Henry IV, Part 1
2012: Richard Eyre
This is the second part of the 2012 BBC Series, The Hollow Crown, which as a whole presents the so-called “First Tetralogy” of history plays. It is preceded (with continuity of casting) by the first part, which covers Richard II, and followed by the third part, which covers Henry IV, Part 2.
The whole series is lavish and gorgeous, with extraordinary production values — cinematography, score, costuming, and sets. Its cast is a veritable who’s who of British acting forces, and the direction is masterful throughout.
The whole series seeks (apparently) to present the story of these plays in a fully cinematic way — which is to say, incorporating those exceptional production values (obviously), but (less obviously) relying on the rhetoric of cinema to carry much of the burden that dialogue and scene structure carry in the original plays. Whereas the BBC Shakespeare series of the late 1970s and early 1980s attempted to bring the theatrical experience to the screen, with a robust and generally pleasing film representation, this is really recasting Shakespeare’s spoken-language-driven plays into the largely visual language of film. We are advised that guards and authorities are approaching the Boar’s Head tavern by a shot of marching feet intermixed with the interior shots of the carousing in the tavern itself. Scenes are broken up and sometimes interleaved in a way that would be impractical for the stage. The impression is immediate, convincing, and quite engaging. One wonders whether its reliance on what is now cinematic convention would have made any sense to the audiences of an earlier day. There is, of course, no way to tell. The story it tells is largely what Shakespeare presents, but it is not told in Shakespeare’s way. The dialogue is all (or almost all) Shakespeare’s, to be sure, but, while I have not done an actual count of lines included or not, I think these versions present probably somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty percent of the play’s lines. This is not merely cutting: it is a massive conversion from one art form to another. That it manages to preserve as much narrative content as it does — almost everything — is a testament to the success with which the translation has been made.
Within this context, the acting is almost uniformly excellent. Jeremy Irons, a lion of British film and stage for four decades, is imposing and severe, but also curiously vulnerable — ill at ease with his kingly role and quite at loose ends with respect to his paternal one. Today’s younger audiences may know him from a variety of things including the voice of Scar in Disney’s The Lion King; those of an older generation may recall his performance as Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited and Charles/Mike in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (both 1981). He also creditably plays Antonio in the 2004 Michael Radford Merchant of Venice.
Tom Hiddleston plays the crown prince Hal with remarkable nuance and a range that makes his riotous life in Eastcheap and his more rooted life at court (including his relationship with his father) credible, and his reconfiguration of his outward character believable, which is difficult. It’s as good a portrayal of Hal as I have seen, though perhaps on a par with David Gwillim’s.
Simon Russell Beale plays Falstaff, and we watch him go from a playful reprobate in the early part of this play to an increasingly unsavory liar and villain by the end and into Henry IV, Part 2. He’s never admirable, really, though he remains a popular favorite among Shakespeare’s characters. (It is interesting that, though he promised more Falstaff in the upcoming Henry V, he was, for whatever reason, unable to deliver: Falstaff’s death takes place offstage and is merely reported by Nell Quickly. The Merry Wives of Windsor may have been an attempt to deliver “some more Falstaff” afterward; one can question whether there would have been anywhere to take the character in Henry V, so thoroughly has be been crushed by the end of Henry IV, Part 2.)
Henry Hotspur, Prince Hal’s notable adversary, is played by Joe Armstrong — the son of Alun Armstrong, who plays his father in the play as well. The family resemblance is visible, and adds a nice note of verisimilitude to the meticulous staging. Hotspur is played with real zest and conviction, conveying an impatient intellect that does not suffer fools gladly. Michelle Dockery plays his understandably anxious wife, who is also clearly his intellectual equal and capable of matching his fire.
Julie Walters (Mollie Weasley from the Harry Potter films) plays Mistress Quickly with style and panache; Maxine Peake (also involved in several Shakespeare productions of — I think — very uneven quality, including one Hamlet and one Midsummer Night’s Dream) plays Doll Tearsheet.
As a way of getting the story of Henry IV, Part 1 in a lush and convincing form, it would be hard to beat this production. At the same time, a good deal of what makes the plays interesting slips quietly through a sieve that has been optimized to preserve and focus upon the surface narrative arc. Many of the discussions embedded in Shakespeare’s plays in general, and in the history plays in particular (e.g., the meditations on kinship, honor, and so on) are just not there. Shakespeare in almost all his plays articulates a vision of people who act on the basis of thought, and he weaves deftly from the abstract working out of ideas to their enactment and the ramifications thereof. The speeches here are cut ruthlessly, largely along those lines: the action-bits are preserved and the speculative bits are not. A speech of forty lines might be boiled down to four. This also has the effect of short-circuiting some of Shakespeare’s uniquely adroit wordplay, by leaving parts of paired ideas unattached. I can recommend these productions heartily, but also advisedly. What emerges here is not quite Shakespeare any longer. Parents or teachers may also want to know that they do contain some moderate nudity.
Bardolph: Tom Georgeson
Baron’s Army Soldier: Jimi James (uncredited)
Blunt: Jolyon Coy
Bracy: Conrad Asquith
Clarence: Matthew Tennyson
Coleville: Dominic Rowan
Doll Tearsheet: Maxine Peake
Douglas: Stephen McCole
Drawer: Drew Dillon
Falstaff: Simon Russell Beale
Francis: John Heffernan
Glendower: Robert Pugh
Gloucester: Will Attenborough
Henry IV: Jeremy Irons
Hercules the Blacksmith: Julian Seager (uncredited)
Hotspur’s Servant: Jim Bywater
Hotspur: Joe Armstrong
Kate Percy: Michelle Dockery
Lady Mortimer: Alex Clatworthy
Lancaster: Henry Faber
Lawyer (uncredited): Greg Bennett
Mistress Quickly: Julie Walters
Mortimer: Harry Lloyd
Nobleman in Sauna: John Duggan (uncredited)
Northumberland: Alun Armstrong
Peto: Ian Conningham
Poins: David Dawson
Prince Hal: Tom Hiddleston
Rebel soldier: Toby Sebastian (uncredited)
Rebel Swordsman: Pete Buzzsaw Holland (uncredited)
Royal Swordsman: Richard Dalton (uncredited)
Sheriff: John Ashton
Street Servant: Jimm Stark (uncredited)
Tandy: Mark Tandy
Traveller: David Beames
Westmoreland: James Laurenson
Worcester: David Hayman
Buy the BBC series The Hollow Crown at Amazon. This is the first of two series, containing Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2, and Henry V.