As much as we admire the title martyr
of “Antigone,” the patriotic monarch in
Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” and, in “A
Man for All Seasons,” the flawed but heroic figurehead
of Robert Bolt’s 1960 historical drama, it’s
not whole-hearted adulation. Beneath her rhetoric of
defiance against tyranny Antigone represents religious
fanaticism gone haywire. Henry V is a pre-imperialist
invader of another lord’s country. An incorruptible
humanist who finds himself on the wrong side of the
battle of church against state, Sir Thomas More hedges
and equivocates until his execution in 1535. The courage
and conscience of what Erasmus called the “English
Socrates” speak more eloquently through his beheading
than they ever did in his protestations.
Bolt honors this stubborn lawyer’s
fascinating complexity, detailing More’s cautious
demurrals before Henry VIII’s non-negotiable demand
that More recognize the king’s power over the
Catholic church in England. In contrast to More’s
venal, vacillating enemies like the obsequious and Machiavellian
Cromwell or impetuous and narcissistic Henry VIII, More’s
“moral squint” seems straightforward, despite
his crafty sophistries about what he owes king and God.
Dispensing with any pretense to period,
director Edward Sobel takes to heart the universality
of the play’s title. Embracing a part that can
be exasperatingly passive and even peaceful, David Parkes’
seemingly fearless More seems unperturbed by his imminent
demise, even by his distraught family’s plea for
him to save his life if not his soul. Indeed Parkes’
sacrifice would seem more human if we could measure
its price better than we do. But we certainly feel it
in Janet Ulrich Brooks’ rational wife (whose advice
to “be ruled” is doomed to fail) and in
Joey Honsa as More’s passionate and proto-feminist
daughter Margaret.
In contrast, More’s foes—Brad
Woodard’s lightweight Henry VIII, John Carter
Brown’s crafty Cromwell, Kurt Ehrmann’s
practical-minded Duke of Norfolk, and Madison Dirks
as More’s acolyte and betrayer—are straightforward
in their homespun, career-seeking malice aforethought.
Somewhere in between lies Mark Richards’ Common
Man, a stage-setting narrator who relates the tragedy
as seen from the safety of obscurity.
It’s counter-intuitive for us
to admit that some things aren’t worth surviving,
like the violation of conscience. Pure creatures like
More offer terrible (as in larger-than-death) measurements
for our own daily struggles.
TimeLine’s sturdy revival gives
us the chance to both admire and regret one man’s
scary refusal to cut his conscience to please his king.
