjou) took multiple parts. This both emphasised the cyclical nature of the political struggle, and the different personalities of the various kings. The play concentrated on the royal scenes, so that Henry V was stripped of almost all the scenes with commoners - no subplot about the careers of Nym, Pistol and Bardolph, and none of the captains of the four nations, but the conversation between the disguised king (Ramsey Nasr) and the soldier Williams was preserved (in fact, he was the only commoner to speak during the entire evening). Likewise, the French campaigns in Henry VI part one, the whole Joan of Arc story, was omitted, and in the civil wars the great scene in which Henry VI (Eelco Smits) discovers the father who killed his son and the son who killed his father was truncated to show only the king's personal misery. The effect of all this was to concentrate totally on the highest level of political struggle, very effectively.

The second half of the play was taken up with the adaptation of Richard III. Hans Kesting played the king as a ruthless and powerful figure in early middle age. (Perhaps the most confusing outcome of the adaptation was the lack of clarity about the generations in the Yorkist branch of the family, as the actor Bart Slegers played both the Duke of York and his son Edward IV, and there was no account of the Duke's death.) It was a performance of mixed menace and grim and macabre humour. As he yelled for a horse, completely alone on the vast stage, he began trotting around the perimeter neighing like a little boy playing cowboys and indians, quite unnerving. 

The sheer descent to brutality exposed by Shakespeare's plays was missing at the most literal level because there were no swords or stabbings, and few official orders for executions. The deaths happened in the corridors and never on stage, and the camera tracking these corridors never witnessed the deaths directly, but only the corpses of the aftermath, except for two of Richard's murders of Prince Edward and of his father Henry VI. However, the threat and danger were always there, and this visual restraint still allowed for the accumulation of disaster to register with the audience.

All in all, a remarkable view of the history plays, still packing a punch even in this truncated and modernised form.