"Do but think how sweet it is to wear a crown". Shakespeare's history of Henry VI examines the sweetness in the savagery, seeing a royal succession arrested and divinities redivined. It begins with the loss of the adored Henry V - 'too famous to live long" - and with him, the loss of France, his own triumphant tribute to England. His heir, the kind and winsome child-king Henry VI, is too little weight in the quarrel between his own House of Lancaster and the House of York. The escalation into the War of the Roses will leave Henry stranded, by his own admission a mere "umpire" unto the breach and an inevitable candidate, one day, for the Tower. His influence can be only a flutter of white petals in a time when power was inspiration and the snatching back of fortune involved the bloody grasp of a whole briar of traitors. Traitors being what they are in this war - the opposition - the boldest deceiver will finally emerge victorious: and he is the Duke of Gloucester, the future Richard III. 
      Renamed Rose Rage, this production by the all-male drama company Propeller is full of the necessary versatility and vitality to get us through a "feast of death'". King Henry's French bride is a mincing drag queen draped in a woolly robe which alerts us to the vulpine nature beneath, and Henry's truest ally, the "shepherd" Humphrey of Gloucester is duly dispatched. 
      One can see this two-part adaptation by Edward Hall and Roger Warren on consecutive evenings – or else in a complete day, with a couple of hours of afternoon sunshine between performances to regather energies for the fray. Hall places this war in an abbatoir – most appropriataely – and then of course, the Theatre Royal, Haymarket itself twists the knife and crown further; the golden stage exquisitely frames issues of rights and ambition. As the audience awaits the opening, the strains of Elgar's first symphony prick through the slaughtermen's ominous sharpening of knives, and the players' costumes tell us that Hall has pitched his production at around 1914, when the assumptions of England's social order were about to be plunged into an orgy of bloodshed on French soil, and changed forever. 
      The swag of roses from which red and white blooms are plucked manifests itself as a fistful of smoking entrails held aloft throughout the play. This is how we are shown the occasions of death: a butcher strikes the block as the actor writhes, lifting the bloody meat as a dreadful analogy of a human death; and cabbages are split asunder as heads fall, so that the stage is strewn with the metaphors of suffering, and shambles reign by the time of Richard's deadly rise. This dramatic device is relentless, and perhaps explains why one feels that the history this production is meant to unfold seems to take place in a void, there not being enough definition of time and character to give the story shape. This might be due to the radical cuts made to Shakespeare's original three-part text; but the originality and excitement of the visual staging makes this production very worthwhile.
Crystal Lyndsey