building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Hall argued that "we live among war, race riots, revolutions, assassinations, and the imminent threat of extinction. The theatre is, therefore, examining fundamentals in staging the Henry VI plays." He also stated that during pre-production, "I realised that the mechanism of power had not changed in centuries. We were in the middle of a blood-soaked century. I was convinced that a presentation of one of the bloodiest and most hypocritical periods in history would teach many lessons about the present." Similarly, in her introduction to the Folio Society edition of the trilogy, Peggy Ashcroft challenged William Hazlitt's dismissal of the Henry VI plays as a depiction of England as a "perfect beargarden", writing "perhaps because we are more aware than ever before what a beargarden the whole world is, we see in these plays a microcosm of so many of the violent and tragic conflicts of our own time. The romantic view of Shakespeare, popular with the Victorians and lasting almost to the first half of this century has now changed, and we have become more aware of Shakespeare's political absorption and inspired interpretations of man's difficulty in governing himself and others." Barton and Hall were also influenced by certain politically focused literary theory of the time; both were subscribers to Antonin Artaud's theory of the "Theatre of Cruelty", and both had attended the 1956 London visit of Bertolt Brecht's Berliner Ensemble. Brecht's influence on The Wars of the Roses was especially pronounced, and many scholars have since cited Brecht's theories on drama in general, and historical drama in specific, as the impetus behind the 'rediscovery' of the Henry VI plays in the 1960s. For example, Ton Hoenselaars argues that Brecht Another major influence on the production was Jan Kott. Hall had read a proof copy of Kott's soon-to-be-influential Shakespeare Our Contemporary, prior to its publication in Britain, just before he began rehearsals for The Wars of the Roses. He was strongly taken by Kott's theory regarding Shakespeare's conception of the "Grand Mechanism" of history; as history continually revolves, each claimant to the throne rises, only to be subsequently deposed and crushed in an ongoing cycle. In the program notes for Henry VI, Barton and Hall included a quotation from Kott, which they felt was especially relevant to