FOR a town with a population of just 30,000, Stratford-Upon-Avon is remarkably blessed with theatre: not only the restructured Royal Shakespeare Theatre and its adjunct, the Swan, but an amateur venture, the Bearpit. And a boys’ company, Edward’s Boys, has for two decades been reviving in the town the late-Elizabethan, early-Jacobean, and even Henrician drama tradition best exemplified in that period by Paul’s Boys (an offshoot of St Paul’s Cathedral): schoolboys and choristers taking to the stage to perform plays of that era.
Drawing on young actors from King Edward VI School, which Shakespeare surely attended, the company excels: line-perfect, with seemingly effortless command of difficult syntax, and immaculate enunciation; and inventive and musical, responding to ingenious direction with accomplished, pliant acting, in comedy (Grobiana’s Nuptials, 1530), myth (John Lyly’s Galatea, c.1588), or the terrifyingly tragedy-filled (The Malcontent, John Marston, 1604).
The company’s latest touring production, The Enterlude of the Godly Queen Hester, is a version of the Old Testament story of Esther that has not been staged, it is thought, since 1529. A pert satire on the fall of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, performed before the King himself, most probably at Hampton Court Palace, it focuses on three biblical figures: King Ahasuerus/Assuerus, his Queen, Esther (originally Hadassah), and a meanly drawn, avaricious counsellor, Haman/Aman. I saw it in the Thatched Barn, at Christ Church, Oxford, the college that Wolsey founded.
The play involves biting monologue and dialogue, partly presented as comic. As always with this talented troupe, boys masquerade as girls, and they carried that off with marvellous, often cheeky, aplomb. The lighting was skilfully handled in a limited space where the actors wound around and through the audience. The cast was cleverly blocked, somewhat dottily bearded or moustachioed, and able to mimic a range of contrasting accents. A wide- or bow-legged Henry, presiding here in person, was presented ominously. A neatly employed, vivid little trio enhanced the mood. Rufus Round, well cast as Hester, shone, as he has in previous productions. The music was vital; and the acoustic was ideal.
In this arresting play, the stages by which Queen Hester, unexpectedly revealed as Jewish herself, and by now splendidly attired, endowed with “half our realm”, prevails on Ahasuerus to abandon Aman’s malicious design to obliterate all Jews in captivity have to be profoundly moving; and so they were.
Every moment told. That a play of the early 16th century could feel relatively modern — perhaps 19th-century — was impressive. Yet the fact that it did owed everything to these gifted young performers and their director, Perry Mills. For a seasoned, highbrow Oxford audience, it was a palpable hit.
The tour continues to the Société Internationale pour l’Étude du Théâtre Médiéval Conference, University of Fribourg, Switzerland, on 19 July, and West Horsley Place, Leatherhead, Surrey, on the 21st. edwardsboys.org.uk