Henry IV, Part 1
2010: Dominic Dromgoole

This is a production from the Globe Theatre in 2010.

As seems to be the case with most things directed by Dominic Dromgoole, this is maximized for laughs. There is abundant crude mugging and gesticulating, and in general anything that can bring the audience to a guffaw. The shenanigans at the Boar’s Head are so excessive that they at a number of points descend to the status of a riot, without direction or purpose.

I certainly don’t mind the humor in Shakespeare’s plays: some of it is quite witty, and there’s no question that even the most serious of the tragedies are well larded with humor. At the same time, I’m not sure that means that all the plays in the corpus need to be played as burlesque or farce. Cashing in the funny lines for a dose of stage slapstick is almost always a trade down. The Henry IV plays have a two-pronged approach to their narrative as it is, with one of the arcs being primarily comical, though the comedy drains out of them progressively down to the austere ending of Henry IV, Part 2.

The humorous is therefore part and parcel of the play; in keeping with that, probably the star of the whole sequence of both Henry IV, Part 1, and Henry IV, Part 2, is Roger Allam’s outstanding Falstaff. I can’t help thinking he was put up to more gratuitous stage business than was either necessary or desirable by the director, but his performance of the language — the delivery of the actual lines — is outstanding. He plays a bluff and robust Falstaff, very different from, say, Antony Sher’s somewhat whiny version in the 2014 RSC (Doran) performance. The comparison of the two is worth the time.

Unfortunately, I find the Prince Hal in this pair of productions (which carries over to the 2013 Henry V) rather tepid and uninteresting. He seems a regular teenager with a flair for pranks, rather than one with any serious issues or divided loyalties — which the part itself certainly does suggest. A careful reading of the play shows that Henry knows that he’s on borrowed time from the beginning, and that his wayward behavior will sooner or later — probably sooner — have to come to an end. He is crafting and planning his character change from the first act — something that can be shown as curiously self-aware or deeply cynical, but which cannot simply be ignored altogether.

Hotspur here is also reasonably well done — he seems a little less round and belligerent than Trevor White in the 2014 RSC performance, but his ability to do something other than bray at all situations is refreshing.

All in all, this is made on the Dromgoole mold, which apparently holds that all Shakespeare plays are chiefly aimed at the groundlings and that any other virtues have to be sacrificed on the altar of relevance — especially relevance to a taste for the modernly vulgar. It is not, I fear, one of the performances that will last a long time, though it has some stellar performances in it that deserve watching all the same.

Buy Henry IV, Part 1 from Amazon.