It is rare to see this history play get an outing but it must surely be rarer to see Henry VIII holding an oversized gold phallus and gyrating libidinously with a strap-on dildo on Shakespeare’s own stage.
This is a high-concept version of the Tudor court, awash with daring and bling, from gold toilets to giant inflatable testicles and penises the size of cannons. There is invigorating iconoclasm to Amy Hodge’s direction and Georgia Lowe’s gold and purple set design, but it feels like a strained bid to give this play a sexy makeover. It is a relief when the phalluses are put away but it does not entirely work even then.
The play itself feels slightly disjointed, perhaps because it was not the Bard’s work alone but a collaboration with John Fletcher. There is now the added authorial hand of Hannah Khalil, who edits the text to accentuate women’s roles and adds some well-known lines from Shakespeare’s other works. Where this should enrich the drama, it exposes its faultlines.
The first half focuses on Cardinal Wolsey (Jamie Ballard)’s scheming. Long before Thomas Cromwell became arch-Machiavel, there was Wolsey. We see him at the apex of his power, played with outward earnestness by Ballard, and then his ignominious end, which comes with a literal stripping of his clerical vestments. He has the potential to be a great villain but we are not allowed into his mind early enough to feel the full impact of his fall. Cromwell (Esmonde Cole), meanwhile, stands at the fringes of this play, with a fascinating moment between the men. “Fling away ambition,” Wolsey tells Cromwell towards the end, and the words clearly land on deaf ears but leave us amused.
Adam Gillen’s Henry VIII is a high-pitched, dangerously petulant king. Gillen, who played Mozart in the National Theatre’s Amadeus, is just as eccentric here but it feels slightly like a repetition of the same shtick, stylistically, although again it amuses.
As a character, he feels villainous but oddly marginal.
By contrast, the production builds an almost great central female part in Katharine of Aragon (Bea Segura, principled and unafraid) who expresses her protest in passionate outpourings after being cast aside in favour of Anne Bullen (Anne Boleyn, played as an innocent by Janet Etuk). We feel her outrage keenly but she forgives the king and proclaims her loyalty before she dies, which feels desperately anticlimactic, dramatically. Another augmented role comes in Princess Mary (Natasha Cottriall), voiceless in the original text but given lines here built from other texts, and shown to have ambitions herself: “I am more like a king, more kingly in my thoughts …”
But nothing can come of this and the play turns a sharp corner to confirm Elizabeth I as the rightful heir to the throne in an ending that seems at pains to cement the legacy of the queen. She had been dead for a decade when Henry VIII premiered, by which time the nostalgic cult around her was firmly in place. The eulogising feels bolted on and the play gives way to over-emphatic celebration.
There is music along the way (score co-composed by Maimuna Memon and Tom Deering) but its folksiness sounds insipid next to the play’s plotlines.
It is worth seeing this production for curiosity value alone but dramatically it feels like a lesser performed work for a reason. If Shakespeare could ever have written a turkey – perish the thought – this might be the closest thing.
Henry VIII is at the Globe theatre, London, until 21 October.