review of 1 and 2 Henry IV, dir. Barbara Gaines, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 6/18/06
Okay, so here it is. I have been geeking out about going to see this production for ages and ages (I found a post from a year ago a while back where I squeed about it, having seen the CST 2005-06 schedule), and I am probably just going to ramble a lot because I both loved it and had some things I have quibbles with, which is an inducement to rambling (my review of the Globe Richard II is like that as well), and also I had never seen both parts continuously onstage before. I imagine I will have a lot to say (I mean, the damn thing kept me awake for hours thinking about it the night I saw it, although I was operating on three hours of sleep from the night before). So let's go...
Okay, then. In summing up five hours of Henry IV it's hard to know where to start! It might seem, incidentally, that five hours of Henry IV would be a lot, but it didn't feel like a long time at all (granted, there was an hour break between parts). The whole thing just flew by -- even though we were sitting in the very top balcony off to the side and had to lean over the rail to see properly (this was mitigated when the people sitting next to us left at intermission during part two, so that I could actually lean forward without blocking their view, although it was rather silly of them to sit through three quarters of the thing and then miss the ending! Especially since the ending of 2H4 is so, so good). anomilygrace and I both agreed that we would have been totally up for sitting through Henry V after that -- after all, when the second part ended it was only eight o'clock, plenty of time for another play.
When we left the theater at the end of part two, rather dazzled by the whole thing and facing an incipient emotional hangover, we overheard a young woman remarking "Why isn't all Shakespeare that good?" and had a major giggle fit. Perhaps she will become a mad histories-lover: that's what happpened to me as a result of Henry IV exposure at a very young age.
This isn't to say I don't have quibbles here and there, of course, but I will get to them over the course of my ramblings. By and large, the general slant of the production worked for me: though I have some arguments with some of the specific details, the outline was very good. I think the production did a good job striking a balance between cynicism and...I don't know, sincerity: we got a good look at both the play's skepticism and its heart. Mostly. More on that shortly.
As in all productions of Henry IV, the interpretive direction of the play is basically determined by Prince Hal. I was, at first, not thrilled with Jeffrey Carlson's reading of the role, and I will still say that his take on the character isn't necessarily how I'd do it, but he grew on me (otherwise, I doubt I would have liked the production quite as much as I did). Carlson's Hal is not especially torn between two lives; in the first half of part one he is constantly twitchy and uncomfortable during the tavern scenes, and has pretty clearly inherited King Henry's total lack of a sense of humor. His soliloquy at the end of the first scene was pervaded by an almost palpable feeling of disgust at the sort of people he's associating with, and that he's pretending to be; one does not have the impression that this Hal will find it particularly difficult to turn away Falstaff. And at first, this interp grated a bit -- particularly since Carlson chose to convey it by general twitchiness, the occasional bit of bellowing, and forays into emo air-punching as if to demonstrate that his manpain could not be properly contained (he even did this a couple of times in his first confrontation with his father, which annoyed me). I suppose that as an interp the disgust and perhaps even the emo manrage is perfectly valid, but it was not quite clicking with me: by intermission of part one, I was more than ready to punch him.
However, after the first big Henry-Hal scene, once Hal promises to straighten up and fly right and begins to visibly do so, things improved immensely. You really have the sense, in this production, that Hal feels more like his real self when he's doing Princely Stuff -- as Emily put it in her notes on the production, it almost felt like a dislocated shoulder being popped back into place. It's like he's going "Okay, this is the real me. I am really Prince Harry and this 'Hal' person is someone I don't like very much but put on for the sake of PR. He isn't really me." He even seemed more at ease physically, no more twitchiness or air-punching. (Also, he slicked back his hair and donned the head-to-toe black leather that everyone at Henry's court wore, and consequently went from looking sort of punk and vaguely Anakin-like to being OMGHOT. All productions should have Prince Hal in leather pants, because, YUM.)
Now, I shall be upfront about the whole thing and point out that this is not really my preferred take on the role: I like it best when Hal, though knowing that he's going to have to ditch his tavern buddies, is on some level regretful about it. Granted this is partly a matter of preference: I sort of want Hal to be more than a manipulative jerkwad, I want there to be some genuine affection there, because, dammit, if he's going to be a big famous king, he had bloody well better suffer for it, and, I don't know, I kind of want to like Hal, maybe because we spend so much time following his character arc, and it's harder to do that when he's all "I'll dump these creepy losers first chance I get." I think too that it's generally more dramatically interesting if he has to struggle a bit, if his Big Grand Scheme ends up being more than he is really prepared to deal with. I admit I may be overly sentimental about this. In this production, Hal is better disposed to slumming it in part two, because it beats the alternative -- he knows he may well be king soon (in his first appearance in 2H4 he's worried about his father's illness), and he does not want to deal with it, so goes back to the tavern to hide from impending fate. But you definitely do not have too much of a sense that he's particularly conflicted about what he's going to do to his friends.
Which isn't to say that his relationship to Falstaff is simply one of unmitigated if disguised disgust, fortunately; this production does lend it some interesting shades (again, I doubt I would have liked it as much as I did otherwise). Our best look at how complicated Hal and Falstaff's relationship is, actually, the moment late in the first part where Hal finds the supposedly dead Falstaff on the battlefield. Hal actually does get a bit choked up when he bids poor Jack farewell, and so forth: there's a belated bit of affection that breaks through, albeit in conjunction with almost a sense of relief on Hal's part that the whole thing is out of his hands now, and he can let himself feel grief for the apparent death of Falstaff because he no longer has to keep himself emotionally distant in preparation for the impending breakup. So maybe he's fonder of Falstaff than he'd ever let on to himself. (Now that I think of it, the mix of emotions is very much a parallel to the moment in part two where Hal thinks that King Henry has died -- and clearly I am a total dope for not having picked up on that particular echo before! And HOW MANY times have I read these plays? *facepalm* -- they're both moments that at the same time establish resolution and make resolution apparently impossible, since Hal appears at different times to have lost both of his father figures before he can really work through his issues, but then he hasn't and that creates new issues -- the scenes mirror each other in all sorts of rather freaky ways. NB: think about this more.)
By and large the approach this production takes means that the relationship between Hal and Henry is pretty movingly dealt with (on which more later), but the relationship between Hal and Falstaff doesn't always click, and so the moments of affection Falstaff shows for Hal are sort of pathetic. although Greg Vinkler stressed the snark and venality over the pathos for a lot of it. After the play Emily and I disagreed about whether Falstaff really loves Hal (I had said that this is his great redeeming quality) or is just in it for the advancement (as my last post on this matter indicated, I am pro-Falstaff and she is anti-Falstaff ;) ) but a lot of the time this production stresses the latter (I still think it comes out on the side of the former, because the text does) -- this Falstaff doesn't let the mask slip that often. Though you do get some interesting twists on the relationship especially early on, when it's established; it veers sort of oddly between vaguely parental (a couple of times in their first scene Hal sort of reclines on Falstaff's belly, which in retrospect, given the end of the scene and Hal's general disgust at the whole situation, is a bit creepy) and rather homoerotic (the "before I knew thee, Hal, I knew nothing" dialogue was done with the two of them lying side by side on their backs under a duvet, with Hal mouthing Falstaff's words and mimicking his hand gestures as though they had had this mock-argument a thousand times. It was totally an old-married-couple thing -- oh, quit objecting, it works if you average out their approximate ages). And then the play-within-a-play scene in the tavern, as it generally is, was nicely emblematic -- there's this brief stunned moment after Hal says "I do, I will" (which Carlson didn't actually deliver as harshly as I expected), where everybody is sort of thrown for a loop and then starts to laugh nervously, as if to say "Oh, of course he didn't really mean it!" I go back and forth about whether I liked that; I think I do, though.
I don't know, I always have a hard time figuring out what to say about Falstaffs (Falstaves?) -- I think I say this every time I review a production of Henry IV. Vinkler's performance in the more upbeat sections was of a piece with his reading of the role in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and so generally pretty good; he had (as far as I can tell from way the hell off to the side in the upper balcony) a nice rapport with the audience, which is a must in a Falstaff. In general I thought Vinkler's performance was stronger in part two -- but I often do with Falstaffs because, and I always say this in reviews, too, I apparently like my Falstaffs masochistic and vulnerable, so this is another personal-preference thing. (It is entirely possible that most of my preferences for performances of Henry IV can be expressed as "I like making all the characters suffer.") I especially rather liked him in that scene with Doll Tearsheet, which is such a nicely wistful little scene -- the one tiny bit that sticks with me most is his line "I am old... [pause] I am old," which I liked not just because it harks back to Falstaff's conversation with the Lord Chief Justice where Falstaff winds up the LCJ by referring to himself as a young man ("the truth is, I am only old in judgment and understanding"), but because so much of 2H4 has to do with everyone's inability to maintain their illusions, and I like seeing that acknowledged. (Which is why, as I said before, the way they handled Hal's "I do, I will" works for me after all -- Falstaff and everyone decide denial is the best way to cope.) And the final rejection scene was very effective, or at least it made me wibble.
And now, to change directions a bit: as King Henry David Lively gave a fantastic performance -- I was briefly nervous even though I had been led to expect good things by the reviews because his headshot made him look unnervingly Wallace Shawn-like, but thankfully he did not actually resemble Wallace Shawn in the play, being bewigged and bearded and all, nor, even more thankfully, did he sound like Wallace Shawn (indeed, he has a fabulous deep gravelly voice). Lively's Henry was aggressive yet tormented: the production laid a lot of stress on how he was racked with guilt over his usurpation. Part one, in fact, opens with him in bed, with the crown on his pillow as established in part two -- we hear in voiceover screams, battle noises, sounds of general unpleasantness, and then he sits bolt upright screaming, and the court rushes in and he starts in on his opening speech. And then at the end of the first part, after he spoke the final lines, he stepped forward, spotlighted in red, and as the lights went down the general unpleasantness noises started up again and he kind of clutched at his temples. So lots of angst, on which see previous parenthetical about my preferences for making everybody suffer! I am either a good reader of this play or a fundamentally mean person or both. They also, btw, did a good job skanking him up in part two when Henry is dying, and he spent a lot of his scenes hacking up blood, which was fairly effective and not quite as gross as Jon Finch's leprosy sores in the BBC version. But it was also a very steely performance (and hey, what with the aforementioned black leather, he even looked pretty badass). And his scenes opposite Hal were downright harrowing -- indeed, I thought he was a bit too physical with Hal in the first one, shoving him around a bit (I forget exactly which part, but it was right before he starts in about Richard), which I felt was redundant: after all, he's already administering a first-rate verbal flaying (for crying out loud, he calls Hal "my nearest and dearest enemy"). I really liked the second one, although I always do -- in this one the image that stays with me is Hal taking his father's hand and vowing that "this from thee / Will I to mine leave, as 'tis left to me." *wibbles* And Lively's delivery of "Thy life did manifest thou loved'st me not" -- which, okay, is another one of those moments in the play that always kicks me in the gut, anyway.
The last of the really major performances I have to remark on is John Douglas Thompson's Hotspur, whom I liked a whole lot -- he was a strong and quite funny Hotspur, which I like. Comparisons may be odious but I don't understand why all the reviews of Stratford's 1H4 come down hard on Adam O'Byrne for also being a funny Hotspur, because Hotspur is a total goofball, albeit one with a tragic side ultimately; perhaps in that production the humor was badly executed, but it worked here -- granted it wasn't always emphasized, and he was still a somewhat less socially-maladjusted Hotspur than a few others I have seen (Andrew Jarvis, I am looking in your direction). I giggled quite a bit, though, at things like his rushing upstage to yell offstage at "this ingrate and cankered...BOLINGBROKE!" Thompson's strongest scene I think was probably the first scene between Hotspur and Lady Percy, and I do not just say this because he spent the whole scene with no shirt on and this was way hot, although it was. But Thompson and Kate Fry as Lady P struck a terrific balance between playfulness and anxiety: Hotspur comes out with "I love thee not, Kate!" when she's being all silly and jumping on him threatening to break his little finger, and he's all wound up about the rebellion anyway so he gets impatient and pissy, and then feels bad about it right away. (And then in the scene chez Glendower they are ridiculously cute.) And the Hal/Hotspur fight scene was very well-done, if not quite as long and knock-down-drag-out as I'd want it to be. Actually it was quite similar to the ESC's, particularly in the way the death of Hotspur was managed: Hal loses his sword, is at Hotspur's mercy, freaks out (or pretends to), and Hotspur gives him back his sword, after which Hal gets the drop on him from behind and kills him. In this one there was eye-gouging and everything, probably taking a cue from Hal's "these favors shall hide thy mangled face" line. Gah.
The supporting cast was on the whole very strong: standouts for me included Kate Fry (as already mentioned) as Lady Percy (even if she was a teeny bit OTT when letting Northumberland have it in part two), Mike Nussbaum as Justice Shallow (whose introductory scene in this one -- "death, as the psalmist saith, is certain; all shall die" -- tugged at my heartstrings rather effectively), Ross Lehman as an amusingly campy Rumor, and Lusia Strus as a rather scary and Janeway-voiced Mistress Quickly (hey, sounding like Janeway is a lot more palatable than the shrillness to which most Quicklies fall prey!) John Reeger as the Archbishop of York was generally pretty good (except that I dislike that he went for a knife when arrested for high treason; that didn't seem to fit the scene), although he was fairly cringeworthy as Glendower.
The one really serious objection I have to the production is the way the text got handled on occasion. I would really like to have a long and stern chat with their dramaturg: this is not just a complaint that they cut some of my favorite bits, although they did, but I grant that that's a pitfall of knowing these plays entirely too well (and being entirely too fond of all the random Richard II refs in part two especially); however, on occasion cuts were made that didn't really make grammatical sense, and that is Not Cool. This happened, actually, in the very first speech and starting off on a WTF note was not much fun. Hence, this earns a Wag of the Finger from me. (They do, however, win some points back for severe trimming of the recruiting of soldiers scene in part two, because while I understand the purpose of that scene it is really hard not to make it drag, and I didn't miss it much. Though they lose points for reducing the number of times we hear recountings of the circumstances of Henry IV's achievement of the throne; I know there are a lot of them, but the very fact of their repetition is significant.)
Here are some miscellaneous comments that may be of interest but which I no longer have the energy to structure:
The production design was by and large pretty spare, probably for touring purposes. The costuming was...interesting. Not really period, but sort of evocative of it; what we ended up getting was Team Leather (the court) vs. Team Furry (the rebels). The leather costumes were really cool, as is evinced by the fact that this is about the third time I have remarked on them. Also, everybody had completely insane amounts of hair -- from the fairly restrained straight shoulder-length hair of the court to the much wilder manes of the Percies (except for Hotspur, who was completely bald) to Falstaff's weird Gimliesque 'do (and whatever the hell it was the tavern wenches had on their heads). The sartorial low-point, however, was that Glendower combined the costume of Tim the Enchanter with the hair of the gaudiest, glammest of '80s hair bands. I mean, it was sparkly. And then when Lady Mortimer and Lady Percy came onstage, they were accompanied by the extra-textual Lady Glendower and Countess of Worcester, and Lady G had exactly the same hair, except not sparkly. It was totally mad. Their daughter had thankfully not inherited her parents' fashion sense.
Oh, speaking of Glendower, at one point he attempted to blast Hotspur with magic -- instead of rhetorical fireworks. I think it was after Hotspur's "will they come when you do call for them" line? Anyway I disliked it, though Hotspur's brushing himself off and continuing to snark amused me.
Scott "That Guy Who Played the Original Voyager First Officer Who Got Killed in the Pilot Episode" Jaeck, who has been in every single play I've ever seen at CST (I'm not sure it'd really be CST for me without him), played Westmoreland (who in this production got a lot of the dialogue originally belonging to various other random noblemen), and, between the black costumes and the long white hair they'd given him, looked frighteningly like Lucius Malfoy (which I would not have thought of except Emily thoughtfully remarked upon it at one point during part two ;) ). Though he did not have a pimp cane. He really should have.
There was a rather odd visual motif of people getting into and out of bed: apart from King Henry's entirely canonical insomnia there was Hal and Falstaff in 1H4 1.2, Lady Percy in her first scene in 1H4, and then Hal and Poins on their first appearance in 2H4, and I may be missing someone. We talked a bit afterwards about what this might signify other than "we have a big table/bed/platform thing center stage and are damn well going to use it," and thought it might have something to do with some kind of national restlessness? As well as an "As the king goes, so goes the realm" thing.
In re: Hal and Poins, incidentally, I had never noticed the implications of Falstaff's speech in part two about why Hal keeps Poins around: "Because their legs are both of a bigness, and a' plays at quoits well, and eats conger and fennel, and drinks off candles' ends for flap-dragons, and rides the wild-mare with the boys..." Ahem. Conger, btw, = eel. I am sure the metaphorical applications need not be spelled out. ;)
Rumor! OMG this was so cool. They started out part two with Rumor wandering about gossiping with the audience, and then he comes onto the stage and starts his speech very conversationally. Hal and Hotspur enter, heavily backlit, and then when Rumor says
I run before King Harry's victory;
Who in a bloody field by Shrewsbury
Hath beaten down young Hotspur and his troops,
Quenching the flame of bold rebellion
Even with the rebel's blood
they re-enact the very end of their fight to the death from the previous play. And then Rumor continues: "But what mean I to speak so true at first?" Rewind! "My office is / To noise abroad that Harry Monmouth fell / Under the wrath of noble Hotspur's sword..." And then we get a replay of the fight except this time Hotspur wins. Henry and Douglas enter upstage and when Rumor says "...and that the King before the Douglas' rage / Stooped his anointed head as low as death" they too fight -- I think, in fact, it's actually the blocking from Douglas' killing of Blunt who is decoying for the King, but I might be wrong -- and they freeze mid-disembowelment. It was so cool and I was pleased to see it because I've always thought that'd be a great way to do that bit.
This production was very fond of maps. Which I am totally down with: after all, it features one of the only two instances in Shakespeare where a map is explicitly called for (the other being King Lear 1.1). In both of these, Britain as an entity becomes visible to the audience right when it is on the point of being fragmented. So the recurrence of the image -- besides the canonical one at the meeting of the rebels, there was a scene that started with Henry and his council examining a map and drawing up battle plans, and then the rebels in part two did the same in their first scene -- is a Good Thing. That said, I would like to counsel all aspiring directors to remember that if they wish or need to have maps onstage, that if you have an upper balcony that hangs nearly right over the stage, they will be visible to the people seated there and thus should actually depict what they are supposed to, or else said people will be all distracted by the fact that a map ostensibly of England says "AGINCOURT" on it.
The map thing, btw, was put to rather nifty use at the end: the newly-crowned Henry V and his brothers and courtiers come onstage on the giant piece of scaffolding across the back wall, so that Henry delivers the banishment of Falstaff from a considerable height. He turns his back afterwards instead of exiting, and then John of Lancaster and the Lord Chief Justice come onto the mainstage and have Falstaff and his friends removed (Falstaff gets clubbed in the gut by one of the officers, which made me cringe a lot) and then have their horrible smug little conversation ("I like this fair proceeding of the King's," Prince John says. Oh, I always want to throttle him at that point!) and exit. Then Hal and everybody on the scaffolding turns back around and unrolls a huge map of France on which Agincourt and Harfleur are prominently marked. The map is flooded with red backlighting and we fade to black on the sounds of battle and screaming. So we end with a parallel drawn between Henry IV's civil wars and Henry V's foreign wars, which fundamentally are all the same in that they're all about killing people really. For how can they be charitably disposed of anything when blood is their argument? It's quite a dark ending, and, I thought, an effective one.
*wipes sweat from forehead* And that, I think, is enough, although if I think of anything more I shall have to post it; I feel like I missed something or other. But if you guys are still with me after all of that, many props to you! Clearly this production got me all thinky and stuff.
Okay, then. In summing up five hours of Henry IV it's hard to know where to start! It might seem, incidentally, that five hours of Henry IV would be a lot, but it didn't feel like a long time at all (granted, there was an hour break between parts). The whole thing just flew by -- even though we were sitting in the very top balcony off to the side and had to lean over the rail to see properly (this was mitigated when the people sitting next to us left at intermission during part two, so that I could actually lean forward without blocking their view, although it was rather silly of them to sit through three quarters of the thing and then miss the ending! Especially since the ending of 2H4 is so, so good). anomilygrace and I both agreed that we would have been totally up for sitting through Henry V after that -- after all, when the second part ended it was only eight o'clock, plenty of time for another play.
When we left the theater at the end of part two, rather dazzled by the whole thing and facing an incipient emotional hangover, we overheard a young woman remarking "Why isn't all Shakespeare that good?" and had a major giggle fit. Perhaps she will become a mad histories-lover: that's what happpened to me as a result of Henry IV exposure at a very young age.
This isn't to say I don't have quibbles here and there, of course, but I will get to them over the course of my ramblings. By and large, the general slant of the production worked for me: though I have some arguments with some of the specific details, the outline was very good. I think the production did a good job striking a balance between cynicism and...I don't know, sincerity: we got a good look at both the play's skepticism and its heart. Mostly. More on that shortly.
As in all productions of Henry IV, the interpretive direction of the play is basically determined by Prince Hal. I was, at first, not thrilled with Jeffrey Carlson's reading of the role, and I will still say that his take on the character isn't necessarily how I'd do it, but he grew on me (otherwise, I doubt I would have liked the production quite as much as I did). Carlson's Hal is not especially torn between two lives; in the first half of part one he is constantly twitchy and uncomfortable during the tavern scenes, and has pretty clearly inherited King Henry's total lack of a sense of humor. His soliloquy at the end of the first scene was pervaded by an almost palpable feeling of disgust at the sort of people he's associating with, and that he's pretending to be; one does not have the impression that this Hal will find it particularly difficult to turn away Falstaff. And at first, this interp grated a bit -- particularly since Carlson chose to convey it by general twitchiness, the occasional bit of bellowing, and forays into emo air-punching as if to demonstrate that his manpain could not be properly contained (he even did this a couple of times in his first confrontation with his father, which annoyed me). I suppose that as an interp the disgust and perhaps even the emo manrage is perfectly valid, but it was not quite clicking with me: by intermission of part one, I was more than ready to punch him.
However, after the first big Henry-Hal scene, once Hal promises to straighten up and fly right and begins to visibly do so, things improved immensely. You really have the sense, in this production, that Hal feels more like his real self when he's doing Princely Stuff -- as Emily put it in her notes on the production, it almost felt like a dislocated shoulder being popped back into place. It's like he's going "Okay, this is the real me. I am really Prince Harry and this 'Hal' person is someone I don't like very much but put on for the sake of PR. He isn't really me." He even seemed more at ease physically, no more twitchiness or air-punching. (Also, he slicked back his hair and donned the head-to-toe black leather that everyone at Henry's court wore, and consequently went from looking sort of punk and vaguely Anakin-like to being OMGHOT. All productions should have Prince Hal in leather pants, because, YUM.)
Now, I shall be upfront about the whole thing and point out that this is not really my preferred take on the role: I like it best when Hal, though knowing that he's going to have to ditch his tavern buddies, is on some level regretful about it. Granted this is partly a matter of preference: I sort of want Hal to be more than a manipulative jerkwad, I want there to be some genuine affection there, because, dammit, if he's going to be a big famous king, he had bloody well better suffer for it, and, I don't know, I kind of want to like Hal, maybe because we spend so much time following his character arc, and it's harder to do that when he's all "I'll dump these creepy losers first chance I get." I think too that it's generally more dramatically interesting if he has to struggle a bit, if his Big Grand Scheme ends up being more than he is really prepared to deal with. I admit I may be overly sentimental about this. In this production, Hal is better disposed to slumming it in part two, because it beats the alternative -- he knows he may well be king soon (in his first appearance in 2H4 he's worried about his father's illness), and he does not want to deal with it, so goes back to the tavern to hide from impending fate. But you definitely do not have too much of a sense that he's particularly conflicted about what he's going to do to his friends.
Which isn't to say that his relationship to Falstaff is simply one of unmitigated if disguised disgust, fortunately; this production does lend it some interesting shades (again, I doubt I would have liked it as much as I did otherwise). Our best look at how complicated Hal and Falstaff's relationship is, actually, the moment late in the first part where Hal finds the supposedly dead Falstaff on the battlefield. Hal actually does get a bit choked up when he bids poor Jack farewell, and so forth: there's a belated bit of affection that breaks through, albeit in conjunction with almost a sense of relief on Hal's part that the whole thing is out of his hands now, and he can let himself feel grief for the apparent death of Falstaff because he no longer has to keep himself emotionally distant in preparation for the impending breakup. So maybe he's fonder of Falstaff than he'd ever let on to himself. (Now that I think of it, the mix of emotions is very much a parallel to the moment in part two where Hal thinks that King Henry has died -- and clearly I am a total dope for not having picked up on that particular echo before! And HOW MANY times have I read these plays? *facepalm* -- they're both moments that at the same time establish resolution and make resolution apparently impossible, since Hal appears at different times to have lost both of his father figures before he can really work through his issues, but then he hasn't and that creates new issues -- the scenes mirror each other in all sorts of rather freaky ways. NB: think about this more.)
By and large the approach this production takes means that the relationship between Hal and Henry is pretty movingly dealt with (on which more later), but the relationship between Hal and Falstaff doesn't always click, and so the moments of affection Falstaff shows for Hal are sort of pathetic. although Greg Vinkler stressed the snark and venality over the pathos for a lot of it. After the play Emily and I disagreed about whether Falstaff really loves Hal (I had said that this is his great redeeming quality) or is just in it for the advancement (as my last post on this matter indicated, I am pro-Falstaff and she is anti-Falstaff ;) ) but a lot of the time this production stresses the latter (I still think it comes out on the side of the former, because the text does) -- this Falstaff doesn't let the mask slip that often. Though you do get some interesting twists on the relationship especially early on, when it's established; it veers sort of oddly between vaguely parental (a couple of times in their first scene Hal sort of reclines on Falstaff's belly, which in retrospect, given the end of the scene and Hal's general disgust at the whole situation, is a bit creepy) and rather homoerotic (the "before I knew thee, Hal, I knew nothing" dialogue was done with the two of them lying side by side on their backs under a duvet, with Hal mouthing Falstaff's words and mimicking his hand gestures as though they had had this mock-argument a thousand times. It was totally an old-married-couple thing -- oh, quit objecting, it works if you average out their approximate ages). And then the play-within-a-play scene in the tavern, as it generally is, was nicely emblematic -- there's this brief stunned moment after Hal says "I do, I will" (which Carlson didn't actually deliver as harshly as I expected), where everybody is sort of thrown for a loop and then starts to laugh nervously, as if to say "Oh, of course he didn't really mean it!" I go back and forth about whether I liked that; I think I do, though.
I don't know, I always have a hard time figuring out what to say about Falstaffs (Falstaves?) -- I think I say this every time I review a production of Henry IV. Vinkler's performance in the more upbeat sections was of a piece with his reading of the role in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and so generally pretty good; he had (as far as I can tell from way the hell off to the side in the upper balcony) a nice rapport with the audience, which is a must in a Falstaff. In general I thought Vinkler's performance was stronger in part two -- but I often do with Falstaffs because, and I always say this in reviews, too, I apparently like my Falstaffs masochistic and vulnerable, so this is another personal-preference thing. (It is entirely possible that most of my preferences for performances of Henry IV can be expressed as "I like making all the characters suffer.") I especially rather liked him in that scene with Doll Tearsheet, which is such a nicely wistful little scene -- the one tiny bit that sticks with me most is his line "I am old... [pause] I am old," which I liked not just because it harks back to Falstaff's conversation with the Lord Chief Justice where Falstaff winds up the LCJ by referring to himself as a young man ("the truth is, I am only old in judgment and understanding"), but because so much of 2H4 has to do with everyone's inability to maintain their illusions, and I like seeing that acknowledged. (Which is why, as I said before, the way they handled Hal's "I do, I will" works for me after all -- Falstaff and everyone decide denial is the best way to cope.) And the final rejection scene was very effective, or at least it made me wibble.
And now, to change directions a bit: as King Henry David Lively gave a fantastic performance -- I was briefly nervous even though I had been led to expect good things by the reviews because his headshot made him look unnervingly Wallace Shawn-like, but thankfully he did not actually resemble Wallace Shawn in the play, being bewigged and bearded and all, nor, even more thankfully, did he sound like Wallace Shawn (indeed, he has a fabulous deep gravelly voice). Lively's Henry was aggressive yet tormented: the production laid a lot of stress on how he was racked with guilt over his usurpation. Part one, in fact, opens with him in bed, with the crown on his pillow as established in part two -- we hear in voiceover screams, battle noises, sounds of general unpleasantness, and then he sits bolt upright screaming, and the court rushes in and he starts in on his opening speech. And then at the end of the first part, after he spoke the final lines, he stepped forward, spotlighted in red, and as the lights went down the general unpleasantness noises started up again and he kind of clutched at his temples. So lots of angst, on which see previous parenthetical about my preferences for making everybody suffer! I am either a good reader of this play or a fundamentally mean person or both. They also, btw, did a good job skanking him up in part two when Henry is dying, and he spent a lot of his scenes hacking up blood, which was fairly effective and not quite as gross as Jon Finch's leprosy sores in the BBC version. But it was also a very steely performance (and hey, what with the aforementioned black leather, he even looked pretty badass). And his scenes opposite Hal were downright harrowing -- indeed, I thought he was a bit too physical with Hal in the first one, shoving him around a bit (I forget exactly which part, but it was right before he starts in about Richard), which I felt was redundant: after all, he's already administering a first-rate verbal flaying (for crying out loud, he calls Hal "my nearest and dearest enemy"). I really liked the second one, although I always do -- in this one the image that stays with me is Hal taking his father's hand and vowing that "this from thee / Will I to mine leave, as 'tis left to me." *wibbles* And Lively's delivery of "Thy life did manifest thou loved'st me not" -- which, okay, is another one of those moments in the play that always kicks me in the gut, anyway.
The last of the really major performances I have to remark on is John Douglas Thompson's Hotspur, whom I liked a whole lot -- he was a strong and quite funny Hotspur, which I like. Comparisons may be odious but I don't understand why all the reviews of Stratford's 1H4 come down hard on Adam O'Byrne for also being a funny Hotspur, because Hotspur is a total goofball, albeit one with a tragic side ultimately; perhaps in that production the humor was badly executed, but it worked here -- granted it wasn't always emphasized, and he was still a somewhat less socially-maladjusted Hotspur than a few others I have seen (Andrew Jarvis, I am looking in your direction). I giggled quite a bit, though, at things like his rushing upstage to yell offstage at "this ingrate and cankered...BOLINGBROKE!" Thompson's strongest scene I think was probably the first scene between Hotspur and Lady Percy, and I do not just say this because he spent the whole scene with no shirt on and this was way hot, although it was. But Thompson and Kate Fry as Lady P struck a terrific balance between playfulness and anxiety: Hotspur comes out with "I love thee not, Kate!" when she's being all silly and jumping on him threatening to break his little finger, and he's all wound up about the rebellion anyway so he gets impatient and pissy, and then feels bad about it right away. (And then in the scene chez Glendower they are ridiculously cute.) And the Hal/Hotspur fight scene was very well-done, if not quite as long and knock-down-drag-out as I'd want it to be. Actually it was quite similar to the ESC's, particularly in the way the death of Hotspur was managed: Hal loses his sword, is at Hotspur's mercy, freaks out (or pretends to), and Hotspur gives him back his sword, after which Hal gets the drop on him from behind and kills him. In this one there was eye-gouging and everything, probably taking a cue from Hal's "these favors shall hide thy mangled face" line. Gah.
The supporting cast was on the whole very strong: standouts for me included Kate Fry (as already mentioned) as Lady Percy (even if she was a teeny bit OTT when letting Northumberland have it in part two), Mike Nussbaum as Justice Shallow (whose introductory scene in this one -- "death, as the psalmist saith, is certain; all shall die" -- tugged at my heartstrings rather effectively), Ross Lehman as an amusingly campy Rumor, and Lusia Strus as a rather scary and Janeway-voiced Mistress Quickly (hey, sounding like Janeway is a lot more palatable than the shrillness to which most Quicklies fall prey!) John Reeger as the Archbishop of York was generally pretty good (except that I dislike that he went for a knife when arrested for high treason; that didn't seem to fit the scene), although he was fairly cringeworthy as Glendower.
The one really serious objection I have to the production is the way the text got handled on occasion. I would really like to have a long and stern chat with their dramaturg: this is not just a complaint that they cut some of my favorite bits, although they did, but I grant that that's a pitfall of knowing these plays entirely too well (and being entirely too fond of all the random Richard II refs in part two especially); however, on occasion cuts were made that didn't really make grammatical sense, and that is Not Cool. This happened, actually, in the very first speech and starting off on a WTF note was not much fun. Hence, this earns a Wag of the Finger from me. (They do, however, win some points back for severe trimming of the recruiting of soldiers scene in part two, because while I understand the purpose of that scene it is really hard not to make it drag, and I didn't miss it much. Though they lose points for reducing the number of times we hear recountings of the circumstances of Henry IV's achievement of the throne; I know there are a lot of them, but the very fact of their repetition is significant.)
Here are some miscellaneous comments that may be of interest but which I no longer have the energy to structure:
The production design was by and large pretty spare, probably for touring purposes. The costuming was...interesting. Not really period, but sort of evocative of it; what we ended up getting was Team Leather (the court) vs. Team Furry (the rebels). The leather costumes were really cool, as is evinced by the fact that this is about the third time I have remarked on them. Also, everybody had completely insane amounts of hair -- from the fairly restrained straight shoulder-length hair of the court to the much wilder manes of the Percies (except for Hotspur, who was completely bald) to Falstaff's weird Gimliesque 'do (and whatever the hell it was the tavern wenches had on their heads). The sartorial low-point, however, was that Glendower combined the costume of Tim the Enchanter with the hair of the gaudiest, glammest of '80s hair bands. I mean, it was sparkly. And then when Lady Mortimer and Lady Percy came onstage, they were accompanied by the extra-textual Lady Glendower and Countess of Worcester, and Lady G had exactly the same hair, except not sparkly. It was totally mad. Their daughter had thankfully not inherited her parents' fashion sense.
Oh, speaking of Glendower, at one point he attempted to blast Hotspur with magic -- instead of rhetorical fireworks. I think it was after Hotspur's "will they come when you do call for them" line? Anyway I disliked it, though Hotspur's brushing himself off and continuing to snark amused me.
Scott "That Guy Who Played the Original Voyager First Officer Who Got Killed in the Pilot Episode" Jaeck, who has been in every single play I've ever seen at CST (I'm not sure it'd really be CST for me without him), played Westmoreland (who in this production got a lot of the dialogue originally belonging to various other random noblemen), and, between the black costumes and the long white hair they'd given him, looked frighteningly like Lucius Malfoy (which I would not have thought of except Emily thoughtfully remarked upon it at one point during part two ;) ). Though he did not have a pimp cane. He really should have.
There was a rather odd visual motif of people getting into and out of bed: apart from King Henry's entirely canonical insomnia there was Hal and Falstaff in 1H4 1.2, Lady Percy in her first scene in 1H4, and then Hal and Poins on their first appearance in 2H4, and I may be missing someone. We talked a bit afterwards about what this might signify other than "we have a big table/bed/platform thing center stage and are damn well going to use it," and thought it might have something to do with some kind of national restlessness? As well as an "As the king goes, so goes the realm" thing.
In re: Hal and Poins, incidentally, I had never noticed the implications of Falstaff's speech in part two about why Hal keeps Poins around: "Because their legs are both of a bigness, and a' plays at quoits well, and eats conger and fennel, and drinks off candles' ends for flap-dragons, and rides the wild-mare with the boys..." Ahem. Conger, btw, = eel. I am sure the metaphorical applications need not be spelled out. ;)
Rumor! OMG this was so cool. They started out part two with Rumor wandering about gossiping with the audience, and then he comes onto the stage and starts his speech very conversationally. Hal and Hotspur enter, heavily backlit, and then when Rumor says
I run before King Harry's victory;
Who in a bloody field by Shrewsbury
Hath beaten down young Hotspur and his troops,
Quenching the flame of bold rebellion
Even with the rebel's blood
they re-enact the very end of their fight to the death from the previous play. And then Rumor continues: "But what mean I to speak so true at first?" Rewind! "My office is / To noise abroad that Harry Monmouth fell / Under the wrath of noble Hotspur's sword..." And then we get a replay of the fight except this time Hotspur wins. Henry and Douglas enter upstage and when Rumor says "...and that the King before the Douglas' rage / Stooped his anointed head as low as death" they too fight -- I think, in fact, it's actually the blocking from Douglas' killing of Blunt who is decoying for the King, but I might be wrong -- and they freeze mid-disembowelment. It was so cool and I was pleased to see it because I've always thought that'd be a great way to do that bit.
This production was very fond of maps. Which I am totally down with: after all, it features one of the only two instances in Shakespeare where a map is explicitly called for (the other being King Lear 1.1). In both of these, Britain as an entity becomes visible to the audience right when it is on the point of being fragmented. So the recurrence of the image -- besides the canonical one at the meeting of the rebels, there was a scene that started with Henry and his council examining a map and drawing up battle plans, and then the rebels in part two did the same in their first scene -- is a Good Thing. That said, I would like to counsel all aspiring directors to remember that if they wish or need to have maps onstage, that if you have an upper balcony that hangs nearly right over the stage, they will be visible to the people seated there and thus should actually depict what they are supposed to, or else said people will be all distracted by the fact that a map ostensibly of England says "AGINCOURT" on it.
The map thing, btw, was put to rather nifty use at the end: the newly-crowned Henry V and his brothers and courtiers come onstage on the giant piece of scaffolding across the back wall, so that Henry delivers the banishment of Falstaff from a considerable height. He turns his back afterwards instead of exiting, and then John of Lancaster and the Lord Chief Justice come onto the mainstage and have Falstaff and his friends removed (Falstaff gets clubbed in the gut by one of the officers, which made me cringe a lot) and then have their horrible smug little conversation ("I like this fair proceeding of the King's," Prince John says. Oh, I always want to throttle him at that point!) and exit. Then Hal and everybody on the scaffolding turns back around and unrolls a huge map of France on which Agincourt and Harfleur are prominently marked. The map is flooded with red backlighting and we fade to black on the sounds of battle and screaming. So we end with a parallel drawn between Henry IV's civil wars and Henry V's foreign wars, which fundamentally are all the same in that they're all about killing people really. For how can they be charitably disposed of anything when blood is their argument? It's quite a dark ending, and, I thought, an effective one.
*wipes sweat from forehead* And that, I think, is enough, although if I think of anything more I shall have to post it; I feel like I missed something or other. But if you guys are still with me after all of that, many props to you! Clearly this production got me all thinky and stuff.