Drawing by Feliks Topolski of a scene from Henry VI Part II, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1977.

Polish-born artist Feliks Topolski (1907–1989) came to live in London in 1935. He produced a vast body of work and became famous as a recorder of contemporary life and events. Topolski worked quickly, depicting his subjects in a shorthand of swirling lines and splashes of colour that capture the immediacy of the moment. Between 1975 and 1977 he drew many of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s productions in both Stratford-upon-Avon and London, sitting in the auditorium with his sketchbook and creating ‘on-the-spot’ pictures in felt-tip pen and crayon.

In 1977 the RSC staged all three parts of Henry VI at Stratford, directed by Terry Hands. The Henry VI plays had received few modern performances. In 1953 the Birmingham Repertory Company demonstrated their stage worthiness, but productions which followed, including the RSC’s celebrated Wars of the Roses cycle in 1963 -64, condensed them into two parts, while adding Richard III to complete Shakespeare’s historical sequence. Terry Hands and the RSC’s Artistic Director, Trevor Nunn, believed that the plays could stand on their own merits and did not require excessive rewriting and cutting. First night reviews were mixed, but the productions had admirers – Michael Billington (Guardian, 17 July 1977) called Part Two ‘little short of magnificent’ – and having developed through performance, the plays transferred to London in the following year to great acclaim.

Topolski’s sketch shows John Rhys-Davies as Cardinal Beaufort, Peter McEnery as the Duke of Suffolk, two figures, probably John Burgess as Simpcox and Roberta Taylor as his wife, Alan Howard as Henry VI, Helen Mirren as Queen Margaret, and Graham Crowden as Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. The scene is Act II, scene i. Simpcox poses as a disabled blind man whose sight has been miraculously restored. Gloucester exposes the imposture.