Though it has flashes of brilliance, Amy Hodge’s splashy, revisionist, female-focused staging makes Shakespeare’s troublesome late history play even more of a mess. Henry VIII is rarely revived for sound dramatic reasons as well as superstitious ones. Co-written with John Fletcher and constrained by Tudor myth-making, it’s short on poetry, long on pomp and pageantry. It also caused the original Globe to burn down when a cannon used as a stage effect ignited the thatched roof.
Nonetheless, you can see the allure for today’s Globe in staging it now, albeit without cannons. The play ends with a transcendent vision of the first Elizabethan age, and we’re just about to mark 70 years of the second. There are good speeches for Henry’s wives, Katharine and Anne Bullen (sic). Little known, the play doesn’t inspire reverence, so playwright Hannah Khalil has been enlisted to edit and augment it, cutting the ceremonial stuff and amplifying women’s voices.
