Review - The Last Wife - Stratford Festival

✭✭✭✩✩

by Kate Hennig, directed by Alan Dilworth

Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford

August 14-October 7, 2015

“As the Realm Turns”

Kate Hennig’s latest play, The Last Wife, now having its world premiere at Stratford, looks at the life of Catherine Parr (1512-48), the last of the six wives of Henry VIII (1491-1547) and the only one to outlive him. Hennig attempts to write a new type of historical drama, but the result is only partially successful. Most people realize when watching or reading Shakespeare’s history plays that beneath the movements of history and the alliances of politics lie the ties of family. What Hennig has done is to foreground the family life of her characters and background their historical and political importance. Hennig has also decided not to have her characters speak in any sort of faux-16th-century English, but rather in the contemporary colloquial English one might hear in any modern suburban Canadian family. Both ploys have advantages and disadvantages.

In her Playwright’s Note, Hennig claims of Catherine Parr that “Her story has been mostly passed over by the men who have written the vast majority of Tudor history”. That may be true, but there is a different reason why her story has been passed over in literature. Catherine Parr outlives Henry VIII, reconciles his offspring, successfully manages the kingdom as regent when he is away at war and gets to marry Thomas Seymour (1508-49), the man she was in love with before Henry asked her hand in marriage. Drama tends to focus on those historical figures with tragic lives – Joan of Arc, Anne Boleyn, Mary Stuart – not on those with relatively happy, successful ones.

Hennig’s play thus focusses on a more general aspect of Catherine’s life – the frustrations of a smart, capable woman in living in a misogynistic, patriarchal society. The first half of the action concentrates on Kate’s marriage to Henry and her efforts in getting Henry to sign the Third Succession Act of 1543 which restored his daughters Mary (by Catherine of Aragon) and Elizabeth (by Anne Boleyn) to the line of succession to the throne. Kate’s reasoning is that Henry needs to insure that children of his blood, even if they are women, need to be able to succeed to throne in case Henry’s only living male heir, the sickly Edward VI (by Jane Seymour), should die. Kate achieves this and the act ends with her greatest success, her appointment as Regent when Henry is away at war in France in 1544.

The problem with Act 2 it that Hennig presents a parade of historical events with insufficient explanation as to their relevance. Hennig shows that after Henry’s return from France he is unaccountably cool towards her which results in his signing a warrant for her arrest and execution. Why Henry should do this is not explained (it had to do with Catholic enmity toward Catherine’s Protestantism). Why Henry reverses his decision is also not explained, except that Kate, advised by Mary, decides to give Henry really good sex.

In Act 2, Henry dies off stage and Hennig never gives us Kate’s view of his death. She shows that Kate and her former flame Thomas Seymour get back together, but neglects to mention that they are married and not merely having an affair. Hennig shows us that Thomas Seymour likes to play tickling games with his niece Elizabeth and that Kate colludes with him. She fails to mention that Thomas was accusing of flirting with Elizabeth and even of intending to marry Elizabeth instead of Kate. Hennig also neglects to mention that Kate’s over-hasty marriage to Thomas alienated Edward, Mary and Elizabeth, whose favour Kate had gone out of her way to win. Besides this, Hennig over-emphasizes Kate’s reconciliation of the children, since those who know their history will know that Edward tried to undo the Third Succession Act to remove Mary from the line of succession because she was a Catholic. When Edward VI later dies off stage and we again never get Kate’s reaction. The play ends with a bit of fantasy by having Mary and Elizabeth gather after Kate’s death from childbirth to celebrate their mother.

Those who know the history of Catherine Parr will think that Hennig has cut out those parts of the story that do not reflect positively on Kate’s character. Those few flaws of judgement, however, are what make Kate human and not merely a victim of the patriarchy punished for being more efficient and farsighted than a man as Hennig portrays her.

In writing fictional works based on English history, writers once would have their characters speak in a consciously archaic language with “thees” and “thous”. Nowadays, as in Hillary Mantel’s novels about Henry VIII, writers use a clear English style that merely avoids modern turns of phrase. Hennig takes this a step further and has her characters speak as if they were any suburban non-royal family. The effect is jarring because we have characters talking about their family members being a king, queen or princess while using modern phrases like “you think I’m a creep” or “that’s okay with me”.

On the one hand, the dissociation between how the characters speak and our knowledge of who they are supposed to be is a kind of alienation device that constantly makes us aware we are seeing a modern play. On the other hand, Hennig makes her characters speak in a way much more colloquial than figures of their position and education would do. Why show off that Elizabeth knows Latin and then have her speak like a Valley Girl? The effect tends to trivialize the characters and made their interactions seem more like a modern soap opera than a serious drama.

Compounding these flaws is the fact that Kate is the only well-rounded character in the play. Maev Beaty shows her both at the depths of despair and at the pinnacle of satisfaction with stops at the wide range emotions in between. Beaty’s Kate is often stuck in the mode of cajoling other characters after her normal style of clear, logical argument fails. At the same time, Kate will bend to necessity when she has no other choice.

Joseph Ziegler’s Henry is subject to erratic changes of mood that Hennig seems to blame on the pain he suffers from an ulcerous leg wound. Henry has deliberately chosen Kate because she is intelligent but seems resentful whenever she achieves positive results because of it. He flies into a rage when Kate tells him what he should do as a king or as a man, but then, on occasion, will apologize for his anger, the latter appearing more out of character than the former.

As Mary, Sara Farb is stuck in a deep funk throughout the play. Mary does have reason to resent how Henry treated her and her mother and sees the fifth of her stepmothers may be as easily cast away as the others. What Hennig does not develop is any sense of strife among the three children – either the girls against Edward because he is next in line, or between Edward and Elizabeth against Mary because of her religion.

Bahia Watson plays Elizabeth, called simply “Bess” in the play, as if she were a modern teenaged girl, who like parties and thinks Thomas Seymour is cute. We find in her performance no hint that Bess is mature beyond her years from the court intrigues she has witness

ed or that she has as yet developed any sort of resolve, steely or not.

Young Jonah Q. Gribble is excellent as the future Edward VI, here called “Eddie”. For some reason his character is spared the colloquialisms that dot the speech of the older characters and expresses himself instead as a smart young boy who has learned to speak properly.

Thomas Seymour, or “Thom” as he is called, is fairly slippery figure to get hold of. At first he resents Henry’s wilful disruption of his relationship with Kate, but later he appears to intrigue on the side of Henry against Kate as when she is denied the protectorship of Edward VI that she craved after Henry’s death. He seems to be in the play mostly so that Kate can express the sexual side of her nature, but his shiftiness at least as Gareth Potter plays him, including his attraction to the young Bess, surprisingly causes Kate no worry.

Suitably for a play written in such contemporary English, designer Yannick Larivée presents it in modern dress. The onstage furniture is wooden though in modern lines, but on the upper level of the stage is an a Tudor-style chair that serves as the throne, the only visual reminder of the play’s connection to that period of history.

With the renewed interest in Henry VIII sparked by Hillary Mantel’s popular and critically acclaimed novels, people will likely rush to see The Last Wife to find out about the period beginning three years after Thomas Cromwell’s death. Since Hennig’s play concentrates only on Parr’s positive influence in reconciling the family, people will be intrigued that at least one of Henry’s six wives was able to live her life on her own terms as much as was possible at that time. What one may long for, however, is some hint of the great unraveling of her influence that would follow first after Henry’s death, then Edward’s, then her own. Choosing patriarchy as an enemy to women is a fairly easy target in the reign of Henry VIII, but it was succeeded by the reign of Britain’s greatest monarch who broke all the misogynist rules of what is was to be a woman.

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

2015-08-15

The Last Wife