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Shakespeare on the Green’s production of Henry VI, Part 1 has made the Bard’s work relevant to today by giving one character a cell phone.
“The play deals with some themes that can feel very distant to us, like the loss of Britain’s French territories, the rise of the Plantagenets, and the power struggle between noble laity and prelates beginning in 1422,” said Lucy Blake ’22, who directed the production. “But we gave one character a cell phone, so that’s something.”
Blake explained that the character of Lord Talbot uses the cell phone in Act IV to call Richard Plantagenet and the Duke of Somerset for reinforcements. Per Blake, the addition of a cell phone is meant to represent that “it’s like, now, you know? Like they didn’t have them back then, but we do now? You know?”
Blake went on to explain that her goal had been to make Shakespeare accessible to a wider demographic. “There’s a huge portion of our audience that doesn’t have the context of Henry V, and might not know that Edmund Mortimer is the rightful heir to the throne since Bolingbroke unlawfully seized power from Richard II three plays ago. But they’ll see the cell phone. Oh, they’ll see the cell phone.”
At press time, SotG’s production of The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth had zombies in it.
