Reader Reviews
Anne Boleyn (Arts Theatre, Cambridge)
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 | Last night I saw the Globe/ETT production of Howard Brenton’s play Anne Boleyn: I had paid £32-50 (an exceptional sum for me) for my ticket. It was better than I would have dared hope. Brenton had already made an impact on me with his Büchner and Brecht. But this text was splendid – although it may not be multilayered enough to be a classic. What seems clear to me is that this is the biggest event in British theatre since Tony Harrison started writing for the stage. Harrison has given us a credible medium for the Oresteia and Molière’s Le Misanthrope – and much else besides. There is point in mentioning Harrison. He has spoken of ‘revivals’ using a fresh version every time. He has done this – but only partially – by adding a new passage to his version of The Misanthrope for a Radio 3 revival. So the ‘classic’ as well as the ‘contemporary’ figure among his values when he writes. The fluctuations in the reputations of historical figures put me in mind of a shooting gallery where balls rise and fall on jets of water defying even the sniper to get them in his sights. Thomas Cromwell is now at the high water mark – his equivalent to the Man for All Seasons as one authority mordantly puts it. Currently the near-flood of historical writing on the Tudor period makes me rejoice that I am not an avowed academic specialist in the period. I am pleased that Cardinal Wolsey is getting a good press at last. (He burnt books – but not people: and worked very hard for what he gained.) After absurd sanctification, as much secular as official, More is seen as a harbinger of the Counter-Reformation – a Jekyll-and-Hyde. (Jasper Ridley has effected this for the wider public.) Tyndale’s translations have received breakthrough reprinting (a different format for the eye) – and the man a more accurate biography. That this should have happened in the run-in to the anniversary of the King James Bible is a triumph for living literature rather than historical study. Later additions are common practice for the historian. The late C. V. Wedgwood revised her Strafford and Thirty Years’ War as new material became available. To move closer to home Ives has done this – encompassing later work with his revised tome on Anne Boleyn. Were Brenton to add further material – for example, something showing the charm of Cardinal Wolsey – it would be far from unprecedented for a literary man. (What is the ‘director’s cut’ of Bleak House? Which ending do we use for Great Expectations? A third has been implemented…) Even the programme was excellent. Indeed Brenton’s article seems to acknowledge my point about reputation: ‘Will the real Anne Boleyn please take the stage?’ Ives gives me no sense of Anne Boleyn’s presence. The sexed-up The Tudors on TV gave us Anne of the sex appeal – very nice, but far too little besides. Jo Herbert - with Brenton’s text - gave us the courageous reformer as well as the determined would-be queen. One rejoices at the idealism of Henry’s wives as to where the money of the monasteries’ should go. This was a salutary emphasis. (To depict Anne’s true sex appeal is a task akin to making Mozart’s Don Giovanni as seductive as the catalogue aria tells us he is. Significantly the opera singers who make a good job of the Don – Ruggero Raimondi, say – concentrate on giving us the aristocrat rather than the Lothario.) But the evening’s main impression was the precariousness of Anne Boleyn. We were expected to know how soon Wolsey and Cromwell would fall: but the scenes with Tyndale, for example, brought out that precariousness– even in Anne’s ‘pomp’. The background of torture, of lack of sympathy… As More once said, ‘What is mine today shall be yours tomorrow’. The shockwaves from Anne’s fall … Other monarchs were more ruthless. Henry could have been far worse. But he still makes one shudder. David Starkey comments on Anne Boleyn’s unpopularity compared with the wide-ranging groundswell of affection for Catherine of Aragon. But he does concede that she is the most intriguing, if not the most attractive, of Henry’s Queens. She may have been a sophisticate rather than a blue stocking but she is a worthy counter pole to Catherine of Aragon. Brenton does indeed give us a sense of what a right-hand she made Henry. The late A. G. Dickens bracketed Anne and Cromwell as ‘unlikely evangelicals’. Cromwell’s fall soon followed the fall he had engineered for Anne. Swiftly the king woke up to his error there: Cromwell became ‘the best servant a king of England ever had.’ Perhaps – rather than expanding this text - Brenton should write about Katherine Parr, an intriguing and thoroughly attractive woman. Anne’s trailblazing enabled her to be who she was and achieve what she did. On Saturday night the company created in the theatre a warmth - a sense of heightened vitality and zest that reminded me of when I first saw the Medieval Players. There can be no higher praise. Geoffrey Coombe - Geoff Coombe | 20 Mar 12 |
| Yes - little is gained in the intimate auditorium. And of course the audience rapport is much more difficult for the actors when all but the first few rows are distant darkness ... - Michael Gray | 18 Mar 12 |
