Player Kings:
Shakespeare’s Henry IV Parts 1 & 2,
adapted and directed by Robert Icke,
London, 2024.
Shakespeare’s two-part Henry IV is the long centerpiece of his Henriad, which begins with Richard II and ends with Henry V. In Richard II the title character is a king of disastrously poor judgment whose throne is usurped by his cousin Bolingbroke, after he comes out of exile with an army that defeats Richard. At the end of the play Richard dies in the Tower of London, assassinated by a loyal follower of the new monarch who mistakenly believes he is doing his king a favor. (The memory of the murdered Richard haunts his successor for the rest of his life.)
Henry IV is named for the king, but its protagonist is his son Prince Hal, or Harry. It’s a coming-of-age story, perhaps the greatest ever dramatized, in which the prince, who has been a grave letdown to his father because he chooses to spend his days and nights with seedy companions in Mistress Quick-ly’s tavern-cum-brothel in Eastcheap, has to put his wayward youth away and prove himself worthy of the crown, which he inherits at the end after his father’s demise. The transition point for Hal is his performance in the Battle of Shrewsbury against an army of rebels, where he defeats the noble but hotheaded warrior Hotspur (another Harry) in hand-to-hand combat. This scene happens at the end of Part I, so he has a way to go to earn his father’s trust and admiration.
Henry V is also a war narrative: the young king conquers France, marries its princess, Catherine, and becomes deeply beloved by his subjects. The common touch he acquired in Eastcheap serves him well when he steals among his soldiers in disguise on the eve of battle, but the play demonstrates all the ways in which he has grown past his checkered youth: he even has to hang one of his old comrades for disobeying his orders and looting a French church. But Shakespeare has already prepared us for his metamorphosis from wastrel to monarch at the end of Henry IV, Part 2, when he publicly renounces Sir John Falstaff, the merry, alcoholic old man who reigns in Mistress Quickly’s tavern and provides an alternate father figure for the prince.
Last summer, the English adapter-director Robert Icke mounted a four-hour splicing in modern dress of the two parts of Henry IV, starring Ian McKellen as Falstaff. Productions of Henry IV usually collapse the two plays into one, which makes sense not only structurally but also dramatically, since Part 2 on its own isn’t very good. Much of it repeats scenes from Part 1, and after Hal kills Hotspur, his alter ego—whom King Henry, in his most despairing moments, has wished were his own son—it seems to take a long time for the crown prince to win his kingship. Still, Part 2 has some wonderful scenes, and the two-tiered climax, Hal’s reconciliation with his dying father and his rejection of Falstaff, is as great as just about anything in Shakespeare. Icke’s adaptation, which he titled Player Kings, was, like his 2015 production of Aeschylus’s Oresteia (also four hours), a rich and moving piece of theater and an immense achievement.
Icke uses the effective, pared-down set by Hildegard Bechtler, gorgeously lit by Lee Curran, as the basis of a highly cinematic staging, giving us the visual and textual equivalent of cross-cutting in order to draw out Shakespeare’s juxtapositions: of the royal palace and the tavern, King Henry and Falstaff, the king and the prince, Hal and Hotspur. For example, a fireplace downstage right with an easy chair before it doubles as a corner of the tavern and an alcove of the king’s chambers. Within this setting, the prince (played by Toheeb Jimoh) lingers onstage as Icke moves from Eastcheap to the first meeting of the rebels, so that Hal and Hotspur (a skinhead Samuel Edward-Cook) face each other off for a moment—a combination of a split-screen effect and a dissolve. The exquisite visual clarity of this Henry IV is echoed in the actors’ readings, which have the glittering translucence of cut glass.
The modern-dress staging allows for a harsher, more rough-and-tumble version of the play. When two of the members of Hal’s gang break into a cash register at the top of the play, one of his pals, Pistol (played by Edward-Cook in the second half, after the play has killed off Hotspur), is truly scary—an image, familiar to us from gangster pictures, of an underworld psychotic with shoulder-length greasy hair. (When he warns the whore Doll Tearsheet that he’ll murder her for spitting at him, we believe him, though Falstaff, taking her side, trips him up and knocks him on his ass. Icke and McKellen make sure we understand that the well-oiled old knight knows his way around this dangerous environment.) The battle scenes are bloody and frightening, and Icke inserts intertitles to situate them and insure that we get how awful they are, with ten thousand men dying and another four thousand wounded. In this context, Falstaff’s ironic soliloquy about honor, which has always been double-sided—as much about pragmatism and survival as about cowardice—feels contemporary indeed.
Icke ends the first part with a brilliant multiple tonal shift. Hal finds Falstaff immobile on the field and assumes he’s dead. After the prince has killed Hotspur and exited, there is a very slow curtain, but suddenly Falstaff rises and drives the curtain up again for the “discretion is the better part of valor” speech; then he stabs Hotspur’s corpse and takes the credit for dispatching him. When Hal reappears, he’s so overjoyed to see his friend alive that he isn’t even bothered by the lie. Then suddenly we learn that the king is “grievous sick.” We stumble into intermission overcome with mixed emotions.
Except for McKellen, whose approach to Shakespearean text comprehends both current performance standards and the more expansive palette of the Olivier generation of British actors, most of the actors in Player Kings tend to read the verse conversationally. Toheeb Jimoh’s delivery of his early soliloquy, about how he plans to win everyone’s good opinion at the eleventh hour (“I’ll so offend to make offense a skill, / Redeeming time when men think least I will”), struck me as somewhat limited. But his performance as the prince grew on me, and the scenes between him and Richard Coyle as the king are wonderful. In their first encounter, after Henry has voiced to his courtiers his dismay over his son’s behavior, we can hear the tenderness that undergirds his exasperation, and so, clearly, can Hal. However, when the king praises Hotspur, the comparison gets under Hal’s skin. We can see how his father’s disappointment in him spurs the prince’s anger against Hotspur and his vow to defeat him. Later, as the two sides prepare for battle, Hal suggests that the war be decided on the basis of a single combat between him and his rival, and the king slaps him in front of everyone. This is an unusual take on this moment, which is generally played as a sign of Hal’s courage. Here Henry reads it as impulsive bravado, and he’s not wrong. But the slap isn’t just disciplinary; we see in it, too, a father’s desire to protect his son. (Hotspur is bigger and stronger than the prince.)
In Shakespeare’s original version, the king’s deathbed scene is already remarkably complex, and Icke enhances it. When Hal steps into his father’s bedroom, where the king is attached to tubes—a contemporary touch that augments the horror of what the prince sees—he thinks Henry is dead, so he takes the crown to (as he later explains) “try with it, as with an enemy / That had before my face murdered my father, / The quarrel of a true inheritor.” But Henry is still breathing; he awakes, finds the crown on his son’s head, and assumes Hal just couldn’t wait to possess it. In Icke’s staging, Henry pulls himself loose of the tubes and attacks Hal, but then, after the prince’s self-defense calms him down, Hal lifts his father in his arms and gently, lovingly returns him to his bed. This is the strongest performance of this scene I’ve ever come across, and the way it traverses the entire scope of the king’s feelings toward his son brought me to tears—not for the first or the last time in this production.
Is Ian McKellen the greatest living actor? The first time I saw him on stage was in 1976, at Stratford-upon-Avon, when I was in my mid-twenties. It was the legendary Royal Shakespeare Company season when he played Macbeth opposite Judi Dench and Leontes in The Winter’s Tale. You couldn’t get a ticket for Macbeth for love or money. (Fortunately it was televised in 1978 and is widely available on DVD.) But I will never forget seeing McKellen as Leontes: he was terrifying. When he gave the “Too hot, too hot!” soliloquy, he happened to be looking right in my direction, and I was frozen to my seat; it was like watching a man unravel. When I saw him play Lear under Trevor Nunn’s direction, I assumed it must be the highest point of a career dotted with high points.
But I’m not sure that his Lear was significantly more astonishing than his Falstaff—and that’s a role that one would never have thought of him for. Of course he’s both witty and hilarious, and at eighty-five he’s breathtakingly spry in his fat suit. (Unhappily he isn’t immune to injury: he fell off the stage and was unable to perform the last three shows.) As Falstaff he leads with his belly, logically enough, and at the end of his first scene, where Bechtler—who did the costumes as well as the set—has put him in suspenders and a beret, he trips off, chomping on a sandwich and humming cheerfully. He’s the most delightful poster boy for a life of sheer physical pleasure; he’s like a fully grown baby. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an actor look like he’s having more fun. When he lifts a cup of sack, he sniffs it tentatively and tastes it delicately, then glugs it down, as if his epicureanism were merely an impersonation and now he’s making a grand mockery of it. And his vocal performance is wildly imaginative. He snorts and sniffles and chuckles, and he seems to invent new ways of getting at insults like “Oh, go hang yourself in your heir apparent’s garters.” He rides his lines—he sleds through them—and his rhythms are entirely unpredictable, as if the lines were riding him. Falstaff is a robust raconteur, constantly changing the details of his stories to meet the challenges of his young audience, who love to deride him. But McKellen’s Falstaff doesn’t give a hint that he’s being caught out, nor does he pause to think before switching from one lie to another. The scene that showcases this pattern is the one that follows the Gadshill robbery, where he keeps building the tall tale, multiplying the number of adversaries he claims to have vanquished. When the prince and the other young men reveal that they were on the scene, disguised, playing a trick on him by pretending to be his assailants, he sails, unabashed, into a different lie, a genuine whopper: he protests that he knew who they were all the time and he would never dream of harming the heir to the crown.
In his first scene, Falstaff asks Hal what time it is and Hal replies, “What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day?” But in Part 2 this man out of time has to reckon with his mortality. Shakespeare wrote a bittersweet scene in Gloucestershire, in the orchard of another oldster, Justice Shallow (Robin Soans). They reminisce about their youth and Falstaff remarks, “We have heard the chimes at midnight,” which gave Orson Welles the title of his magnificent 1967 film adaptation of Henry IV. Icke brings us into this new setting with just a single apple tree and a couple of apples tossed onto the stage, a grace note of a scene shift. Welles was a famously melancholy Falstaff; McKellen pays tribute to him by borrowing his tone for this late scene. It prepares us for what we know will follow: Falstaff’s excitement when he learns that his dear Hal is now the King of England, his unseemly appearance at court after the coronation, Hal’s insistent “I know thee not, old man,” and Falstaff’s pathetic attempt to assure his friends that the king is only putting on an act for the court and will send for him in private. These moments break your heart, and they are the zenith of McKellen’s portrayal.
The whole ensemble performs impressively. Clare Perkins plays Mistress Quickly as a hard-boiled, fun-loving dame (who enjoys the occasional toot of cocaine), and Joseph Mydell fleshes out the part of the Lord Chief Justice, whom the prince defies when he comes to the tavern to arrest his friend Bardolph (Geoffrey Freshwater). In this version Hal actually head-butts this honorable representative of his father’s court and knocks him down. They meet again after the death of the king, when Hal shows how much he has changed by humbling himself to the good old man, whose grief over the loss of the king he has served for years is one of the many mournful notes Icke does not neglect to sound here. He uses a countertenor, Henry Jenkinson, for two of them, an ironic, unsettling rendition of “God Save the King” at the top of the show and one of “Jerusalem” almost at the end, when the dying king speaks once more of his desire to take a pilgrimage to the holy land. In William Blake’s poem, which Hubert Parry set to music, Jerusalem is the promise of a new holy land in England; it’s an inspired choice for this moment.
Orson Welles imported Mistress Quickly’s eulogy for Falstaff from Henry V for Chimes at Midnight. Icke follows suit. At the end of Player Kings, she and three of the other tavern hangers-on stand downstage center. It’s another split-screen image, with Hal on one side and Falstaff, now a ghost, on the other. Finally only Hal and Falstaff are left, the newly crowned king, spotlit stage right, and the friend whose heart he had to kill (in Quickly’s words) in shadow stage left, stumbling into the wings. It’s a fitting finale to one of the best evenings of Shakespeare I’ve ever spent.
Steve Vineberg has been writing for The Threepenny Review since 1983. He teaches drama and film at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts.
