The Old Globe’s Erna Finci Viterbi Artistic Director Barry Edelstein, director and adaptor of Henry 6, discusses what he loves about Shakespeare, how this production came together, and what these plays have to say to modern audiences.

Interview by Sonia Desai

It is fascinating that this is a centuries-old work, but it is also the world premiere of this adaptation.  What was the process of adapting the three Iplays into these two parts?

I came across the plays for the first time when I was in graduate school at Oxford. And I really fell in love with  them. They were the first plays I actually wrote about in any kind of depth when I first started my graduate  program, so I’ve had a soft spot for them for a long time. And what I know about them is that they’re full of  extraordinary passages, but they’re also just inconsistent because they’re so early in Shakespeare’s writing  life. Henry VI, Part I is very likely his first play, so there’s a sense of a young man on the make wanting to show  everybody how brilliant and talented he is. As a result, the tone swings around a lot. So the first thing I knew I had to do was pick the pieces that seemed the most  effective or efficacious or exciting, and let them be  the thrust of what we were trying to do. 

 The biggest problem was figuring out how to structure  the story. Each of my plays has two acts, so I had four  movements to work with. I treated it like a screenplay.  One of the things about screenwriting that’s very  different from writing for the theatre is that it’s all  about events. It’s about the action. Screenwriters  do this thing where they write the action of each  beat of the screenplay on an index card, and as you  structure the screenplay, you take the index cards  and swap them around. So I got screenwriter index  card software, and I went through the three plays and  wrote down what happens in each beat of action in  every scene. Then I could start to structure the arc  of the story by pulling things out and moving things  around. I removed stuff, cut characters, combined  characters until there was a clear line of action all the  way through from beginning to end.

When you first looked up these plays in grad  school, I’m sure there were things that excited  you about them. Are there new things you find  exciting that you wanted to focus on?

I remember very vividly. I had just graduated college.  I showed up at Oxford. I had no idea what was  going on. And I wrote a paper on Henry VI, Part I. I  remember writing about the moment that Talbot  dies, and Shakespeare calls him Old Talbot, which he  doesn’t do in the rest of the play. One reason is that  he introduces his son, Young Talbot, so the speech  headings have to make the distinction between the  father and the son. I remember being fascinated  by the fact that now he’s old, and with the death of  Talbot, the medieval world dies and the modern world  is born because Talbot is the last person in the play  who understands the greater values of England and  what England means. The idea that England is worth  defending as something greater than any individual.

And after Talbot is dead, all the struggles for power  are about the glory of one individual. That feels to me  consistent with an idea that Shakespeare develops  in plays like Macbeth, which is that when politics  are divorced from values, only violence results. And  it feels to me like that’s one of Shakespeare’s bigger  thoughts about history and politics, that devoid of  values that are greater than ourselves, a society will  collapse, and when a society collapses, it collapses  into authoritarianism. And I knew that back in grad  school. But I didn’t have the necessary vocabulary to  translate it into some kind of theatrical insight that I  do now after 30 years of directing his plays.

I think these plays are a warning that when political  leaders are in it only for their own power, radical  violence will result. And no less an eminence than the  great Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt has  written about these plays and said they are about the  phenomenon of authoritarianism that we’re seeing in  the world right now.

The other thing Shakespeare does throughout the  plays is he brings us to regular people. The plays  constantly check in on them. He’s clearly interested  in how the selfish decisions of the cynical politicians  impact the day-to-day lives of regular people. And it’s  always bad. Shakespeare sees and understands that. 

I’d love to talk about the character of Margaret.  How did you approach her?

There is a series of great female roles in these plays.  Early in his career, Shakespeare demonstrates that  he’s really, really good at writing incredibly powerful  and strong women. You have Joan of Arc, and you  have Eleanor, the Duchess of Gloucester, and you have  Margaret, and they’re just tremendous, tremendous  characters.

The thing about Margaret that’s so interesting is  she’s an outsider. She’s French, and she’s brought  over to England to marry the king to try and bring  the two kingdoms together. She never feels like she  is welcomed. She is made to feel like an outsider,  even by the good people in England. That sense of  denying her any kind of actual home or belonging just  sets her off. She’s also incredibly impatient with her  husband’s apparent weakness. She can’t understand  what it is that’s paralyzing him because she, like  the men in the play, doesn’t have a larger vision of  England and what England means. She’s only able  to see the country through her own needs and her  own wants. So she cheats on her husband, and she  authorizes the murder of a powerful leader. Just a  series of really, really, really bad things. The women in  the play are not immune to the same political myopia  that afflicts the men, but she has a vividness about  her that Shakespeare doesn’t grant to the men. 

There is a huge community element to this  production. How did that come to be, and what  is it like?

First, I’ve got to give a shout-out to Roy Cockrum  and The Roy Cockrum Foundation, whose generosity  and whose vision of a way to support the American  theatre is unparalleled. Without Roy’s support, we  wouldn’t be able to do this. It’s a big part of this story,  and we can’t really talk about the Globe’s achievement  here without tipping our hat to Roy Cockrum.  

Barry Edelstein in rehearsal with actors Keshav Moodliar and William DeMeritt.

The second thing is what we’ve been trying to do  with The Old Globe for the past 12 years. We’re  trying to bring our work in the community into  conversation with our professional art-making  work in a real and important way. We’re trying  to draw arts engagement toward the core of  the company, we’re in the community doing all  these different programs where we are engaging  populations all over San Diego County through  our nonprofit partners. But we hadn’t yet found a  way to actually engage them with the tremendous,  authentic creation of a production. So we  wondered how we could use this production to blur  the barrier between professional art making and  nonprofessional art making. That led to months  and months, if not years, of discussions across the institution about how to bring together these two sides  of the company. We brought the designers out to do workshops with community members so the community  members could help conceptualize some of the stuff that you actually see on the stage.

We started talking about having people show up in the show, but we knew the commitment to be here physically  six nights a week for two and a half months just seemed too much to ask. So somebody in the organization  said, “Well, why don’t we put them on video?” And that was a wonderful revelation. So we thought we could  film people and then project their images on the stage—they’re here, but they’re not physically here. This led  to the production having a whole rich video component, which we haven’t done on the outdoor stage ever  before.  

We spent months of work setting up acting workshops with some of our community partners and figuring  out how to invite people to come here and participate. We had an amazing two weeks when The Old Globe  suddenly turned into a film studio. That’s been kind of amazing. We’ve had over a thousand people participate  directly in these shows between that filming and all the other workshops I’ve been talking about.

What would you like the audience to take away from this play?

First and foremost, I hope people just have a really wonderful time with what is, in the end, a terrific, epic yarn.  That’s what all theatre artists want: to provide a meaningful experience for the audience. Meaningful in all  sorts of ways. And of course it’s an election year, so Shakespeare’s cautionary note about leadership and what  a nation starts to look like when its politics forgets its core values is worth heeding.  Also, I want everybody to feel proud of The Old  Globe. This is a big, crazy, bold thing to do. And it  takes resources, and it takes skills, and it takes a set of  overarching ideas that are our North Star. What this  project is really talking about is what the nonprofit  arts can be, and what a nonprofit arts institution can  mean to its community. That’s what I love about this  project, and it’s what I love about my job. I get to come  in and work in the service of a set of big ideas about  art and society, and I get to demonstrate through my  work what the arts can do to enrich our city’s quality  of life. I hope that, in addition to having a good time  at a couple of shows, our audience will boggle at the  fact that they have this institution in the middle of  their city that is audacious and that is committed to  a set of very big principles about the meaning of art  and the meaning of the nonprofit movement and  what that all can deliver to people’s lives. I hope San  Diego is pleased at what we’ve achieved.

Barry Edelstein in rehearsal.

Photos by Rich Soublet II.