Case Study: Staging the Henrician Court

Project description

At the centre of Staging the Henrician Court research project was a full-scale public production of John Heywood's The Play of the Weather in the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace. The project included other public engagement activities including public lectures and theatrical workshops.

The Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace is the only great hall built by Henry VIII. It is also the only existing building in England for which there is solid evidence of its being used for performances during the Tudor period.

John Heywood's The Play of the Weather is an allegory of the religious and political choices facing Henry in 1533. In the play the god Jupiter, representing Henry VIII, decides to come to Earth and resolve the debates that men have over which is the best kind of weather. He soon discovers that it is impossible to keep everyone happy as while the washerwoman wants sun, the little boy desires snow, and while the huntsman desires clear weather, the sea merchant requires wind – and so on.

The play subtly argues that the best for Jupiter (the King) is to do is nothing at all, as trying to please everyone will simply lead to yet more disputes.

The production of The Play of the Weather involved ten professional actors. It was directed by Gregory Thompson, who in the past has worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The show played for five nights with the public audience coming to two performances, both of which were sold out. What the audience experienced was unique opportunity to see a full scale production of a Henrician drama performed in one of Henry's favorite palaces.

The project team created an interactive website that allowed members of the public audiences to comment on the production. These comments then fed into the research agenda for the two workshops staged in March 2010. This was one of the real successes of the project since it meant that its ongoing research has been informed by the public audiences.

Purpose

The objectives of the project were to research Henry VIII's court through its drama and in particular The Play of the Weather.

The Great Hall at Hampton Court appears to the modern eye as a large relatively empty space. This was not the case during the Henrician period when the space of the Great Hall would have been crisscrossed with different and important symbolic boundaries and passages. One of the things that became apparent during the course of the project was how important lighting was to court space during Henry's reign. Who was lit and with what, candles, torches or lanterns, was symbolically important.

'Staging the Henrician Court' staged The Play of the Weather for a public audience in order to generate and test academic theories about the management of space in Henry's court.

Results/ Outcomes

What worked well

The public production of The Play of the Weather in the Great Hall at Hampton Court was a triumph. It taught the project team important things about Henry's court and how it worked.

It was very interesting for the academics involved in the project to work alongside Gregory Thompson who is an expert in working with and for public audiences in historical buildings. His production of Shakespeare's Henry VIII was performed in the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford as part of the RSC's complete works season Working on the text of The Play of the Weather in a library is a very different experience to watching it being researched and produced for public performance where every single word has to be meaningful.

One of the real successes of the project was the way in which it also engaged the staff and visitors at Hampton Court. Rehearsals for The Play of the Weather took place in the afternoon in the Great Hall while it was open to the public. This meant that visitors to the palace experienced the Great Hall as a working space. It also meant that HRP staff could watch and participate in the rehearsal process.

Putting on a full-scale public performance in the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace shed shafts of light on Henry VIII's court which it is difficult to imagine being generated in any other way.

Respecting all the participant's aims and objectives for the project was vital to its success.

What didn't work well

It was very hard filming the production in the Great Hall at Hampton Court, despite the fantastic support we received from the staff at HRP and the professionalism of the film crew. The tapestries that are hanging in the Great Hall are priceless. This constrained our options in terms of lighting and also meant we had to restrict the number of people in the audience on the night when the show was filmed.

We knew The Play of the Weather as a political work, but when it came to performing the play we learnt that the politics had to be under played and left to the audience to see or not depending on their knowledge. To perform The Play of the Weather as a serious piece of political drama was to miss its comic and bawdy elements and to therefore produce a stilted in some ways tided up version of Henry's court and its drama.

Resources Required

It would have been completely impossible to have done this project without the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council which provided the funding and HRP's generosity in allowing us to rehearse and perform in the Great Hall.

The Merry Report is The Play of the Weather's 'Fool'. He endears himself to audiences by acting as the middleman between the god Jupiter and the mortal men.