The Stage

Henry IV Parts 1 and 2

Published Thursday 15 July 2010 at 12:07 by Mark Shenton

“Event Shakespeare” is all the rage nowadays. The Old Vic is currently hosting the latest double bill of the Bridge Project, in which director Sam Mendes asked us to see As You Like It and The Tempest as forming “single gesture, a single journey”. The press were encouraged to see both in a single day and try to forge connections between two plays.

There’s no need to find reasons to shoehorn Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 together, though - they are joined at the hip already, and not only make up a single journey but also a singularly bracing and brilliant one at the Globe. I often find the Globe strenuous enough to visit for one play, with its hard, backless bench seating in the galleries and standing room only in the pit, rigorously monitored by intrusive stewards, so subjecting yourself to more than six hours there takes an added commitment.

But taking this journey together with the same cast of actors for both - led by Oliver Cotton as a stern, forbidding Henry IV, Jamie Parker as his clean-cut but rebelling son Prince Hal and Roger Allam as Hal’s surrogate father Falstaff - is to go on an exhilarating, powerful and poignant voyage through time and history that also connects vividly with us today.

Dominic Dromgoole firmly locates it in period dress, with the balconies of the Globe adorned by flags of family coats of arms, but though serious matters of state and regal succession will play out below them, Dromgoole begins each part with a comic masque, the second of which bizarrely involves a character with a giant phallus. Such things may play well to the groundlings, but the set up isn’t strictly necessary. These plays hold the audience spellbound anyway - even when, in the first part, a torrential downpour drenched them.

It’s a testament to the Globe experience, which always forges a unique kind of immediacy, and the particular strength of this production, that they stayed with it. (It’s also coincidentally interesting just how many weather references there are in the play: “The southern wind/Doth play the trumpet to his purposes/And by his hollow whistling in the leaves/Foretells a tempest and a blustering day”, Prince Hal says, soon after the largest downpour.)

It’s been said that Part 1 was Shakespeare’s most successful play in his lifetime, and the Globe production underlines its popular appeal, which of course is partly driven by the wonderful double act that Prince Hal and Falstaff make. And as played here by Parker - an original cast member of The History Boys, now offering a firebrand performance of a historical figure - and Allam, this is a warm, funny portrait of loose living.

Allam has long been one of the theatre’s best secret weapons, and his versatility seems to know no bounds, from being a great classicist for both the RSC and National to a terrific interpreter of new plays like Michael Frayn’s Democracy or David Harrower’s Blackbird, as well as an accomplished musical actor who can stretch from playing Javert in the original Les Miserables to more recently dragging up as a fine Albin in La Cage Aux Folles. Now, however, he comes into his own as seldom before as a larger than life comic creation, like a less fruity version of Brian Blessed but full of great tenderness, too.

As the crown is passed by Henry IV to his son in a moving deathbed scene in Part II, Allam’s Falstaff is also dramatically cut out of the new Henry V’s life, and given how much we’ve come to care about him, it marks a heartbreaking coda to a spellbinding day’s theatre.

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