Of all Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth is the one whose performance history is notoriously strewn with disasters. But, as Dominic Dromgoole, whose new production of Henry IV, Parts I and II, has just come to the Globe, may have discovered, the Scottish Play is a cakewalk compared with the Henrys.
Unlike the other much-performed histories, they don’t have one big theme and one big royal hero or villain to hold them together. But there is, of course, an outsize figure in the Henrys. Sir John Falstaff, the fat knight and leader-astray of the Prince of Wales, is the most immense of all Shakespeare’s creations, his girth matched by his wit, his appetite by his cleverness. And there is a big theme, too: the journey of Prince Hal, from dissipated layabout to upright royal pragmatist.
Nothing in the Henrys is simple, though. We see Falstaff lie, rob, cheat, celebrate drunkenness, exploit pitiful soldiers, fleece an honest widow and, in his dotage, grope a whore. And yet we give him our heart. We see Hal throw off a life of idle loutishness and accept the mantle of sovereignty, and he turns our blood cold. The end of Part II, in which Hal becomes Henry V and repudiates his old companion in crime, is more shattering than any denouement of Shakespeare’s tragedies. At the end of Hamlet, King Lear or Antony and Cleopatra the stage is littered with bodies. At the end of Henry IV, Part II, all we have is the broken heart of the fat old knight, and it is much worse. On coronation day, he gets his crushing put-down. ‘I know thee not, old man,’ lies the new king, and Falstaff, before our eyes, begins to deflate and die.
The Henrys are full of these sudden mood swerves between comic riot, bloody mayhem and unexpected falls into deep tenderness. They are also packed with some of Shakespeare’s most pyrotechnically spectacular writing. The exchange of abuse between Falstaff and Hal, the sheer euphoria of slapdown insults, is alone worth the price of admission. But more minor characters all get startlingly powerful, funny and meaning-packed speeches, each in their own idiom.
The testosterone-driven young warrior rebel, Hotspur, brandishes hyperbole like a broadsword. The increasingly ill, guilt-racked Henry IV has the voice of desperate solitude: ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.’ Falstaff’s sorely tried hostess at the Boar’s Head tavern, Mistress Quickly, is given the ‘so she said’, ‘so I said’ broken diction of the gossip; Justice Shallow, who embarrasses Falstaff with memories of their scapegrace days as law students, has the wheezy cadences of ancient memory.
Shakespeare gives us his England in its completeness: the Eastcheap tavern world of Falstaff and his gang; the Gloucestershire village where he goes to press pathetic recruits; the lonely court of the insomniac King Henry IV; the feuding coteries of nobles who put him on the throne but now conspire against him.
So, much credit to Dromgoole for taking a crack at the cliff-face challenge that are the Henrys and to Roger Allam for taking a deep breath before padding his costume with Falstaff’s mighty circumference. It’s not a perfect production by any means, but, despite its flaws, it has – courtesy of Allam’s fine, subtle Falstaff–the breath of life in it, hot and boozy and by turns exhilarating and devastating.
There’s a special fitness about seeing the Henrys in the intimacy of the Globe, for the plays make shameless appeals to the audience’s sympathy. Shakespeare always sets off the posturing of the nobles against the revelling of the simple and the earthy in the Boar’s Head. The toffs think they are immortal. The boozers know they are mortal. Echoes resonate. The king hates the night. Falstaff and his company hate ‘the sweetest morsel of the night’ being stolen from them by a summons to arms.
Dromgoole’s hardworking company do their utmost to get across this contrast between high emptiness and simple humanity. But the success or failure of any production of the two parts of Henry IV must turn unavoidably on the performance of Falstaff, the ‘most completely good man in all of drama’, as Orson Welles said of him.
Welles not so much acted as became Falstaff (as well as directing himself in the role) in Chimes at Midnight (1965). Falstaff has to be a magical compound of sweetness and cynicism, animal appetite and sharp-witted philosophy, appalling self-deception and fearless truth-telling. Anthony Quayle did it brilliantly, with ruthlessness and rapine uppermost, in various versions beginning in 1951 and continuing over two decades. Hugh Griffith turned in a roaring performance for Peter Hall and John Barton’s Royal Shakespeare Company production in 1964, and Joss Ackland came close to definitive in ripe life-force eloquence in 1982.
So it is heartening to report that Allam’s version stands comparison with the great Falstaffs, even the frighteningly titanic Welles. Allam’s is a younger Jack, not so very plump, and grey-rather than white-haired; a Falstaff who could actually be the fifty-going-on-three-score he claims to be. This Falstaff is nimble-witted, graceful even, in the self-admiration of his cleverness, the voice rising and falling in collusion with the audience. The rumbustiousness is there but Allam soft-pedals the streak of real cruelty with which Shakespeare complicates Falstaff’s make-up. On the other hand, his kinder, cuddlier Falstaff is fully convincing in the generosity of his love, not just for the likes of Doll Tearsheet (a scene played with exactly the right touch of mortal pathos) but, most fatally, for the prince. And no one, but no one, is ever going to do a better ‘sherris-sack’ monologue than Allam.
But at times Allam seems to be off by himself, acting in an altogether different company from a cast that all too often doesn’t take the measure of Shakespeare’s richly subtle text. Are there any other plays that depend so critically on getting ostensibly small roles right – the robotically cold-blooded John of Lancaster, for instance? Some of the cast, doubling up, do rise to the challenge. William Gaunt makes the Earl of Worcester, who has one crucial strategic moment in the events leading to the battle of Shrewsbury, plausible in his weary mistrust of the king; and then delivers a lovely uncaricatured version of Justice Shallow in Part II. Amazingly, Paul Rider is both a fabulously grunty Bardolph and a sinister Archbishop of York, and Barbara Marten in the perilous role of Mistress Quickly is pitch-perfect, in gossip and bony righteousness.
But there are some casting clunkers that turn the play’s high poetry into pedestrian prose. Poins, Hal’s laddish sidekick, the butt of the Prince’s social hypocrisy and a creepy accomplice in his own repeated humiliations, can’t possibly be played as Danny Lee Wynter does here, as an inane fop. You don’t have to have a young Sean Connery to play Hotspur (as he did in the BBC’s 1960 An Age of Kings), but, since the part is all about macho strut, you don’t want to turn the character, as Sam Crane does, into a screechily petulant undergraduate.
The tonal music of the two parts could not be more different. Part I is all physical uproar and adrenaline rush. The deeper, more unsparingly anxious and painfully beautiful Part II is the mordant payback: pox, gout and an autumnal infirmity in which love struggles to resist being snuffed out by power. Written in 1596–97 after the death of Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son Hamnet, the two different plays are hinged together by the tortured dramas of paternity that will culminate a few years later in the ultimate father-son vindication ordeal: Hamlet.
The theme obsesses the playwright. Through the course of the Henrys, one father, the king, wishes out loud that there had been a changeling error that would allow him to claim Hotspur as his son rather than his own delinquent Hal. Hotspur’s father Northumberland effectively condemns his own warrior boy to death by staging a no-show at the battle of Shrewsbury. Falstaff and Hal play at Dad–Bad Boy exchanges, Falstaff the deuterodad gushing the affection that will set him up for a lethal impaling by his ‘sweet boy’.
The two parts of Henry IV are but half a masterpiece, however, unless we get a great Hal alongside a great Falstaff. At the Globe, Jamie Parker as Prince Hal gives decent merriment in the tavern scenes but never really rises above handsome affability into the realm of verbal violence and calculation with which Shakespeare has invested him.
The sudden sickening turn, during the play-acting scene in which Falstaff plays Hal and Hal the king, when the volley of invective loaded on to Falstaff is so violent that the laughs freeze mirthlessly, is performed at the Globe as just another round of chuckledom. Worst of all, the repudiation scene is flatly businesslike, as if the new king now had a Plantagenet PR adviser at his side telling him he has better things to think about than one surplus-to-requirement fat man. This is to cheat the audience of the tragedy of the moment, rather as if someone were to pop up with an umbrella for Lear on the blasted heath.
But what the production lacks in attentiveness to the text it makes up for in genuine ensemble fellowship, of the kind Shakespeare undoubtedly wanted for the Boar’s Head scenes. You feel the warmth in the Globe production: there are precious moments when the hearty savour of Shakespeare’s world takes possession of ours and bad, sad wisdoms of family, power, sex, larceny, drink and slaughter, country tables and urban pisspots, all become mysteriously real amid the heady delirium of words Shakespeare unleashes on us. And there in the middle is a truly great Falstaff: a performance of flesh and thought, inhabited equally by the ghosts of eros and thanatos. Now why in the world would anyone want to miss that?