When last we looked in on those wacky, warlike Brits—in May, courtesy of Chicago Shakespeare Theater—they were busy taking over France. First King Edward III did it. Then Henry V did it again. Then it was Henry VI’s turn to do it, but he made a mess of things and kept his Gallic domains only by the skin of his diplomatic teeth.
And a significant reason for the improvement is the material. An amalgam of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2; Henry VI, Part 3; and Richard III, Civil Strife has the advantages of narrative momentum and strong, ongoing characters. Where Foreign Fire kept crashing in the same car—one imagines a Citroën—the sequel supplies such long-haul essentials as rising action, life-and-death consequences, and vivid psychological development across its entire length. We see Steven Sutcliffe’s Henry VI, a kind of misfit Gandhi, tricked into marrying Karen Aldridge’s fierce French Margaret, much to their ultimate, cosmic regret. And the great Larry Yando as Richard, Duke of York, leading his four sons through a family saga as cruel and Pyrrhic as that of the Corleones. And, in an aside, Kevin Gudahl doing a Trumped-up version of Jack Cade, England’s wild, lumpen insurrectionist. Most important, we encounter Timothy Edward Kane’s fascinating Richard III: introduced early on as a bright, even sweet junior member of the York clan only to turn over time into a coolly paranoid tyrant steeped in blood.
Through 10/9: Fri 5 PM, Sat 4 PM, Sun 1 PM; also Wed 10/5, 5 PM, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 E. Grand, 312-595-5600, chicagoshakes.com, $100.
