King And Country: Henry V, or, Echoes And High Notes

My going-to-war crown has a cross on it.

 

 

“Oh come ON!” loud-whispered the guy two seats down from me during the final scene of Henry V. He had spent most of the evening leaning forward, arms on the railing in front of us, but now he leaned back and shook his head. “It’s a stupid FARCE!” he said to his wife with his arms folded. To which I wanted to reply: “First time ever seeing Henry Five, huh, fella?” Because that last scene—the wooing scene between Henry/Hal and the Princess of France, is a total hoot no matter how you play it. Seriously—it’s as bad-actor proof as the Pyramus and Thisbe play from Midsummer Night’s Dream—it’d even get laughs if Christian Bale did it. With Alex Hassell and Jennifer Kirby playing it, it was delightful. It’s the crowning scene in the play, and the crowning moment in Hassell’s journey from a scapegrace taking on two tavern wenches at once to a self-aware king making self-aware passes at someone who barely understands English. 

 

 

This production begins with a moment that is just as delightful. The stage is bare of all except a throne, on which sits the crown of England. In saunters Oliver Ford Davies as the Chorus, dressed like a rumpled old history buff who mistakenly walked through a stage door instead of his study door. He looks around. He acknowledges us. He  sees the crown of England sitting on that throne, and holds it up to look at it—and then Alex Hassell marches on in a huff, grabs the crown out of his hand, and marches off with it, throwing a snooty over-the-shoulder look back at Davies like he’s the fly in the buttermilk. 

From that moment, you know you’re in good hands. And while it’s not on the level of Henry IV 1, this production achieves a nice balance between foolery and seriousness—with the notable exception of Pistol, who is still painfully unfunny, even though in this play Antony Byrne portrays him as a completely different Pistol from the one in Henry IV 2. If anything, this serves to highlight just how seamlessly the rest of the actors are delivering consistent characters from one play to the next. 

 

Especially Hassell. This is the culmination of all the work he’s done in the previous two plays, and all that work pays off here. Again, when Henry V is done as a standalone, certain choices that actors make are defined by the fact that they have to come out of this play alone. Hassell can echo and call back to and advance upon what he’s done in both earlier plays to make this Henry someone who is still learning how to be a ruler, a warrior, and a man. The mannerisms that marked his Hal are still there in his Henry, but they’re refined and more under control, like a set of potential flaws that have been forged into protective armor. It’s a different kind of theatrical acting than I’m used to—it’s a style and technique that’s more suited to television, where you use the episode to build to the series, and it’s both fascinating and revelatory to have seen that on stage. 

Especially since there’s really no connecting tissue here. Everything is self-contained, like an evening of one-acts introduced by a kindly old producer, who invariably apologizes in advance for what we are about to see. The scenes are like secular Stations of the Cross, with the betrayal scene even compared to a second fall of man, which is pretty damned presumptuous if you ask me. Also totally British.  

There is a lot of audience interaction, with the lights rising during the Harfleur speech (we’re the French) and just before Agincourt (we’re the army). Nym talks a lot about humors, and the frequency of it makes me suspect that it’s a deliberate parody of Ben Jonson. Falstaff’s death is handled poignantly, and little by little the world of Eastcheap is whittled away, with Nym and Bardolph hanged, the Boy killed in battle, and Pistol turning cutpurse and thief. Jane Lapoitaire, playing the French Queen, performs her final verbal bow the same way she made her first one, by entertaining the first two rows of the audience with what the rest of us cannot hear without the audio equivalent of a satellite dish. Seriously—you can hear your cells dividing more clearly than you can hear her.

 

And the ghost of Richard II hovers over everything. Henry’s plea to God not to be punished for inheriting the sin of his father along with his crown has a lot more resonance when you see the plays in sequence. You really get a feel for how awful any murder is, never mind the murder of a sovereign. And you also, if you know your history, get the very clear sense that just because God doesn’t punish you now, that doesn’t mean he won’t let you win and then take it all away from you later, or wait until you’re dead and have your son lose everything and more, like that. 

 

Two final notes: the scene between the Princess of France and her ladies-in-waiting, as they describe body parts in English and French, was sublimely hilarious, and just as uplifting as that final wooing scene between Henry and the Princess. But the one scene in this production that brought down the house was the Welshman/Irishman/Scot scene. Simon Yadoo as Jamy the Scot was as hilariously unintelligible as Brad Pitt in Snatch, and his commitment to total gibberish was nothing less than inspirational. Which was the source of the other memorable overheard comment of the night. After the play was over, as two women waited as patiently as possible on line for the Ladies, one turned to the other and said: “I wanted to see more of Jamy the Scot.”

 

Me too, lady. Me too. 

 

*   *   *   *   *

 

So what to say about the King And Country series as a whole?  

The ensemble work throughout was stellar. Each play had its own style, but the series as a whole shared a number of recurring motifs. A playful moment with the crown. Church or religious settings, with men and women crossing themselves either to ward off evil or acknowledge a blessing. Henry V's peacetime crown is unadorned and gold; his war crown is dark ungleaming silver with a cross on the front. (God is very near the earth in these plays.) How History as a force never really ends, even though plays must. How the dead haunt the living—the series that begins with a mourning old woman draped over a coffin while a choir sings dirges, ends with a marriage attended by both the living and the dead of Henry V—the dead looking down from where the choir sang in Richard II, the living assembled in preparation for a curtain call.  

 

Ranking the four plays: I’d put Richard II at the top, followed by Henry IV 1, Henry V, and Henry IV 2.  

 

What I remember as I think back: a king who loves martyrdom more than monarchy teasingly offering and then snatching away his crown to the man who will succeed him. A young prince laughing with his commoner friends. A rash husband walloping his wife’s shoulder with what passes in him for affection. “Here comes your father.” A quiet night before battle when soldiers tell the truth to a king in disguise who should know better than to defend himself by pulling rank, but does it anyway. And a woman’s body draped over a coffin while a choir from above sings three-part harmony. That’s the image that began the series, and it infected everything else I saw with the presence and the promise of grief and mortality. And—despite our oh-so-modern trust in progress, understanding, and community—aren’t those two things what History is all about?



King And Country: Henry IV Part 2, or, Johnny (Falstaff) One-Note

See this? That's how much plot you're getting tonight.

You don’t see this play done by itself very often—I have a vague memory of seeing it once before this, but damned if I can remember when—because when it’s done at all, it’s either done in rep with Part 1 or combined with Part 1 to make one gigantic HenryFouriad, like the version at Lincoln Center in 2003. And for good reason. The plain truth is, this play can’t be done on its own. It’s a Part 2 that requires an intimate knowledge of Part 1, a sequel in which the opening Eastcheap scenes all contain callbacks to things that happened in Part 1, and they’re not references that are explained. The only way it can be successfully mounted as a standalone is if you construct a “Previously, on Henry The Fourth Part One” voiceover, with excerpts and selected moments from the prior play presented for the Bolingbrokian impaired. 

I would have loved it if this production had started out that way. But it doesn’t. It starts out with a monologue by Rumor—a very modern Rumor, wearing a Rolling Stone Tongue T-shirt (perfect) and carrying a cellphone (double perfect), who delivers a clever multilingual  hashtag joke (perfect hat trick). The entire speech is delivered like Hal’s monologue, right at the audience with the house lights up half. And then he waves them down, and we are in the play proper, and it’s the first misfire of a night which will contain several. In most productions, the actor playing Rumor also plays Lord Bardolph, who brings (what turns out to be rumor and false) news of the battle of Shrewsbury to Hotspur’s father. In this production, the actor playing Rumor plays the Porter who lets Bardolph in, so the point that Bardolph is a walking rumor is lost. Which is inside baseball, yes, but it’s the kind of smart moment that happened everywhere in the earlier two plays in this series. 

Not this one, though. Where the previous play soared, this one staggers and disorients, and this production does its best to help it walk, but it’s a lot of heavy lifting. The scenes with Hotspur’s father are confusing. Is he going to war? Is he getting out of Dodge? Is there a point where we should care? Out of nowhere, Hal has enough brothers to field a basketball team—one of whom (Prince John) is a total dick. Plus Hal doesn’t show up for almost an hour of stage time. Plus the funny stuff isn’t as funny as everyone thinks it is, and when I say this, I’m pointing at the Pistol scene (Act II, Scene 4). It’s so relentlessly devoid of laughs that you can feel the actors’ frustrations coming out—it’s like watching a bunch of people kick a dead body as hard as they can to bring it back to life. But no such luck; it was dead on arrival.  

And that’s how this play feels for the first half. Everyone is trying to lift it up, but it just won’t get off the ground, not the way the first part did. And I know it’s wrong to compare one play with another, but damn, a good 30% of this script is full of nothing but references to another play, so how can you help comparing the two of them? You can’t. 

Seeing Henry IV 2, you really appreciate the ease with which the three worlds of Henry IV 1 are integrated: the court, Eastcheap, and the rebellious north.  It’s a study in contrasts that is as brilliant as the Athenians/Mechanicals/Fairies triptych in Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s also lightning in a bottle. You can’t repeat it. Which is what makes this play not just problematical thematically but incredibly difficult to do theatrically. And the problem is epitomized by the portrayal of one character: Falstaff. For the first 90 minutes, he is the one constant. Not Hal, not the court: Falstaff. Yeah, we get some scenes in the North, and the beginnings of a new rebellion, but we also get a ton and a half of Eastcheap before we finally (finally) see Hal for the first time. And throughout all this, Anthony Sher kills it as Falstaff. But then this play is built around Falstaff. He has a monologue like once every ten minutes. The more he talks, the more you’re supposed to love him. Because the more you love him, the more it’s going to hurt when Hal becomes King and rejects him. But because the play is structured so that Hal’s accession is a late-second-half development, and because it’s built on the same kind of “I screwed up/I forgive you” scene with his father that reconciled the two of them in Part 1, it feels rushed. Like Shakespeare said to Will Kempe: “Okay, you’ve got two hours to ad-lib your ass off as Falstaff; but then I REALLY have to start telling the story, okay?” 

[Theatrical side note. Think of the pre-1600 Chamberlain’s Men as the kind of repertory company where all the sharers were (a) guaranteed roles in each play the company performed and (b) also given an equal number of lead roles, depending on what plays were done. And Henry IV 2 was Will Kempe’s lead role as Falstaff. Probably his last one. Because once the Men built the Globe in 1600, Burbage and his brother owned half the total shares of the company, Shakespeare’s plays were all written for Burbage to play the lead and no one else, and Kempe was gone as a sharer. Why? Nobody really knows. But watching Henry IV 2, it’s not hard to see Richard Burbage seething at all the attention Kempe is getting, and then turning to Shakespeare and saying “If I’m doing Henry the Fifth, I’m not doing it with Kempe as Falstaff. Because it’ll be his play, not mine. So no Falstaff. And Kempe’s out.” ] 

This production does its best to make the first half feel like more than filler, but it’s an uphill battle, and it doesn’t settle down until the war starts and we get to Gloucestershire. With the appearance of Shallow and Silence, something like the balance of Part I is achieved, for now the comedy has war to bounce off instead of referencing moments from another play, and that makes it sharper and funnier. Oliver Ford Davies, with his plummy voice and manner, makes Shallow a continual delight; the scene where the recruits are chosen is hilarious in all the right satirical ways.

But in the end, side dishes are not meant to be main courses, and by building most of the play around Falstaff, the story—the history—bounces off the comedy, instead of the other way around. The thing is, Falstaff without the real world to bounce against or comment on is like Costello without Abbott. You can’t have misrule without rule, and there is no rule in this play. If Henry IV I was a house of many rooms, this play is a house with just one. It’s like a Twilight Zone episode where every door you think is going to lead you out, leads you back to Falstaff and Eastcheap, and try as you may, you can’t run away from them. Which is why Hal’s “I know you not, old man” speech is not just an attack on Falstaff, it’s an attack on the audience, like it’s our fault for liking Falstaff so much from the first play that he usurped the second one just to make us happy, and now he’s rejected and there’s going to be a war with France. Happy now, Falstaff lovers?

 

Text note: the epilogue, which promises that Falstaff will return in Henry V, is dropped.

King and Country: Henry IV Part 1, or, Hitting All The Right Notes

I never laugh like this with Dad.

 

The ghost of Richard II hovers over this play—literally, since in the opening scene, which begins with a kind of coronation ceremony, the galleries are full of viewers—including one tall fellow with long hair dressed in a white robe in the gallery audience right, and is that a crown on his head? Blink and you’ll miss him, because he leaves almost immediately, but his ghostly physical presence soon becomes a concrete verbal one as Henry’s one-time allies, feeling slighted by the new king’s peremptory treatment of them, start reminding us that Richard was the rightful King, and had his own ideas about his successor, whose name did not rhyme with Rolling Croak.  

The way that opening scene is acted in this production, it’s pretty clear that, to his old supporters, Jasper Britton’s Henry is the political equivalent of an actor who gives great monologue but can’t play the part—the  kind of King who inspires revolt because he lacks the touch of gratitude that his son displays, the kind of man who uses his new position to justify both his superiority and his condescension. And there’s also a hint of insecurity, like all this bullying and temper is masking the granddaddy of inferiority complexes. All of which raises the question that the rest of the play is designed to make us keep asking: what makes a good king? Because that’s what we see for the next two hours: rightful kings, potential kings, would-be kings, and illicit kings, especially a crafty old overweight one. 

(And by the way—during this argument, we get another great crown bit, as Henry, holding it in his hand, uses it to literally push people around until he finally plants it on his head because he’s the fucking King, by God, so treat him like one.) 

As for the other would-be monarch, Anthony Sher’s Falstaff is a drawling, self-satisfied cross between Fagin and Pecksniff (a very Dickensian Falstaff, this one) who milks laughs out of the stoniest lines as he waddles around the stage like a smug well-fed goose who knows that it’s going to be someone else’s neck on the chopping block come Christmas dinner. (That walk is a brilliant touch. He literally goes from side to side in order to move forward, which is a great visual image for a character who can only progress by eternally reinforcing his current position.) Matthew Needham, who pretty much walks away with best Hotspur Ever, IS the privileged fratboy that everybody presumes Prince Hal to be, restlessly pacing when he’s not speaking, punching his wife’s shoulder when he’s being affectionate, never reining in his tongue when he can ride it at a gallop, and absolutely riveting and hilarious and heartbreaking in his divinely brainless simplicity. And Alex Hassell’s first appearance as Hal is a character reveal, as a bed with a pile of linen on it slides into view and out from under those sheets comes the future King of England, and the tavern wench he just slept with; and then the other tavern wench he just slept with. Which is a perfect place to start with this character, because it makes him look so much like a decadent wastrel that, when he gives his first soliloquy, what he’s saying is in sharp contrast to what we’ve seen him doing. 

And that soliloquy is the first of many interactive moments in this series, because when we see Hal alone after his first scene with Falstaff, the lights rise to half in the audience, and suddenly we’re part of the play, and Hal is literally giving US the “I know you all” monologue where he reveals that he’s just pretending to be a scapegrace. This is also usually the moment in the play where the actor playing Hal starts to foreshadow the kingliness of the future Henry V. But not this version. Twenty minutes later, Hal goes and slaps the Lord Chief Justice, which is a moment imported from the earlier version of this script, The Famous Victories of Henry V. The moment jars, and it’s meant to. We’ve just seen Hal tell us he’s not really the juvenile delinquent he pretends to be, and here he is acting like one, which—when you think about it—retroactively makes his soliloquy not a statement of fact, but a statement of purpose. 

So why undercut the soliloquy? Because there are two ways to play Hal—the serious Prince who’s slumming, which runs the risk of making him look like a manipulative prat; and the frivolous spoiled brat who is slowly learning responsibility and control, which runs the risk of making him look like a perpetual frat boy. Because this play is often done as a standalone, most actors choose the first option, so that—by the end of the play—Hal’s journey is complete. But when you do the three Hal plays in sequence, you HAVE to choose the second option, because you’re playing the long game, because you’re building a character whose journey doesn’t conclude at the end of the first play, or even the second, but the third. And that’s what Alex Hassell does throughout the sequence—he doesn’t achieve; he strives. His Hal goes back and forth between selfish and selfless, and Hassell does this wonderful thing whenever he says something Princely—he makes it look like some inner impulse he can’t control is making him speak in a kind of rush that he rides, instead of drives. It’s hard to describe, but the effect is that you get a sense of the Prince inside occasionally taking over Hal’s words and actions, little by little (and play by play) becoming more dominant, more visible, more the Windsor against which Hal of Eastcheap must measure himself. 

Which is why this production is unique along all the other Henry IV 1’s I’ve seen. It’s not played as a novel, but a chapter. It asks the questions but it doesn’t give you the answers. It pits Hal’s two fathers against each other—one a likeable braggart, the other a peevish bully; one a chummy blowhard, the other a vexatious drillmaster—and it never declares a victor. It pits Hal against a Hotspur who, thanks the right direction and a great actor, is just as much a spirit of misrule as Falstaff, the main difference being that Hotspur’s self-centered view of the world will cost other people their lives, while Falstaff’s only costs other people their money, and their pride, if they’re willing to part with them. 

Interesting perception note: The scene where Hal offers to fight Hotspur in single combat is not done as a regal Hal moment but as a Hotspur Hal moment, where the whole thing rushes out of Alex Hassell in what amounts to a single thought and almost a single breath. And Henry’s reaction is to brusquely and physically push Hal back into line. My friend DJ saw this and thought: “He’s protecting Hal because he doesn’t want him to lose his life in a stupid chivalric tradition that makes no sense.” I saw this and thought “He’s shoving Hal back into line because he doesn’t want to share the spotlight with anybody, even his son, and no wonder Hal hangs out with Falstaff.” Which says all you need to know about my relationship with my father, and DJ’s with hers. 

And the end of the play, which I have seen done so many times as a moment of finality and completion, has a definite TO BE CONTINUED feel to it. Nothing gets settled. The battle is won, but nothing has really been decided. You’re left without the usual closure you get when you see this play. Because it is indeed to be continued.

 

Spoiler alert: Too bad it’s continued by Henry IV Part 2.

King And Country: Richard II, or, How To Set The Tone

If you want it, here it is--come and get it.

Plays are verbal music, with the added bonus (or burden) of silence as a note all its own. Most plays begin by setting the tone for what will follow. But when a play begins with a speech from the one guy who is always the wrong note in the chorus, unless you know what everyone else is supposed to be singing, the wrongness of this guy isn’t clear from the start—because you hear it first, you judge everything that you hear, from then on, as either off-key or harmony, and only after a while does the realization creep up on you that the note you started with, the one you took as your starting point the way an orchestra takes concert pitch from the first violin, is wrong—all wrong.  

That’s the challenge of doing Dickie Double. Richard has the first lines in the play. So if you don’t set the tone—if you don’t let the audience know where Richard stands in relation to the rest of the play’s world—then they will spend the first half hour of the play getting their footing, instead of being grounded immediately. If watching a play is like climbing a set of stairs, where you always know where you stand and always trust where you’re going, then the opening of Richard II is like standing on a warped bottom step, subconsciously shifting your balance so that it feels level, and then, as you climb, being forced to adjust your balance until you realize that it’s not the staircase that’s out of whack, but just that first step. It’s incredibly disorienting. (It’s also a great example of how, when a writer cuts to the chase because he trusts that a contemporary audience knows what’s going on without being told, it works brilliantly. But only for that audience. Modern playwrights who lean on 21st Century topical references, take note.)  

This production solves that problem brilliantly.  The audience walks in on a set that shows a casket lying in the middle of an empty church. With the house lights only dimming to half, an old woman enters. In a gallery above, three sopranos begin to sing Latin funeral songs. The old woman drapes herself over the casket, and for the next six minutes, that’s all you get: the casket, the mourner, and the music. At the end of which, after other mourners (mostly male) have drifted in and offered silent support, David Tennant’s Richard bounces onstage, and speaks the first lines of the play. And the audience immediately— thanks to the jarring effect of having this bubble of silence and mourning pricked and needled by Richard’s flighty now-now-now’s—immediately knows that this guy is a total jerk, an opinion which is confirmed by the embarrassed way his Queen and her attendants hang back from him, like they’re saying “We don’t really know this fool, honest.”  

And we’re off and running with the best production of Dickie Double that I have ever seen. That opening colors everything so well that, when John of Gaunt dies, and Richard sails on and snaps up his lands and estates, it offends our decency, because we’ve seen what decency is. Director Gregory Doran does everything so right that he even gets away with dressing up Tennant to look like he’s Christ: long hair, bare feet, floor-length white one-piece robe. In the first half it’s affectation; in the second half it’s a one-to-one correspondence, with Richard’s farewell scene with his Queen played like a brief interruption on the way to Golgotha, and his reveal in prison complete with chains that pull his arms akimbo like he’s being crucified. 

There’s a lot of playfulness with the crown (a motif that will be repeated during the next three plays); there’s a briskness to the staging and the acting that totally trusts the audience as it reassures them; and there’s a lot of nice touches with Aumerle, who has in this version an arc which is not in the original—and a shared-kiss love relationship with Richard. The only real flaw in this precious ointment is Jane Lapotaire, who plays the Duchess of Gloucester, the old woman who opens the play draped over that casket. She has a great many lines during that opening scene, all of which are distinctly audible to the first two rows of the audience and reach the ears of the rest of us with all the clarity of a speakerphone conversation three blocks away. Even the oldsters with their assistive listening devices hear nothing louder than a distant mutter, and boy are they pissed. 

As for Tennant, his Richard is brilliant: he’s flighty, mercurial, self-obsessed, and annoying in the first half; and without changing a single one of his mannerisms or line deliveries, he is serious, focused, objective, and charming in the second half. The same qualities which make him the kind of king who needs replacing make him a great ex-king (which, given the religious angle in which this is presented, is like saying that sometimes it’s the worst priest who makes the best martyr). Richard goes from being vain and disgraceful to being the voice of decency, which is the hallmark of this script. Without changing anything in his main character, Shakespeare makes you see him one way when he’s in power and a completely different way when he isn’t. That’s genius, and this production rises to it.