Richard Paul Knowles
Robin Phillips' Richard III in 1977 was among the most distinguished productions of Shakespeare during Phillips' six-year tenure as artistic director of the Stratford Festival. Brian Bedford's Richard, presented as a recognizably human study of perverted will, was balanced, not by Richmond, who was played by Tom Wood as a pious Machiavellian, but by the play's chorus of women, presented by Martha Henry, Margaret Tyzack, Maggie Smith and Mary Savidge as the unified voice of time, history and the play's plot.
Le Richard III de Robin Phillips a été en 1977, l'une des représentations de Shakespeare les plus remarquables produites pendant les six ans au cours desquels Phillips était le directeur artistique du festival de Stratford. Le Richard de Brian Bedford, présenté comme l'un des avatars d'une volonté pervertie, a eu pour contrepoids, non pas tant Richmond, interprété par Tom Wood comme un Machiavel pieux, que le choeur des femmes, composé de Martha Henry, Margaret Tyzack, Maggie Smith et Mary Savidge représentant l'unité temporelle, historique et structurale.
Richard III has enjoyed frequent performance and wide popularity for nearly four hundred years, and is the earliest English play to have consistently held the stage.1 Little is known of its first performance, probably in 1593 with Burbage in the title role. It is clear, however, from the large number of early editions and contemporary allusions to the play, that it was as popular in its own day as in ours, and in all probability it continued to be performed by Shakespeare's company until the closing of the theatres in 1642. After the Restoration, too, there is evidence of occasional performances by the King's Company, though a cast list from about 1690 reveals that Betterton did not play Richard, but gave the role to the period's most celebrated stage villain, Samuel Sandford.
The popularity of Richard III continued throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it was Colley Cibber's adaptation, not Shakespeare's original, that was performed by Garrick, Kemble, Edmund Kean, Booth, Macready and Charles Kean. Cibber reduced the play's length to 2050 lines, half of which were Shakespeare's, and eliminated sixteen characters, including Clarence, Edward IV, Margaret and Hastings. Not until Irving's production in 1877 was any serious attempt made to return to Shakespeare, and even then Irving cut, along with all of Cibber's additions, enough of the original to leave the play as deformed as its hero, at little more than half its original length.
Irving nevertheless led the way for the twentieth century's restoration of Shakespeare's Richard III to the stage, though traces of Cibber linger even in Olivier's 1944 production, which was, because of the brilliantly acted film version that followed, the most influential production since Garrick's. Olivier's Richard was characterised by a detached and charming impudence and a cynical wit, and this reading of the part eclipsed both the psychoanalytical Richard of Emlyn Williams, in Guthrie's 1937 production, and the fascist wartime Richard of Wolfit. Not until the influence of Jan Kott began to be felt was there a serious challenge to the Olivier prototype.2 Kott's anti-heroic Richard was first seen on the English stage in the Peter Hall /John Barton version of the Wars of the Roses in 1964, and was perhaps most successfully presented in J ohn Hirsch's 1967 production at the Stratford Festival, with Alan Bates as Richard. But Kott's bleak, fatalistic view of history's 'Grand Mechanism' seemed always in these productions to struggle with a personal, psychological approach to the character of Richard, and, like Olivier's interpretation, to deny the play its full tragic dimension. It was Robin Phillips' achievement in 1977 to capture and communicate the play's tragic effect to a twentieth-century audience accustomed to the psychological rendering of character, and distrustful of the providential view of history considered by many critics to be embodied in the play.
Richard III was in many ways Phillips' most distinguished production of Shakespeare during his six-year tenure as artistic director of the Stratford Festival, and the production received highly favourable reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. In England, Robert Cushman said 'it ranks with the finest Shakespeare I have seen',3 and B.A. Young called it 'a truly magnificent production';4 while in Canada Max Wyman compared Brian Bedford's Richard favourably with Olivier's,5 and John Fraser called the interpretation 'definitive - speaking to our time as Olivier's did to his'.6
The 1977 Richard III was also the most ambitious and massive production of the Phillips years at Stratford, stretching the considerable resources of the Festival company and crew (the cast, exclusive of understudies, totalled sixty-two), to create a wholly convincing environment for Bedford's truly malignant Richard. Julie Hankey comments in her stage history of the play that
without a production which grants the rest of the play its own corresponding reality, Richard is always within a hair's breadth of the wrong sort of laughter. . But once allow Richard's monstrousness to belong to its own peculiar world and the whole exercise becomes less precarious. The mode is altered, and the audience sheds its expectations. From being merely a piece of dazzling (or failed) theatricality, the play can become a formidable evocation of human depravity.7
Phillips recognized the danger, and
the world he created around his Richard was as convincing as it was depraved,
an analysis both of our own post-Watergate world (a connection made frequently
by reviewers) and of Tudor politics. As Michael Crabb commented in Performing
Arts in Canada,
a morbid, fetid atmosphere lingers over this Richard. Every trace of romantic nostalgia for medievalism has been expunged. Phillips plays Shakespeare straight and in so doing shows that there is much in Richard III that can speak to us today. Political ambition, amoral duplicity, simpering, cowardly sycophancy. We can recognize them - and here they are revealed in all their nastiness.8
The council scene (III, 4) was in this
respect a highlight of the production. The young prince watched from the
balcony as the counsellors entered, among them Graeme Campbell's Hastings,
'tall, bulky, direct, his large features a chart of loyalty, treachery,
scheming and sincerity':
Richard enters the council room limping on the left leg, and shoots up his right arm in a wave so boisterous that it all but pulls him apart. He is affectionate, then moody, then distracted; he sends someone for strawberries and suddenly he launches himself at Hasting's [sic] neck. He walks out, and the other courtiers melt away. Hastings remains, a blasted rock, looking dumbly at the other courtiers who still sit there.9
Meanwhile, the young prince has, almost
unnoticed, withdrawn from the balcony on Richard's 'off with his head'
(1.75).
The executions of Rivers and Grey, too, were brutally and unsparingly presented, as a nasty Ratcliffe ('this Richard would have some strange creatures as henchmen'10 accompanied by black-vested guards, kicked his prisoners in the groins, slit their throats, and shoved their corpses summarily into a gaping pit, stage centre.
The medievel period setting was carefully researched and realistically portrayed. The action of the play took place on the open reaches of the Festival stage, around Daphne Dare's cold, sparsely furnished metal-grey set; costumes were in murky greys and blacks, relieved only occasionally by touches of blue, white, or silver, and by sparingly used slashes of blood red or scarlet; and all was illuminated by Gil Wechsler's intricate pools of chilling light. In this stygian atmosphere crept such characters as Frank Maraden's skeletal Tyrell, Rod Beattie's sinister Ratcliffe, and Alan Scarfe's political henchman, Buckingham, inhabiting the edges of the stage, lurking just outside of the circles of light, listening, plotting, and awaiting orders.
The world of the production was not all horrific, however, and in fact Phillips made telling use of his sensitivity to stage picture and spectacle to present magnificent pageants that contained shrewd analyses of the uses of pageantry. Reviewers were unanimous in their praise for the 'gorgeous Plantagenet costumes, caparisoned horses, flights of arrows in a battle fought, not faked', but most also noticed that the pageantry was 'never overblown'.11 In fact, the only time that the spectacle or the rhetoric seemed excessive was at the end of the play, when a decidedly unheroic Richmond stepped forward to deliver the closing speech:
The total absence of puffery and empty speechifying is not really noticed until a puffed-up little rat of a Richmond (Tom Wood) spouts his political rhetoric after wresting the crown from Richard on Bosworth Field. Richmond ... pulls out all the patriotic stops and the play ends with Richard's tortured, evil realism and the noisy return of the status quo.12
The presentation of Richmond as 'simply
another Machiavellian',13
as contrary to theatrical tradition as to most critical opinion,14
was among the most controversial aspects of the production, but it was
clearly intended as a final, ironic comment on the political functions
of pageantry and patriotism. The speech was accompanied by a 'grand hymn,
that could be any national anthem you've ever heard but isn't quite', a
setting that was suggested to composer Louis Applebaum by Phillips' rehearsal
process:
When Robin was rehearsing the last speech, he got all the other actors to sing 0 Canada ... It worked them up to an enormous patriotic fever, and they quite drown out the lines at the end. The speech is such a hand-on-heart piece of patriotism you don't actually have to hear all the words, so I said I'd do the same in the score.15
Phillips was clearly exploring in the
production the same questions about the traditional identification of Richmond's
speech with the play's central meaning as Wilbur Sanders voiced in 1968:
'If this is the deeply felt centre of the play and the fount of its profoundest
discoveries ... then the play only offers a profound platitude.' Sanders
goes on to comment that throughout the play Shakespeare 'has created an
audience which is now too wary of simplifications to be fobbed off with
this one, and which quickly reduces it to a pious shell and a hard core
of prudential self interest.16
Phillips clarified his interpretation with one of the few substantial cuts
of the production: he excised Richard's and Richmond's orations to their
armies before Bosworth, and thereby further downplayed the role of Richmond.
If the roles of Richmond and Providence as Richard's opposites were downplayed, however, that function was served as never before in my experience by Margaret, the chorus of women, and a concept of history that seemed to owe something to Kott's 'Grand Mechanism'. Seldom in the theatre has there been so formidable a quartet of women, with Margaret Tyzack playing Margaret, Maggie Smith Elizabeth, Martha Henry Anne, and Mary Savidge the Duchess of York. While in the early stages of the play the women confronted Richard individually and were defeated by his apparently indomitable will, by IV, 4 they were welded into a unified and chilling single voice against him, and they spoke unrelentingly as the voice of history, of destiny, and of the play's plot.17 Phillips underscored their importance by his rearrangement of the ghosts' speeches in V. 3 to climax, not with the speech of Buckingham, but with that of Lady Anne.
Margaret's first entry, in I, 3, was delayed, her first four asides (1. 110-111, 117-119, 125, 133) were cut, and she finally broke in upon the wrangling group of courtiers at lines 154-5, which she delivered not as an aside, but as an announcement of her presence and precedence:
As little joy enjoys the Queen thereof
For I am she, and altogether joyless.
The power and authority of her entrance
was thereby increased, and its drama was emphasised by her appearance:
she entered armour-clad and enshrouded in smoke, her hair metal-grey and
ghostly. Her voice was electronically amplified and channeled through an
echo chamber to give it a hollow, metallic ring. Ronald Bryden described
her as 'an ancient prophetess of doom [who] presides over the play like
a sexless sibyl, pronouncing judgement in a voice from Revelations'.18
She was, as several reviewers noted, a nemesis figure, and she, rather
than Richmond, was the counterweight to Richard. It is not surprising,
then, that at least one critic found Margaret's confrontation with Richard
in I, 3 to be central:
The production's true moment of greatness ... comes in the encounter between Richard and Margaret. ... Here Miss Tyzack has lost all her feminity [sic], all humanity. She stands tall and gaunt. Her pale face with a quivering halo of colorless hair, has nothing in it but a compulsion to denounce Richard and to see him perish. There is no fear, no love left; only an unearthly joy in her own hatred.
Eyes blazing and dead, dressed in a stiff cuirass, she is like a corpse sitting up out of her coffin. Her litany of denunciation, heedless of peril, touches Richard for the first and only time. She is in full career -'Thou loathed issue of thy father's loins! Thou rag of honor ... Thou detested...' when he suddenly screams 'Margaret!' with the pain of a demon being exorcised.19
The scream was followed by a chilled
hush, in which she whispered 'Richard', the voice of history hushed for
the moment by the force of will.
This conception may have been suggested by E.A.J. Honigmann's introduction to the New Penguin edition of the play - the acting edition used for the production - in which Honigmann describes Margaret as 'a modernized Cassandra, the only person in the play who matches Richard in strength of will, in total self absorption, and in her understanding of history'.20
Set against this unearthly Margaret, and inhabiting the core of this corrupt world, was Brian Bedford's morose, embittered, casually vicious Richard, presented not as the witty, attractive, and melodramatic figure to which one has become accustomed, but as a recognizably human study of perverted will, who speaks, as Ronald Bryden commented, 'in the light, dry accents of over-controlled neurosis'.21
Richard is enveloped in black, left arm withered, left hand gloved, left shoulder hiked, left leg dragging behind his right as he scuttles about, hatching death. ... The key to this Richard's fascination is that he is less a creature of intellect than an embodiment of malignant will.22
Bedford's Richard, then, with the exception
of a very 'simple, plain Clarence', did not trick anyone, but overpowered
his adversaries by sheer force of will.
The play opened with Bedford's slow, limping entry down the theatre's centre aisle. He surveyed the cold, steel-grilled set from the gloomy periphery, hump to the audience, before entering the centre-stage pool of light and delivering the opening soliloquy as an entirely logical descant on his own deformity. Ralph Berry, in The Shakespearean Metaphor, describes the Richard of this soliloquy as a man 'at some distance from the psychic pain of 3 Henry VI; having come to terms with himself, he announces his conclusion as an apparently logical inference, as an act of will: "And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover ... / I am determined to prove a villain".' 23 Bedford reinforced this interpretation of Richard by employing his considerable presence to face down individual audience members with his challenging sneers. The concept came from Phillips: 'I told Brian Bedford when he was doing Richard III that if he got a response on the lines about marrying his brother's daughter then he must use it and turn to the person concerned.' 24 It was an effective way of cutting off laughter, and an efficient staking-out of the production's approach, signalling it clearly to an audience that may have expected Olivier.
The wooing of Martha Henry's Anne followed in kind. Gina Mallet, reviewing the production in the Toronto Star, commented that Richard 'doesn't waste a minute on seduction, [he] shows himself to her just as he is, inside and out'.25 The seduction, then, was a highly sexually charged exercise in domination. Anne became fascinated by Richard's perverse honesty, visibly stirred by his sinuous assurance. When she spit in his face she shocked herself, and seemed compelled to reach out and touch him, wiping the spittle from his cheek with her fingers. He, in turn, lurched forward to lick her fingers clean, and the gesture was at once repulsive and enthralling. Anne whimpered as she tried to make herself slide the sword into Richard's bared chest. When she kneeled to retrieve the sword that she had let fall, Richard seized her and kissed her fully-clothed breast, in one of the production's most electric moments.
The key to the scene, however, and to the interpretation of Richard, was the self-disgust and scorn for achieved victory in his 'And will she yet abase her eyes on me?' 'Once he has achieved domination', as Nicholas Brooke says of the play, 'he loses all interest in Anne'.26 Bedford made the point very clearly.
Throughout the production Phillips and Bedford emphasised Richard's sheer effrontery, and his scorn for achieved glory. In the accusation of Hastings in III, 4 it was clear that Richard's (behold, mine arm / Is like a blasted sapling' was a challenge to all present to dare to speak their knowledge that the arm had been withered since birth. In III, 7 considerable selective cutting made the business of cajoling the citizens more perfunctory, and the wide grin to Buckingham that ended the scene spoke volumes:
The grin is inspired. It indicates, quite unmistakably, not merely pleasure at having the long-sought crown finally pressed upon him, but arrogant assumption that it was a sure thing all along. It lasts only an instant, but it bespeaks infinite contempt for those whom he and Buckingham have hoodwinked.27
The coronation scene that followed
was equally inspired, as crimson cloaks and ermine robes paraded in splendour
across the stage to ceremonial fanfare, only to be immediately dismissed
and banished the stage by Richard's anti-climactic 'stand all apart' that
opens IV, 2. This brilliant image of Richard's scorn for achieved glory
was followed by an equally effective image of 'the grotesque little usurper
dragging his vast cloak painfully up to the throne. It's a moment of genuine
medieval horror: the enthroning of incarnate evil in the seat of grace'.28
The throne, however, with the crimson robe draped carelessly across it,
was abandoned for most of the scene, left in an evocative disarray as Richard
lurched about the stage hatching his plots. It remained onstage, a mute
but eloquent symbol, at intermission.
Even the interview with Buckingham was presented as a battle of wills, with the victory again scorned by the victor. Ralph Berry, in his Shakespeare Quarterly review,29 notices that Bedford shifted the climax of the interchange from the usual 'Well, let it strike' (1. 111), to the preceding line, 'Well, but what's a clock?' The victory won, the 'let it strike' was dismissive and distracted. The full significance of Richard's concern with (what's a clock', however, was revealed in IV, 4, the turning point in the production and the heart of Richard's tragedy as interpreted by Phillips. Early in the scene as written, time is revealed as 'the force that discovers and defeats Richard'.30 Time in this production was identified with the inexorable process of history, and therefore was associated with Margaret and the chorus of women: 'The application is implicit in Queen Margaret's apostrophe to Queen Elizabeth: "Thus hath the course of justice wheel'd about, / And left thee but a very Prey to time..." (IV.4.105-6).31 In the subsequent interview with Maggie Smith's superbly outraged Queen Elizabeth, Richard's true tragedy was revealed. Once again, the scene was played as a battle of wills. Cuts, including Richard's denial of responsibility for the princes' deaths, were made to render the attempted seduction less reasoning, more perfunctory. Maggie Smith spoke 'I have no more sons' as a wail of anguish, and delivered 'must she die for this?' without a trace of irony - in this world to be 'virtuous and fair, royal and gracious' could be construed as cause for death.
The climax of the interview was Richard's unconscious acceptance of his place in the larger story of history and the play's plot, as his search for something to swear by included his swearing by himself, and by 'the time to come' (denied by Elizabeth's speech, 11. 388-96, as the voice of time), and finally culminated in 'myself myself confound' (1.399). This self-curse, like Buckingham's in II, 1(32-40), unconsciously implicated him in the larger story outlined by Margaret's prophetic curses, and it came back to haunt him on Bosworth Field:
What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by.
Richard loves Richard: that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why -
Lest I revenge. Myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
0 no! Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself. (V.3.183-91)
Ultimately Richard's tragedy was to
have been, in his exercise of individual will, in his 'plots', an unwitting
agent of the larger Plot, of time, and of history, as represented within
the production by Margaret and the women. In the production's closing sequence,
his final act of will was an acknowledged fulfillment of the predicted
course of the larger story. He did revenge himself upon himself,
by dispiritedly pushing himself on Richmond's sword, willing his
own death, having whispered 'My kingdom for a horse' in a tone of agonized
recognition.32
It had come to this.
His death was the point at which Richard and the audience recognized the convergence of his plots with the play's plot as foretold by Margaret, of his will with the inevitable course of history. It was a totally convincing conclusion to a very powerful and coherent theatrical interpretation of the play.
ROBIN PHILLIPS' RICHARD III: HISTORY AND HUMAN WILL
Richard Paul Knowles
1 All quotations from the
play are from the prompt book in the Stratford Festival Archives. The prompt
copy is based on the New Penguin Edition, edited by E.A.J. HONIGMANN Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1968, and line references are to that edition. The author
wishes to thank Festival Archivists Dan Ladell and Alexandra Cushing for
their help. An earlier draft of this paper was presented to the Richard
III seminar at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of
America in Ashland, Oregon, in April, 1983. See JULIE HANKEY, Richard
III
Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981, for an excellent treatment
of the history of the play in performance.
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2 JAN KOTT, Shakespeare
Our Contemporary London: Methuen, 1967
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3 ROBERT CUSHMAN, The
Observer 19 June 1977
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4 B.A. YOUNG, Plays
and Players 24, #1 (August 1977)
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5 MAX WYMAN, Vancouver
Sun 9 June 1977
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6 JOHN FRASER, The Globe
and Mail 10 June 1977
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7 HANKEY, p 12
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8 MICHAEL CRABB, 'Stratford's
Jubilee Season', Performing Arts in Canada (Fall 1977) pp 31-32
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9 RICHARD EDER, New York
Times Service (Santa Rosa California Press Democrat, 14 June 1977)
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10 RALPH BERRY, Shakespeare
Quarterly 29, #2 (Spring 1978), p 224
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11 CUSHMAN, The Observer
19 June 1977
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12 FRASER, The Globe
and Mail l0 June 1977
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13 RONALD BRYDEN, Maclean's
11 July 1977
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14 Most critics, as ANTONY
HAMMOND points out in his introduction to the New Arden edition of the
play London: Methuen, 1981, p 111, recognize the shallowness of Richmond
on the realistic level, but nevertheless take him quite seriously as a
symbol of divine providence. Similarly JULIE HANKEY, p 250n, notes that
'most productions are still content to allow Richmond his virtue', and
that, interestingly, 'only the one in Warsaw described by Jan Kott ...
and [John Hirsch's], in Stratford, Ontario [in 1967], suggested that the
new reign was the start of a new cycle of tyranny'.
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15 Quoted by WILDER PENFIELD
III, Toronto Sun 15 August 1977.
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16 WILBUR SANDERS, The
Dramatist and the Received Idea Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1968, p 73
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17 G.R. HIBBARD in The
Making of Shakespeare's Dramatic Poetry Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1981, pp 72-73, comments that in Margaret's prophecy in I, 3 she
speaks with 'the voice of history ... a long and comprehensive curse ...
which is also an accurate prediction of what is about to happen in the
play'. He goes on to comment on IV, 4 as a parallel scene in which the
other women, who had earlier rejected Margaret, are now grouped with her.
This regrouping was very prominent in the production.
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18 BRYDEN, Maclean's
11 July 1977
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19 EDER, New York Times
Service 14 June 1977
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20 E.A.J. HONIGMANN also
quotes, p 44, from a review of Phelps' production in 1845, in which Margaret
is called 'the incarnate Nemesis, -the revelation of Fate, - almost the
Chorus of the play. Mrs. Warner played her admirably. She entered with
the aspect less of a human enemy than of some supernatural being. The intensity
and violence of her hate were terrific'.
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21 BRYDEN, Maclean's
11 July 1977
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22 JAY CARR, The Detroit
News 9 June 1977
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23 RALPH BERRY, The
Shakespearean Metaphor Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978,
p 10. Berry's is an unusual reading of the speech, but it describes Phillips'
production perfectly. The book was published about the time that Professor
Berry would have been writing his
Shakespeare Quarterly review of
the production. Here, and in his comments on the role of time in the play
(see notes 30 and 31 below), Berry's interpretative remarks support my
reading of Phillips' production: perhaps this is an instance of a theatrical
interpretation influencing a scholarly one.
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24 Quoted by MICHAEL BILLINGTON,
The Guardian 17 June 1977.
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25 GINA MALLET, Toronto
Star 10 June 1977
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26 NICHOLAS BROOKE, Shakespeare's
Early Tragedies London: Methuen, 1968, p 67
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27 DOUG BALE, London
Evening Free Press 9 June 1977
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28 BRYDEN, Maclean's
11 July 1977
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29 BERRY, Shakespeare
Quarterly p 224
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30 BERRY, The Shakespearean
Metaphor p 24
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31 Ibid, p 24
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32 See, however, ANTONY
HAMMOND'S comment, p 72n: 'In the distinguished production of the play
at Stratford, Ontario, in 1977, Brian Bedford delivered the famous demand
for a horse
pianissimo, for no reason one could think of other than
that Olivier had done so con tutta forza'.
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Appendix
PRODUCTION INFORMATION
Richard III, The Stratford Festival,
Festival Stage
Opened 8 June 1977
Directed by Robin Phillips
Designed by Daphne Dare
Music by Louis Applebaum
Lighting by Gil Wechsler
Fights by Patrick Crean
Assistant to the Director Peter Moss
Stage Manager Colleen Stephenson
King Edward IV.........Eric Donkin
Edward, Prince of Wales..........Robin
Nunn
Richard, Duke of York..........Vincent
Dale
George, Duke of Clarence..........Robert
Ruttan
Richard, Duke of Gloucester..........Brian
Bedford
Queen Elizabeth..........Maggie Smith
Duchess of York..........Mary Savidge
Lady Anne..........Martha Henry
Edward Plantagenet..........Don Goodspeed
Margaret Plantagenet..........Melody Ryane
Queen Margaret..........Margaret Tyzack
Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers..........Barry
MacGregor
Marquess of Dorset..........Bob Baker
Lord Grey..........Peter Hutt
Duke of Buckingham..........Alan Scarfe
Earl of Derby..........Max Helpmann
Lord Hastings..........Graeme Campbell
Lord Lovel..........Rodger Barton
Sir Richard Ratcliffe..........Rod Beattie
Sir William Catesby..........Lewis Gordon
Sir James Tyrrel..........Frank Maraden
Sir Thomas Vaughan..........Stewart Arnott
Duke of Norfolk..........Richard Whelan
Sir Robert Brakenbury..........William
Needles
Earl of Surrey..........Stewart Arnott
Earl of Oxford..........Stephen Hunter
Henry, Earl of Richmond..........Tom Wood
Archbishop of Cantebury..........Robert
Benson
Archbishop of York..........Rodger Barton
Bishop of Ely..........Mervyn Blake
Jane Shore..........Barbara Stephen
Sir James Blunt..........Joel Kenyon
Sir Walter Herbert..........Robert Selkirk
Christopher Urswick, a Priest..........Peter
Brikmanis
John, a Priest..........Stephen Hunter
Tressel..........Stephen Hunter
Berkeley..........Peter Brikmanis
Lord Mayor of London..........Richard
Curnock
Lady Mayoress..........Alicia Jeffery
Sheriff of Wiltshire..........Walt Bondarenko
Pages..........Gerald Isaac, William Merton
Malmo
First Murderer..........Joel Kenyon
Second Murderer..........Stephen Russell
Singers..........Gerald Isaac, Elias Zarou,
Stewart Arnott, Bob Baker,
Lords, Attendants, Messengers, Soldiers,
Horsemen, Bishops, Aldermen, Citizens..........Rodger Barton, Keith Batten,
Christopher Blake, Walt Bondarenko, Peter Brikmanis, Barbara Budd, Jennifer
Dale, Margot Dionne, Martin Donlevy, Frances Fagan, Don Goodspeed, Peter
Hutt, Stephen Hunter, Patricia Idlette, Gerald Isaac, Alicia Jeffery, Barbara
Maczka, Colin Rand MacPherson, F. Braun McAsh, Francesca Mallin, William
Merton Malmo, Robin Nunn, Robert Ruttan, Robert Selkirk, Frank C. Sweezey, Tom
Wood, Elias Zarou