In this stunning production of the second part of the Henry plays, broadcast live from Stratford-upon-Avon by the RSC, the stage fills with ghosts and grandeur, Sir John Falstaff topples into the dust as his sway over the young Prince Hal ceases to have any credibility, and the dying king Henry IV is prey to an over-burdened conscience, as he remembers how he got to the throne by murdering Richard II.
It is this sense of English history which runs throughout Gregory Doran’s glorious production, where pastoral England, with its apple orchards is paraded against the gluttonous sexuality of the London brothels, and a political system where brother turns viciously on brother in the cause of amoral political ambition, where a beheading can lurk behind a smile.
Throughout the screening, technological expertise brings you to within an inch of Prince Hal’s nose (Alex Hassell) as he sweats it out on the games court and a perfectly-judged camera hones in on the moving scene between Prince Hal and the dying King Henry (a sensitive Jasper Britton).
Quite frankly this is a wonderful way to bring Shakespeare to the thousands of people around the regions, who cannot easily get to Stratford (or afford a ticket when they get there). I found I could not take my eyes from the screen, without risking the loss of a priceless second – perhaps the moment when Justice Shallow (Oliver Ford Davies) and his cousin Silence talk of their youth in the Inns of Court, where they once heard the chimes at midnight and pursued the “bona robas” (ladies of the night, to you and me) or again, it might be the arrival of the manic Pistol (Antony Byrne in an unequalled interpretation notable for its dynamic sexiness and wild-eyed violence).
But wherever your eye falls, there you will find the beautiful, the disturbing or the totally remarkable and that is the undisputed spirit of true theatre.
But at the heart of the play is Sir John Falstaff (Antony Sher) a rollicking, ale-guzzling conman, inconsistent to a degree and with a sense of amoral fraudulence that can trick the Cheapside madam, Mistress Quickly (the marvellous Paola Dionisotti) out of house and home and Justice Shallow out of a thousand marks – a huge sum by today’s values. This is the ageing chancer beloved of young Prince Hal, and when it all shatters and a disgraced Falstaff is led off to prison at the reformed Prince’s command when he becomes Henry V, Sher’s eyes, reflecting a world lost, are unforgettable.
How this wonderful actor creates a Falstaff into the kind of man who can trick us all to the point where we switch from criticism to affection is the kind of miracle only an actor of his prodigious talents can achieve. After Sher there is not likely to be a Falstaff of this magnificence for decades – if ever.
In repertoire at the RSC Stratford-upon-Avon until September 6.
