June 1st to 10th 06 - Northern Broadsides Company at Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough - Wars of The Roses (2/2) by Patrick Henry

(1/2), (2/2)

Richard succeeds them for opposite reasons: sheer ruthless ambition overcoming disadvantages of disablement and being the second son of a second son, never tipped from the start to get to the top, except by "wading through slaughter to a throne", as Gray's Elegy has it. After disposing of his royal cousin and own brother, Richard naps his third king, a track record in the Macbeth league, Edward V, one of the princes in the tower, his nephews and own wards, where darkness falls on them.

His hour on the stage as monarch is brief, factually two and a half years, here a matter of stunning minutes until on a losing run he tries to find a horse at Bosworth and falls to Earl Richmond, supposedly Lancastrian, though he has invented himself and his power-base like most others in this monumental war-game culminating in another tremendous stage-battle. Richmond becomes Henry V11 and starts another dynasty: The Tudors, from out of the woodwork where such creatures breed.

Richard's end is like a vampire bat or croaking raven overtaken by the power of daylight, dissolving into the murk of history. Here he is played as an all-knowing fixer, full of ironies and mordant satisfactions. It is hard to pity him. The young princes go out as cocky modern top-drawer-schoolboys and also evince little sympathy, a loss to the power of the show, as I have said repeatedly.

Josephine Tey in her famous intellectual-cult historical-mystery work The Daughter of Time, found Richard a benevolent ruler maligned as tyrannical murderer by his successor Henry Tudor, so cementing that notoriety down the ages. The Plantagenet era was no climate for a Mandela- style head-of-state, so the truth might be somewhere between The Bard's assessment of Crookback and her own.

Next month I go to Stratford where these same plays are at The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, to see how our supposedly top-theatre and social-class establishments view these matters. Northern Broadsides web: www.northern-broadsides.co.uk Stephen Joseph Theatre web: www.sjt.uk.com

Photographs courtesy and copyright Nobby Clark.

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