To come staggering out of the Roundhouse into a cold spring night after seeing the RSC at its usual superb best is to be faced with a problem: are there enough words of commendation in the lexicon to do justice to what the RSC does, to what it gives, to how it makes the works of our Shakespeare live and breathe in their fullest, greatest glory? To rummage about for the required vocabulary, and to succeed, would be a hopeless gilding of the lily. It has to be sufficient to say: it just does not come better than this. If you would see theatre at its very, very best, and if you would know why Shakespeare is a genius, see the RSC performing him.
       But it has to be added that the enactment of the cycle of history plays in this intense way is something extra special. Pelion piles on Ossa here in the addition of excellences. Moreover, the snarled history of the years between the second and third kings to bear the name of Richard comes alive with a power and vividness that is like a horse’s kick to the solar plexus. Staggering home in the cold spring night, it is a reflection indeed to wonder what it must have been like for those Elizabethan audiences for whom the history was both recent and present in the dangers of their day. For here, in our own late hour of history, the resonances and the horrors are as alive as ever. When the artillery blasts and smoke of Agincourt shook the Roundhouse stage, right before our eyes there was a battlefield somewhere today, and the meaning of bloodied faces, fear, confusion, terror of mortality and exhaustion, all of them human perennials in human conflicts, came sharply home.
       The thing about the RSC is that the smallest and most incidental part is beautifully played and spoken, so that it seems invidious to single out individuals. But the great parts are great in length as in possibility, and the sheer feat of memory, quite apart from the skill of bringing so truly to life kings, nobles, traitors, lovers, low-lifers, in their range of emotion and in a depth of character that little time and relatively few words are available to shape, need notice. Jonathan Slinger as Richard II is wonderful. Clive Wood gives us a powerful, blunt Henry Bolingbroke, whose ambiguities of ambition remain right to the end, and set the tone for the doubt and anxiety that attended his successors: was the crown usurped, had the ordination of God been impugned, what dire consequence could not but follow this murder of the right order of things?
       In Henry V what a play! what resonances for England (specifically England) in the occasions, the speeches, the sentiments of this play! Geoffrey Streatfeild is a vigorous Henry V, Jonathan Slinger a wonderful Captain Fluellen, John Mackay a magnificently camp Dauphin. The play needs its chorus and Forbes Masson is sterling (and wittily adaptive) in the role.
       Two stars emerge: Michael Boyd as director, Jonathan Slinger as actor and an actor of unmistakable genius. The latter must stand as written; there is nothing to add to such praise, save that we will surely see him become a major star in all genres. How he inhabits a character, and makes it real, true, living, utterly believable, moving, funny, deep, absolute. Note his name.
       Analogous praises apply also to Michael Boyd. This beautifully observed, wonderfully straight evocation of Shakespeare, letting the words do the work but making each one count, each one clear, each arrangement of opportunity for the text to be the play, is stunning. And it is done with energy, vivid imagination, a constant driving rhythm and rush that snatches up the audience and carries them breathless and exhilarated along; the changes of pace, as when the principals’ soliloquise, are like the cadences of music; in fact the whole thing is orchestration, superlatively done.
       It is hard to buy tickets for the Histories cycle; no wonder. I trust and hope that performance of them will become an annual fixture, a cultural anchor, a pillar of theatrical tradition as well as of our intellectual and emotional tradition not, as this achievement shows, that there is any difference between the two. These plays, performed as the RSC performs them, are proof of that.
AC Grayling