Henry VIII’s stage fight

Last month at the Tom Hendry Warehouse, when the actors used paintbrushes and purses as ammunition in playwright Trish Cooper’s Holland, none of their movements were random. Every jab and swing was intricately plotted with the help of the production’s secret weapon.

Over the past decade, Jacquie Loewen has become Winnipeg’s go-to co-ordinator of onstage battles, hired to develop the physical language of conflict and character on stage with chessboard precision.

When theatre directors want to punch up their productions with carefully constructed realism or cartoonish slapstick, they often turn to Loewen to choreograph the good fight.

But fight direction isn’t only about the bumps and bruises, says Loewen, who worked with director Cherissa Richards to choreograph the royal rumbling in The Last Wife, the second-last production of Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s mainstage season. It’s about the slow accumulation of action that may or may not lead toward collision.

In The Last Wife, that buildup occurs in the court of King Henry VIII (Cory Wojcik), whose matrimonial track record is as well known as it is horrific. Playwright Kate Hennig’s script picks up after the beheading of Katherine Howard, Henry’s penultimate wife, and introduces us to his sixth and final, Katherine Parr (Amelia Sargisson), named in the program as Kate.

“The violence, in this case, is in the lead-up and the intention and the attitude,” says Loewen, who for years performed as a member of the award-winning comedy troupe Hot Thespian Action.

“A violent movement could be something that’s technically, incredibly simple, but when it is specific and precise — a physical action that comes out of a rising tension — then that violence, I think, dramaturgically, is much more graceful.

“When I started this job” — her first gig was RMTC’s Romeo and Juliet in 2011 — “I was like, ‘OK. You’ve got punches, slaps, kicks and hair-pulls: let’s put those tools to good use.’

“And now I understand (that fight choreography) can be the very quick step of a man in front of a door as a woman is trying to leave.”

“And now I understand (that fight choreography) can be the very quick step of a man in front of a door as a woman is trying to leave.”

That’s the kind of violence that permeates The Last Wife, says Loewen, who worked with fellow University of Winnipeg theatre alum Wojcik to imbue Henry, whom Loewen compares to an aging lion, with a potent sense of physical authority.

In one scene, as Kate walks by, Henry grabs her roughly and pulls her toward him as he carries on speaking.

“In that move, nobody will get physically hurt — it’s not technically difficult — but we worked on it for an hour and a half, because it’s about figuring out where that violent quality is within that,” says Loewen, who will direct the University of Manitoba theatre program production of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest from April 1 to 4 ($12 at eventbrite).

“In The Last Wife, the question is always about how dominance is being asserted. People will always talk until they can’t anymore, and then something physical has to happen. I think that bridge between the two is the most delicate part,” she adds.

“Somebody once told me that the fight begins when the words run out. So in a play like this, it’s about working two or three minutes ahead of that to get the violence to mount, until the words are no longer sufficient and that dominance has to be physical.”

That differs from Holland, which traded in more direct communication of onstage violence, softened by comedic edges.

“In that case, I wanted to be able to create images the audience could see and read that come in a particular tempo, subverting the images that came before,” she says. “To make the fights intentional, then to change the pace and the quality, I can’t think of a better way to describe it than as being made of right angles.

“If you think about the Road Runner, it’s funny because he runs straight, looks down and falls straight at a 90-degree angle,” says Loewen. “The comedy is in his moment of realization and his quick change of direction.”

“In The Last Wife, a drama, the violence that happens is on a curve.”

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