Hassell imbues the soliloquies with some meaning, but you can see the cogs going round. Alex Hassell’s Hal is fine of form, discovered in bed with two whores and Falstaff at the foot, but weak of voice (from what little we get to hear of his companion Poins, Sam Marks would have made a more appropriate prince). No-one else is going to step in and charm us instead. My companion wasn't there to see either, having left at the first interval clutching his throat from the transferred pain of all that dalek-speak. It isn’t, though we treasure the few moments like the “honour” speech or the awareness of ageing where the gargling stops. He’s a rather horrid old man the delivery is slow and deliberate, marred above all by word-gargling which might have been established in the first scene with his beloved prince Hal and then abandoned. Not that Antony Sher’s Falstaff has us on his side by then. That scene is horribly botched here, where an inappropriate burst of diddly-diddly folk music in Paul Englishby’s predictable and over-amplified score marks the robbery and where Falstaff simply walks offstage after the attack. Timothy West brought tears to the eyes from the start in a very traditional English Touring Theatre production in Lloyd’s Donmar entertainment, I warmed to Ashley McGuire‘s rogue by the time of the charade at Gadshill, where the prince and his pal terrorise her by popping a red balloon ("no, no, not the balloon" muttered this Falstaff in his sleep behind the arras). Falstaff needs to charm early on so that we can be repelled by his bad behaviour on the Shrewsbury battlefield and his nastiness chez Justice Shallow. I’d gladly have exchanged his nine hours’ conference with the six which weighed ever heavier yesterday.Ĭatastrophically, there’s not a single performance among the leads to win allegiance. This one lacks pace, has poor verse-speaking not least from some minor performances you’d be ashamed to see on an amateur stage and is "as tedious as a tired horse", as Hotspur says here of Owen Glendower. That was pacy, drew its actors from diverse theatrical or television backgrounds into a true ensemble and followed through its women’s-prison setting to brilliant, touching and often very funny effect. "Captured live in Stratford-upon-Avon, the production transferred to the Barbican, London, as part of ‘King and Country: Shakespeare's Great Cycle of Kings’, to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death.Maybe it didn’t help that I saw RSC artistic director Gregory Doran’s diligent trawl through both parts of Henry IV less than a month after Phyllida Lloyd’s dazzling, visceral portmanteau version at the Donmar, welding most of Part One to selective scenes from its successor. Henry IV, Part 1 (Royal Shakespeare Company)
Performed by David Gwillim, Robert Brown, David Buck, Clive Swift, Tim Pigott-Smith, Bruce Purchase, Robert Morris, John Cairney, David Neal, and Norman Rutherford: BBC Worldwide, 1979, 2 hours 25 minutes." Henry IV, Part 1 depicts a span of history that begins with Hotspur's battle at Homildon in Northumberland against Douglas late in 1402 and ends with the defeat of the rebels at Shrewsbury in the middle of 1403."
It is the second play in Shakespeare's tetralogy dealing with the successive reigns of Richard II, Henry IV (two plays, including Henry IV, Part 2), and Henry V. " Henry IV, Part 1 is a history play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written no later than 1597.
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