THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Adapted from Henry IV Parts 1&2 by William Shakespeare
Noel Coward Theatre, St Martin's Lane, London until June 22, 2024, then on tour to Bristol, Birmingham, Norwich and Newcastle until July 27, 2024
Over his illustrious career Sir Ian McKellen has tackled all the great Shakespearean roles but there was one that evaded him until now – Falstaff. Although he'll be 85 next month, he wasn't daunted by this prospect. He is simply masterful in it and it's a tribute to his astonishing energy and skill.
Director Robert Icke has done us a favor by judiciously filleting the two parts of Shakespeare's Henry IV plays without losing their essence, and bringing it in at 3 hours 40 minutes (including an interval) he makes it leaner, focused and more complete.
The other headline news with this production was casting Ted Lasso's Toheeb Jimoh as Prince Hal. He matches McKellen with both charisma and stage presence and there is a touching tenderness between them. Jimoh gives the young Prince an intelligence and a lightness to contrast with the athletic, fiery, youthfulness.
Icke's great skill with the classics is to render them modern without making them up to date. Designer Hildegard Bechtler's clean lined aesthetic is achieved here mostly using a vast drape which is swished in and out like a cinematic 'wipe'. This ensures the pace never slackens. The stripped-back brick walls double for a modern East End boozer (The Boar's Head) and the dark recesses of the King's palace.
Shakespeare brilliantly contrasts the two ends of society here. The high-minded politicians with their eternal Machiavellian plotting versus the ordinary folk, reveling in their raucous, coke-fueled nights in the pub, until the day they might get conscripted.
Enthroned in his Eastcheap pub, where he oversees the debauchery, McKellen embodies one of drama's great reprobates, getting by on wit and charm, all on somebody else's tab. Dodgy, obese (McKellen in a great fat suit) and eternally cash-strapped, this Falstaff is no jolly old fellow, he's more a grifter.
This production, while packed with ideas, is never heavy handed and Icke brings his usual crystalline clarity to both the staging (overlapping scenes) and the verse speaking. He makes great use of the countertenor, Henry Jenkinson, who gives a gloriously melancholy rendering of 'Jerusalem' which counterpoints the war with the blissful English rural idyll of Justice Shallow, all dappled apple orchards and honey. Falstaff is paying a visit of course to try and conscript more unfortunates to the King's army.
This Falstaff could be the embodiment of Samuel Johnson's dictum that "Patriotism is last refuge of the scoundrel." Dressed in his blazer and beret and adorned with medals, McKellen looks like a veteran at the Cenotaph but unlike them he's a charlatan. He loots corpses on the battlefield (the great speech "What is honour?"), has a grift going with his own wine label.
Once, he lets the mask slip and his malignant selfishness surface, when he denigrates Hal and Poins, not realizing he is being overheard by them. This gives a whole new spin to Hal's final, famous, rejection of him "I do not know thee old man". This is normally milked for pathos, but here it's grounded in an unavoidable reality that Hal has had to grow up and move on and, importantly, that he knows this.
The Ensemble couldn't be better cast. Richard Coyle manages to make the King into a jittery modern politician, who can't fully hide his guilt at being a usurper. Joseph Mydell elevates the normally dull part of the dutiful Lord Chief Justice into something a lot more human. Samuel Edward-Cook, bald, lean, and mean, brings a Vin Diesel, coiled-spring intensity to Hotspur, which is perfect – for once he's not a prig and we totally understand his frustration at these entitled Bolingbrokes. Edward-Cook doubles as Pistol, another bruiser, but this one with a shocking mullet. Finally, Claire Perkins gives a great modern take on that quintessential archetype, the East End Pub Landlady, as Mistress Quickly.
The play ends with Hal, the new Henry V, donning the coronation regalia, mirroring where it all began with Henry IV doing the same. 'The Firm' will continue.
