Henry VIII
2012: Mark Rosenblatt

This is a well-played version of one of Shakespeare’s most undervalued plays, and if you can only see two of them, see this one. If you can only see one, see the BBC.

The overall performance here is good, and it runs with some of the best of the Globe family of productions. What really undercuts its success is the fact that its fussy, political, and detailed dialogue is brutally cut, to the point where it’s hard to figure out what is going on. To make matters worse, the microphone management on the DVD release, at least, is such that many lines are hard to hear, being accompanied by a background hum or howl, which makes things very difficult to follow. The intimacy of the closeup scenes is lost, and the flow of discussion is butchered by wanton hacking of almost half the lines from the script. It actually was written to make sense; curtailing it by 50% does it no favors.

Dominic Rowan plays the role of Henry VIII with a certain amount of grace and composure — unfortunately, he did not bring a like equanimity to the role of the Duke in Measure for Measure though this may well have been a function of his direction. He’s clearly a capable actor, and he carries himself through the lines that remain to him of an ample and coherent original.

Kate Duchêne’s Katharine of Aragon is played to represent her (accurately, no doubt) as a foreigner in a foreign land, without roots and bearings; it’s affecting and should be taken seriously. She does not, however, have quite the poise and presence of Claire Bloom in the BBC Shakespeare Plays version of Henry VIII. She is otherwise quite solid.

All in all, this, taken together with the BBC version, forms a case study in why it is not really smart to cut Shakespeare’s plays whimsically or perhaps at all. The coherence of the plot is barely recoverable from the discussions that leap from memorable line to memorable line, while losing the continuity of (perhaps dull, but still necessary) explanation that intervenes. It’s worth seeing, and the Globe company is to be commended for having done it at all. At the same time, it is wise to trust the author.

Buy Henry VIII from Amazon. (Despite warnings on the Amazon listing, this is an All-Region DVD, and should be playable everywhere.)