Royal Progress

Riffs on shakespeare: Vivat Rex
BBC Radio 4
The Observer

Ten years ago. I began my working life as a script reader, and occasional producer, in BBC radio drama. Doing the same job in adjacent offices were two ex-actors, Gerry Jones and Martin Jenkins. Both are still working in Broadcasting House. They have bigger offices now and are real producers: which in radio denotes both artistic and administrative responsibility. There is a great deal of both involved in Vivat Rex, the project on which Jones and Jenkins are currently engaged and which is described - not only by them - as the biggest in the history of the department.

It is a Radio 4 Sunday serialization in 26 instalments of ‘the history plays’- not just the familiar Shakespearean octet, from Richard II to Richard III, but a cluster of other Elizabethan chronicle pieces as well. It begins tonight with Marlowe’s Edward II and ends with Henry VIII by Shakespeare and (probably) Another. En route it takes in Edward III (by Another and just possibly Shakespeare) and Perkins Warbeck, written by John Ford, one of the last of the Jacobeans and drawn from the reign of Henry VIII. 

Also included, a rare treat, is an incident from the scrawny and anonymous Famous Victories of Henry V on which Shakespeare drew for his presentation of Prince Hal and Falstaff; the episode is the mythical one of Hal giving the Lord Chief Justice a thick ear - one of those pranks by which, as those incomparable historians Sellar and Yeatman remarked, he won all English hearts.

Jones, a prizewinning playwright, once spent a season at the Old Vic, but this is the first essay into Shakespearean production; Jenkins is a classical veteran. He has done many of the plays on Radio 3, and was co-founder of the Liverpool Everyman Theatre, which in his day was a stronghold of the set text. As an actor he carried an assortment of spears in Peter Hall’s Stratford production of The Wars of the Roses, from which sprang his determination to ride a history cycle of his own one day. A few years ago he drew up a detailed scheme for a radio serial of the usual eight plays: those done on television in 1960 as An Age of Kings and by Hall in Stratford in 1964. The idea stayed on the shelf; its present resurrection and expansion has been partly due to the BBC’s desire to present something for Jubilee year. (The series ends with the birth of Elizabeth I; the punch-line of ‘Vivat Rex’ is ‘Vivat Regina.’)

As usual in such cases, the decision was taken late, and the directors have had six months to prepare an operation that might have taken three times as long. They are now recording the middle of the series, playing back the beginning, and still casting the end. This is a perennial radio headache; actors like the medium for its speed and freedom, but will rarely commit themselves to it far in advance, for fear something more lucrative may turn up. Returning to my old radio haunts I have found myself involved in impromptu casting sessions, firing off brilliant and invariably impractical suggestions. I did, though, get to write an explanatory booklet filling in the narrative background to the series: all you need to know about ‘Vivat Rex’ available from the BBC- I weep to type it- free.

To date, the line-up of actors is fairly stunning: Richard Burton as narrator, Michael Redgrave, Peggy Ashcroft, Paul Scofield, Diana Rigg, Derek Jacobi ( ‘I Richard II’), John Hurt (a feline Edward II with definite Caligulan traces), Billie Whitelaw, June Whitfield (as Mistress Quickly, why not?), Robert Hardy and as Falstaff, Anthony Quayle: a part he played in 1951, when, as director of the Stratford Memorial Theatre, he master-minded one of the first and most successful history seasons, contributing greatly to the plays’ rehabilitation in theatre and study alike.

Quayle attributes their triumphant track-record to their accessibility: Hamlet and Lear are more difficult to reach, for actors and audiences. The people in the histories are built on our scale.’ But psychological naturalism is set in an enormous sweep of space and time; the action of ‘Vivat Rex’ covers 230 yers. The histories win both ways: a homely epic.