martin cummins played henry on when calls the heart.
martin cummins played henry on when calls the heart.
who plays henry on when calls the heart?
martin cummins
Na
Na
another element of "verfremdungseffekt" in this production is the use of doubling, particularly the use of the actors david burke and trevor peacock. burke plays henry's closest advisor and most loyal servant, gloucester, and after gloucester's death, he plays jack cade's right-hand man, dick the butcher. peacock plays cade himself, having previously appeared in "the first part of henry the sixt" as lord talbot, representative of chivalry. both actors play complete inversions of their previous characters, re-creating both an authentically elizabethan theatrical practice and a breachtian political commentary. graham holderness saw howell's non-naturalistic production as something of a reaction to the bbc's adaptation of the "henriad" in seasons one and two, which had been directed by david giles in the traditional and straightforward manner favoured by then series producer cedric messina; "where messina saw the history plays conventionally as orthodox tudor historiography, and [david giles] employed dramatic techniques which allow that ideology a free and unhampered passage to the spectator, jane howell takes a more complex view of the first tetralogy as, simultaneously, a serious attempt at historical interpretation, and as a drama with a peculiarly modern relevance and contemporary application. the plays, to this director, are not a dramatisation of the elizabethan world picture but a sustained interrogation of residual and emergent ideologies in a changing society [...] this awareness of the multiplicity of potential meanings in the play required a decisive and scrupulous avoidance of television or theatrical naturalism: methods of production should operate to open the plays out, rather than close them into the immediately recognisable familiarity of conventional shakespearean production."
henry vi, part 2