The play may never have been produced in Elizabethan and Jacobean times. That might have been as much due to the heavy hand of politics as to its artistic qualities - there were few times in Tudor and early Stuart London when portraying the city in riot could be guaranteed not to produce a copycat performance from the audience. But the fact that Thomas More has rarely been produced since is equally explicable, for the play has problems beyond the central one of More's character. In many ways it is two plays shoehorned into one evening. The first is the lively riot and its aftermath; the second is the fall of More. The only real link between them comes when a "poor woman" (Michelle Butterfly) evades the guards taking More into the Tower to throw herself at his feet and proclaim him "the best friend the poor ever had".
Another structural problem with the play is that More has no visible enemy - only the off-stage, barely mentioned, power of the king. He wrestles on stage with the crowd, but it is a multi-headed weakling; there's no balancing force. Most of the other characters are little more than talking walk-ons. Michelle Butterfly in her first role as Doll Williamson, the woman who sets off the riot by resisting rape by one of the foreigners, manages to make an impression of powerful indignation and a very English sense of proper treatment, but few others stick in the mind. Most of the actors have three or four parts - a reflection in the way that this play is more a (highly inaccurate) telling of history than a logical dramatic performance. (For the record, More was certainly not a champion of the people, although he was something of a jester, and even published a low-brow verse comedy under his own name.)
Article comments