I am myself alone

I that have neither pity, love, nor fear …
... I have no brother, I am like no brother,
And this word ‘love’, which greybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another,
And not in me! I am myself alone.

These words, from Gloucester, the future Richard III, after he kills the king in the penultimate scene of Henry VI Part III, are among the grimmest in Shakespeare – and indeed in the whole of English literature. Spat from the mouth of Jonathan Slinger in the penultimate play of the RSC’s Histories Cycle at Camden's Roundhouse, which I saw last night, they have the power to chill the marrow.

The Henry VI trilogy is among Shakespeare’s earliest – and least rated – works. It is rarely staged and you might wait a lifetime to see all three plays together. At the time of writing, there are still a small number of tickets left: try to get one (and don't worry if it's 'restricted viewing' - the restrictions are very restricted).

Be warned, though: this production is not for the faint hearted. The killer of Richard’s father, the Duke of York, who has his head mounted above the gates of York (so that ‘York may look down on York’), has his tongue torn out and his penis cut off and stuffed in his mouth in one grimly realistic scene. I swear that half the audience involuntarily crossed their legs.

Shakespeare's birthday

It’s Shakespeare’s birthday and I’m two-thirds of the way through Henry VI and three-quarters of the way through the Royal Shakespeare Company's histories season at Camden’s Roundhouse. (Henry VI Part III is tomorrow night, with Richard III to come on 3 May.)

Last night, Jonathan Slinger made an enticing cameo appearance as the future Richard III in Henry VI Part II. He’s already raised the Roundhouse roof with his portrayal of Richard II (pictured), as well as filling in between times as Francis Feeble in Henry IV Part II, Captain Fluellen in Henry V, the Bastard of Orleans in Henry VI Part I and as a member of Jack Cade’s rebel army in Henry VI Part II.

Confused? So was he on at least one occasion apparently. According to his fellow RSC ensemble member Nick Asbury (Pistol in Henry V, Somerset in Henry VI Part II etc etc), Slinger was in the middle of a Richard III speech in one performance ‘when he launched seamlessly into Richard II for a line before returning, ashen faced, back to Richard III’. Geoffrey Streatfield (a magnificent Henry V, among other parts) has also had his difficult moments. He was warming up for Henry V at half past six one night when Asbury says he ‘had a little mental blank and had to go to the props cupboard behind the audience to establish which play it was we were doing. I think he was faintly surprised and alarmed to find it was Henry V.’

It took me the best part of a morning simply to sort out my diary in order to be able to book the eight plays in chronological order. Some of the actors are having to perform up to half a dozen parts in as many days. Jonathan Slinger was doing several in one performance last night.

The RSC’s production of all eight histories at the same time is one of the theatrical events of the decade, probably of a lifetime. If I have one minor criticism to make, it is only that in a small number of cases the same actors don’t play the same characters through into the subsequent plays. So it's confusing enough when Richard Cordery plays the Duke of York in Richard II, only to turn into Henry V’s brother Humphrey, the Duke of Gloucester, in Henry VI. But having Humphrey played by someone else again in Henry V leaves you requiring not only a degree in the medieval nobility to keep up with who’s who among the competing claimants to the throne but a working knowledge of which actor's playing which part in each individual performance.

Last night John McKay, previously the Dauphin in Henry VI Part I, played a gloriously camp Jack Cade in Part II. Jack Cade has a thing about people who can read or write and condemns the Clerk of Chatham to be hanged ‘with his pen and inkhorn about his neck’. Cade's rebel army hauls a member of the audience onto the stage for this part of the performance and they go through his bag while the rest of us laugh at his humilation. ‘Ooooh, Coutts,’ the actors sneer when they find his cheque book.

Stunning acting and class hatred too, eh? Shakespeare was never this good at school.

Shakespeare and Shaw, blood and thunder

There was less blood for the Battle of Shrewsbury the other night than there was for the murder of Richard II a couple of days earlier at the first in the RSC’s cycle of Shakespeare’s eight histories at the Roundhouse, Camden. But the sword-crashing battle scene that pitted Harry ‘Hotspur’ Percy against Prince Hal seemed to show some of poor Percy’s (stage) teeth sent flying from his mouth – to the audible shock of the audience around me.

I do like a touch of blood and thunder to keep me from dozing at the theatre – and I like to see the actors sweating for the cause. Lex Shrapnel, playing a hyper-manic Hotspur, was so out of breath from his exertions in his fight with Hal that his chest kept rising and falling for many minutes after his half-spoken final exhalation about being ‘food for worms’. At this rate, Prince Hal (Geoffrey Streatfeild) is going to be exhausted before he gets to play Henry V at Agincourt.

A different sort of blood and thunder was on offer in the National’s current production of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara, which fills the stage with shells for the third and final act set in Andrew Undershaft’s munitions factory. The Times reviewer describes this as ‘at root a pernicious play, the one that in 1905 gave a first warning of its author’s eventual mutation into the armchair revolutionary and anti-democrat who praised Stalin and Mussolini and excused Hitler’.

I can see what he means. This is a disquieting piece of work. Undershaft (played to understated, gravelly effect by Simon Russell Beale) is too sympathetic, too likeable, too polemically-convincing an arms dealer to let you sink into comfortable liberal certainties about the morality of his trade. ‘It is cheap work converting starving men with a bible in one hand and a slice of bread in the other,’ he says to his daughter, Major Barbara, of her work with the Salvation Army. ‘I will undertake to convert West Ham to Islam on the same terms. Try your hand on my men: their souls are hungry because their bodies are full.’

A century ago, Shaw expressed through Undercraft’s ‘hideous gospel’, as Robert Blatchford described it in the socialist Clarion, the same emotional underpinnings that were to give rise to in later times to the Thatcherite working class. ‘I was an east ender,’ Undercraft declares. ‘I moralised and starved until one day I swore that I would be a full-fed free man at all costs – that nothing should stop me except a bullet, neither reason nor morals nor the lives of other men. I said “Thou shalt starve ere I starve”; and with that word I became free and great. I was a dangerous man until I had my will: now I am a useful, beneficent, kindly person. That is the history of most self-made millionaires, I fancy. When it is the history of every Englishman we shall have an England worth living in.’

Undercraft’s predecessor at his weapons factory wrote up on the wall: ‘Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.’ (‘After that, there was nothing left for the seventh [Undercraft himself] to say. So he wrote up, simply, “Unashamed.”’)

In this, we see the dark side of Shaw, the one that raised the power of the intellect (principally his own) above all else, believed in eugenics and ‘creative evolution’, and was drawn to the power of a breed of ‘supermen’ who could transform the world through the effort of their own mental abilities and will. This was the Shaw who could visit the Soviet Union in the midst of Stalin’s repression and devastating famine and return only with ‘unbounded enthusiasm’, and who, as late as 1940, could declare Hitler ‘nine-tenths right’ (the ‘one hitch in his statesmanship’ being the ‘bee in his bonnet’ about the Jews).

Shaw’s controversialism and his willingness to deal with the big or difficult moral issues of his (and many another) day overturned theatrical conventions and transformed British theatre at the end of the Victorian era. And, as in the National’s production of Major Barbara, there is always more than enough wit – and a large enough proportion of wisdom – to temper his polemical and other excesses.

In any case, we sometimes need the untempered opinions of the professional controversialist to help us to form our own. And as Shaw himself argued, ‘A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.’

'Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated. Dare you make war on war?'

I could spend an aeon quoting Shaw, so indulge me with one (longish) extract from Major Barbara. It's between the arms manufacturer Andrew Undershaft, his estranged wife Lady Britomart, daughter Barbara and her fiancee Charles 'Cholly' Cusins.

LADY BRITOMART: Your ideas are nonsense. You got on because you were selfish and unscrupulous.

UNDERSHAFT: Not at all. I had the strongest scruples about poverty and starvation. Your moralists are quite unscrupulous about both: they make virtues of them. I had rather be a thief than a pauper. I had rather be a murderer than a slave. I dont want to be either; but if you force the alternative on me, then, by Heaven, I'll choose the braver and more moral one. I hate poverty and slavery worse than any other crimes whatsoever. And let me tell you this. Poverty and slavery have stood up for centuries to your sermons and leading articles: they will not stand up to my machine guns. Don’t preach at them: don’t reason with them. Kill them.

BARBARA: Killing. Is that your remedy for everything?

UNDERSHAFT: It is the final test of conviction, the only lever strong enough to overturn a social system, the only way of saying Must. Let six hundred and seventy fools loose in the street; and three policemen can scatter them. But huddle them together in a certain house in Westminster; and let them go through certain ceremonies and call themselves certain names until at last they get the courage to kill; and your six hundred and seventy fools become a government. Your pious mob fills up ballot papers and imagines it is governing its masters; but the ballot paper that really governs is the paper that has a bullet wrapped up in it.

CUSINS: That is perhaps why, like most intelligent people, I never vote.

UNDERSHAFT: Vote! Bah! When you vote, you only change the names of the cabinet. When you shoot, you pull down governments, inaugurate new epochs, abolish old orders and set up new. Is that historically true, Mr. Learned Man, or is it not?

CUSINS: It is historically true. I loathe having to admit it. I repudiate your sentiments. I abhor your nature. I defy you in every possible way. Still, it is true. But it ought not to be true.

UNDERSHAFT: Ought, ought, ought, ought, ought! Are you going to spend your life saying ought, like the rest of our moralists? Turn your oughts into shalls, man. Come and make explosives with me. Whatever can blow men up can blow society up. The history of the world is the history of those who had courage enough to embrace this truth. Have you the courage to embrace it, Barbara?

Bucketfuls of blood

The night before last was Richard II and tonight is Henry IV Part One. I’ve booked myself and a friend for all eight of Shakespeare’s histories, currently starting a season at the Roundhouse in Camden (the friend doesn't know how to thank me) and I’ve been busy swotting up on my Henrys, Harrys, Hotspurs and Hals to try to ensure that I know what’s going on.

I’ve discovered that it’s no wonder I was so confused when I first came across Henry Part One at English ‘O’ level because Shakespeare took a fairly flexible approach to how the various historical Hs fitted into his dramatic framework. So Harry ‘Hotspur’ Percy is made to be 20-odd years younger than his actual age for dramatic effect, while Harry ‘Prince Hal’ (son of Bolingbroke, friend of Falstaff, Henry V to be) is given a dissolute adolescence that it seems he never had.

Shakespeare’s histories cover a period in English history when the ruling class did at least as much damage to each other as they did to the people over whom they ruled. Those who are doing the killing on one day are almost invariably being killed themselves on another. There must have been a whole bucketful of stage blood used for Richard II’s murder the other night (in reality he was probably starved to death so as to leave no marks upon his corpse). I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like at the Battle of Shrewsbury tonight. I’ll keep you posted.