Garvan Walshe is a former National and International Security Policy Adviser to the Conservative Party.
In which the recent mutiny is reviewed by as though it were Henry IV, Part I.
The study of late Medieval England gave birth to the term ‘bastard feudalism.’ The term describes the unstable political relations of late medieval society, as the feudal order in which knights gave military service to barons, and barons to kings started breaking down. The historian K.B McFarlane, who coined the term, put it thus (£):
When a man asked another to be his ‘good lord’, he was not commending himself and land; nor did he become anything remotely like a vassal. Rather he was acquiring a temporary patron. In this loose-knit and shamelessly competitive society, it was the ambition of every thrusting gentleman – and also of anyone who aspired to gentility – to attach himself for as long as suited him such as were in a position to further his interests”.
Vassals and Lords were no longer related by land, but by patronage. The King was reduced to a manager of factions without resources of his own to squash his overmighty subjects.
Small wonder that Shakespeare’s history plays, set amid the bastard-feudal Wars of the Roses, transfer so well to contemporary Russia. (As would Jacobean revenge drama: what would Webster have made of 1990s Moscow?).
St Petersburg’s Wagner Group Theatre Company, as it were, has carved out a gory niche updating British classics. Wagner debuted with an adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, set in the Central African Republic. Its more recent Siege of Bakhmut, a blood-soaked rendering of Blackadder Goes Forth, owes more to the MacDonagh Brothers (In Bruges, The Banshees of Inisheerin) than Rowan Atkinson and Hugh Laurie. Despite little success, Bakhmut had a long run, fostering suspicions that it was in fact a tax evasion vehicle.
Last week, Wagner opened their most ambitious production yet, Хотспур (Hotspur) is an immersive retelling of the Percy rebellion from Henry IV, Part I. Spanning over a thousand miles, and unfolding in the Russian cities of Rostov-on-Don and Voronezh, it burst out with ambition worthy of Odin, commanding attention across Europe.
Shakespeare had made Percy a contemporary of Prince Hal (the future Henry V), but the historic Percy was a decidedly older man who plotted with Hal’s father, Henry Bolingbroke, to depose King Richard II. Wagner get closer to the historical age by casting Yevgeny Prigozhin, most famous for his standout performance as Francis in The Two Popes, as Percy.
Percy (the “Hotspur” of the title) rebels against King Henry under the pretext that Henry has had Percy’s brother, Edmund Mortimer, imprisoned. The reality is that the Percys, together, are strong enough to threaten Bolingbroke’s shaky hold on the crown.
The King, despite his royal title, knows that his legitimacy is faked: he won it by forcing Richard II (who makes a ghostly appearance using holographic footage of Boris Yeltsin) to “give this hefty weight from off my head/and this unwieldy sceptre from my hand”, and lives afraid that he will be deposed in turn.
Bolingbroke’s performance lacks the depth of Jeremy Irons’s Henry in the BBC’s Hollow Crown, which may be accounted by the decision to give the role to Vladimir Putin, “a grey KGB mouse” turned crooner (top hits: Blueberry Hill and Crimea River), but fits naturally into the part of an indecisive king aware his powers are starting to fail, and that the sharks he has surrounded himself with will gobble him up if they get the chance. He gives battle with reluctance. Carlisle’s warning “The woe’s to come. The children let unborn/shall feel this day as sharp to them as thorn” gives him pause.
Percy also temporises. He declares his rising is not, of course, against the person of the King but merely on behalf of his brother Mortimer and against the King’s courtiers Baron Gerasimov (David Jason) and Falstaff Shoigu (Gerard Dépardieu). He wants to adjust the terms by which power is divided, and position himself better when the ailing king dies.
He seeks the help of Welsh leader Owen Glendowr, who boasts magic powers to “summon spirits from the vasty deep” to bolster Percy’s temporal army. Glendowr was perhaps the most controversial casting choice: played by the astonishingly versatile Volodomyr Zelenskyy (Servant of the People, All the Single Ladies).
The Russian city of Voronezh stands in for the battle site of Shrewsbury (astute product placement by French DIY chain Leroy Merlin must have done something to offset the enormous budget needed for a show in which seven or eight Russian military helicopters were shot down). In this version, Wagner depart from the historical record and have Percy win the day, and set his sights on a Moscow defended only by trucks and earth moving equipment.
But Percy’s men are few. Glendowr hangs back to watch the English invaders kill each other. Bolingbroke, on the move, is impossible to pin down and can muster forces from the trenches of Aquitaine. Nevertheless, the 100 year Special Military Operation has stretched Henry’s forces thin. Instead of burnishing is reputation as a military leader, it keeps his army pinned down, making it unusable as an instrument of domestic power (his ability to regulate domestic disputes, argues early modern historian Mark Galeotti, is the reason why the barons tolerated late medieval kingship).
In Shakespeare’s original, Percy is tricked into battle with a King who wants to avoid it. In Wagner’s, he escapes across the border, concluding as Falstaff did that discretion is the better part of valour. It is too early to say whether this belle ruse, in the Norman French idiom of the time, saves his skin, but Putin’s Henry should now be in no doubt: uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.