Henry VI

Abstract

Davis Hall’s performance as the emerging pacifist king is filled with the affectations of Shakespearean acting at its most stereotyped, emerging as a series of teary-voiced, sing-song declamations and recitations delivered in a relentless tremolo. Victoria Boothby is overwrought, more a caricature than a character, as the banished Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester… Save for several exceptions (Ed Dennehy as Talbot and John Hertzler’s Richard, later Duke of York), most of the performances are simply ineffectual, among them Lisa Barnes’s Joan of Arc … and William Pitts’s Dauphin (who appears in a Carol Channing-like wig), or pompously stagy. In all the battle scenes, most of which are clumsily negotiated, Mr. Barry’s direction is short on climaxes, lumbering along at a ponderous pace. (Alvin Klein, New York Times, 17 July 1983)