We've already met Sir Thomas More this week, as the prisoner of conscience in A Man for All Seasons, at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London; now we get More the practical joker. The astonishing thing about this once-banned 1592 play - written by Anthony Munday and others, and presented by the RSC as part of its Gunpowder season - is what a rib-tickler the old boy is. Given his propensity for puns and wheezes, you feel the play should be retitled The More the Merrier.
In fact the first, more serious half is much the better, not least because Shakespeare clearly revised a scene in which More quells a domestic riot. We are in the London of 1517, where artisans are rebelling against "aliens and strangers". More steps in to restore order with a magnificent speech that is Shakespearean in the density of its style and the breadth of its compassion. When he urges the rioters to imagine themselves as foreigners in a land where the locals "whet their detested knives against your throats", you hear the voice of the master.
Robert Delamere's production puts all this in modern dress, which seems to me a mistake: it misses the historic specificity of a scene that shows that Londoners had genuine grievances against rapacious Lombards. Modern dress also fails to illuminate the second half, which focuses on More the genial host and stoic martyr. Even though a scene with Erasmus has been cut since this production showed in Stratford, it still seems odd to find a gaggle of drunken players turning up at the Lord Chancellor's contemporary home to perform an allegorical interlude. And when More resigns his office, you feel it needs a more resonant gesture than handing over what looks like the keys to the company car-pool.
But the play is worth reviving for the extraordinary light it sheds on Elizabethan England. Here was a work, written barely 60 years after More's execution, that presents him as a popular folk hero and wise jester. Given the hagiographic tendency the text shares with Robert Bolt's play, Nigel Cooke plays him with just the right native shrewdness and breezy charm. This is a More who turns his love of merry jests to moving account when he goes to the executioner's block making jokes about forgetting his head.
Michelle Butterly as a victimised commoner, Fred Ridgeway as a sloshed actor and Tim Treloar as a vindictive earl make their presences strongly felt. But, after a brace of idolatrous plays, I am reminded of the truth of Alan Bennett's remark in Untold Stories: "Henry VIII is a devil but that doesn't make More a saint."
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