The genius of the director Mark Rosenblatt's approach on this occasion is that he honours such exigencies up to a point - glitz-minded audiences will like the cloth of gold on view at first glimpse of Angela Davies's set - while always foregrounding the personages caught up in history's often unforgiving forward march. As a result, you actually feel for (or are repulsed by) the parade of famous names on view, which in turn lends dramatic tension to what can in lesser hands seem merely to pay toe-curling tribute to Elizabeth I: the monarch's birth and Christening conclude the play. ("This little one shall make it a holiday," or so concludes Henry VIII on the arrival of his daughter, in what strikes me as an especially lovely way of greeting a new-found member of one's family.)
Interestingly, the production isn't dominated by its Henry, a comment intended by no means as disrespectful to Dominic Rowan, the fine actor who here takes on the part. (He was recently seen as Damian Lewis's sidekick in that West End Misanthrope in which the assembled multitudes had eyes only for Keira Knightley.) True, Rowan in no way resembles the amply proportioned redhead immortalised forever by Hans Holbein, an iconic image fleetingly (and deliberately) evoked near the ending of this production. But the actor finds appealing chinks in the historical armour, not least in language ("thou speakest wonders") that echoes the landscape of astonishment of The Winter's Tale, notwithstanding that Henry VIII's propaganda proves scant substitute for the earlier romance's parable of rebirth. This Henry emerges as likeable, even sweet, which may or may not be one revisionist step too far depending on where you stand on the issue of historical figures centuries after the fact made flesh.
Where Rosenblatt really scores is in the play's contrapuntal figures of Wolsey and Katherine, the former dryly funny and, as needed, repugnant as played by Ian McNeice (pictured right); the latter scorchingly taken, thick Spanish accent and all, by a genuinely transfixing Kate Duchêne, who - trivia buffs, take note - was a Cambridge contemporary of the Globe's artistic director, Dominic Dromgoole. Katherine is, of course, the queen that gets discarded as the terminally priapic Henry - his codpiece isn't sizeable for nothing - moves on to Anne Boleyn, whom Spooks star Miranda Raison plays with charm if not much of a voice. (Raison will get a second bite of the Globe cherry later this summer as the lead in a new Howard Brenton play about the second of those famous six wives.) But as Duchêne seems to fold in on herself with rage, her scream at the top of the fifth act stilling a notably full house for so commercially fearsome a play, a piece about procreation and political skullduggery suddenly gives itself over to pain and loss. That, in itself, is a thing of wonder, for which Duchêne and her director ought to be very proud.
