SOURCE: Shore, Robert. Review of Rose Rage. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5179 (5 July 2002): 20.

In the following review of Rose Rage, a two-part adaptation of the Henry VI plays by Edward Hall and Roger Warren, Shore contends that Hall and Warren “largely succeeded in giving us what earlier adaptors, such as William Davenant and Nahum Tate, are routinely derided for having thought possible—Shakespeare improved.”

Orchestral music from the wings evokes the undulating English countryside, but what emerges on stage as the mist rises is not a vision of green pastures but the iron-mesh cages of a slaughterhouse. Jack-booted abattoir workers loiter threateningly, the lower halves of their faces moulded into feral snouts by protective masks. They stare out into the audience in search of potential troublemakers and busy themselves sharpening knives, the clash of metal gathering in volume until it drowns out the tranquil strains. Then, at a given...