July 27, 2006, by Peter Kirwan

A nice link

One more thought from yesterday’s ‘1 Henry VI’

There was one point when the elderly Mortimer was reminiscing with Richard of York, and telling him about the old days when the Percys took up arms in his cause and tried to put him on the throne.

What made this a really nice moment for me watching the play was that I’d only seen the ‘Henry IV’ plays a couple of days before– which depict that exact bit of history, when Hotspur and Worcester battled Henry IV to put Mortimer on the throne (historically it was a different Mortimer, but that hardly matters in the plays).

I just thought it was quite a cool link, to have watched a young Mortimer as the potential heir to the throne one week, and then to see an elderly version of the same character reminisce about it the next week. I’m sure that this wasn’t intended when the Festival was being organised, but it was one of the first times that different plays have given the impression of linking to each other– reminding me that this was just one more in a massive cycle of Shakespeare plays.

Other links so far have brought out the similarities between Juliet and Hero by having them played by the same actress, and between Portia and Octavia through the same means. These links are necessarily small and quite possibly unintentional, but it’s fun to pick up on any sense of continuity between all of these very different productions.

It’ll be interesting to see what else the Festival throws up!

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