War of the Roses

First published on 5 Dec 2008. Updated on 17 Feb 2009.

Shakespeare's accounts of England's leaders and their wars of foreign aggression have long been framed with the national mind's eye gazing on their latest military endeavour. In propaganda preparations for the invasion of Normandy, Churchill asked Laurence Olivier to raise morale with his 1944 film of Henry V; Olivier produced a stirring patriotic masterpiece, discreetly removing Harry's undiplomatic comments about bringing on rape and pillage in French towns. In 1986 the English Shakespeare Company performed the six Henry plays plus the two Richards as The Wars of the Roses; it and a 1989 film version were dubbed left-wing and "post-Falklands." Now, in George W Bush's last week at the Oval Office, the Sydney Theatre Company's adaptation of those eight plays looks set to enter theatrical legend as the "post-Iraq" Shakespeare.

Cate Blanchett - War of the Roses Editing more than 35 hours down to two parts of four hours each meant finding more cuts than keeps for adaptors Tom Wright and Benedict Andrews. But director Andrews wasn't aiming for a pretty staging of the Bard's best-loved scenes in traditional costumes. "It's a radical condensation – a mutilation to some," he concedes. "It's a deliberately volatile, fractured reading, looking at language as a tool for persuading people to kill." Asked whether the phrase "axis of evil" is an exemplar of such language, he denies any intent to be current or even factual. "For me these are not stagings of English history; they are ghost plays." But few in the audience will not think of the former Presidents Bush when Henry IV (played by Robert Menzies, the grandson of the WWII Prime Minister) plans his invasion of the Middle East and advises his son to "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels." Andrews says he is "creating an echo chamber."

No echos of the acronym "WMD" will be heard, but plenty of lying and manipulation will be seen in the catastrophic final quarter of this generational saga. Pamela Rabe will open it with the famous line "Now is the winter of our discontent," but without the villain's trademark humpback.

"The whole of Richard III is about dissemblance," Andrews says. "She's there as an actress unadorned, and we watch her becoming a monster." In the second scene Richard sets himself the seemingly impossible task of seducing Lady Anne Neville, whose husband she knows he murdered. Despite catching her at a bad time (she is mourning over the corpse of her father-in-law Henry VI, another of his victims), he persuades her to marry him. Andrews cast Cate Blanchett as Lady Anne. "We see him take possession of her. It's great fight, poeticially and viscerally, so you want two of the greatest actors of your time doing it. This delicious meeting is a very good reason to go to the theatre."