Player Kings

 Bristol Hippodrome

Who was it who said that if you are not a socialist at twenty, you don't have a heart, but if you are still a socialist at forty, you don't have a brain? I think you could probably misapply that principle to the works of Mr William Shakespeare. If Hamlet isn't your favourite play when you are twenty, you obviously don't enjoy theatre. If Henry the Fourth Part Two isn't your favourite play at fifty, you obviously don't enjoy life.

You can't really have Henry the Fourth Part Two without Henry the Fourth Part One, so it doesn't get done as often as it should. Trilogies and double bills and complete history cycles are a bit of an undertaking. Part Two has all the really great scenes. Part One has the comedy and the insults and the politics. Lots and lots of politics. Really, really, who is Mortimer and why should we care? 

Player Kings is a mash up of AitchFourOne and AitchFourTwo. The fellow who reviewed it for the Bristol online arts paper felt the show lost momentum during "strange scenes from Gloucestershire orchards" in the second half. That would be the "chimes at midnight" scene, which Sir Peter Hall said was the one he'd work on if he could only produce one scene from Shakespeare for the rest of his life. Which is fine. The reviewer was very probably under fifty. At sixteen, I liked the prequel. This royal throne of kings and all that that entails.

Sir Ian McKellen is over eighty and fighting fit. A bit too fighting fit: he got over-keen during one of the battles in the London production and fell off the stage. He's on the mend; but although his name is blazoned above the Hippodrome, the role of Falstaff is taken by his understudy, one David Semark. Prince Hal, Harry Hotspur and the eponymous King are taken by Toheeb Jimoh, Samuel Edward-Cook and Richard Coyle, respectively. They've all appeared in big-ticket TV shows which I haven't seen, but McKellen was obviously meant to be the big draw. It's impossible to know how many people in the audience bought their very expensive tickets because they wanted to see Gandalf in the flesh. The theatre is full; hardly anyone seems to availed themselves of the proffered refund. Still, you can't shake the sense that we're watching a star vehicle without a star. But Semark was a fabulous Sir John Falstaff; he even looks a bit like Magneto. It's conceivable that the rest of the cast shone a little more in Srian's absence.

The evening is billed as Player Kings and festooned with quotes about Shakespeare meeting Peaky Blinders. But it's an abridgement, not an adaptation. A modern dress production -- aren't they all -- but a modern dress production which is emphatically about Kings and Princes and Knights and Soldiers and not about anything else. A year or two back I saw Henry the Sixth Parts One, Two and off-puttingly Three at the the Old Vic, "reimagined" so that the English Rose Company was subject to a series of hostile takeovers. It worked perfectly well. Tonight, Harry Four (the former Bolingbroke, and the future Harry Five's father) comes on stage in a modern dress-uniform, to a slowed down God Save The King and dons robes and a crown which instantly reminds everyone of the coronation of our own dear Charlie Three. Everyone puts on khaki for the battle scenes, and there's some creative use of landlines for the diplomacy. When the action shifts to the Boar Tavern, there is a brief montage insinuating drugs, shirtlessness and mild kink; but once Falstaff and the Prince start chatting about sac, robberies and what would happen if all the year were a playing holiday, we seem to have settled down into a perfectly intelligible reading of AitchFourOne (before the interval) and AitchFourTwo (afterwards). True, the robbery at Gad's Hill seems to involves guns, security men, balaclavas and some bright lights: that may be where some critics got the Sopranos connection. But we're still in Shakespeare's theatrical world. Nicking stuff is a bit of a jape; war a way of proving yourself; being hung an occupational hazard. 

That's the central difficulty with the diptych, and also what makes it so inexhaustible. Falstaff is a drunk, greedy, dishonest, cowardly crook. He robs corpses and mutilates a dead body on the battlefield. And Hal (prince of Wales, heir apparent, going to whop the French at Agincourt) treats him shockingly. But we have to spend the first half thinking of Sir John as a comical fellow, and Hal as a heroic nobleman slumming it for a bit. But in the second half, Falstaff becomes a poignant -- as opposed to a tragic -- figure, a broken down old man who can see that he's messed up his life. Part Two only works if we believe in Falstaff as a human being; Part One only works if he's a theatrical type. 

  

I saw Ian McKellen essaying the role of Mother Goose on this very stage. It was very funny and rather compelling and in the end even a little bit moving. But we were not meant to believe that the magic fairy and the singing animals and the cross-dressed film actor were actual people: it would have been no fun if we had. 

Prince Hal openly says that he's only using Falstaff. Not to learn the ways of the common people -- we could have respected that -- but because he wants to cos-play being a dissolute youth so everyone will be that much more impressed when he suddenly turns into a brilliant King. He sends Falstaff away at the end of the second half. Not so much breaking up with an old friend, as casting aside a tool. Who's side are we supposed to be on?

The theatre chappie in the Guardian argues that these contradictions make Falstaff as complex and nuanced as Hamlet. Maybe. We could equally say that Shakespeare took a comic supporting character from one play and made him the central figure in a more serious sequel. Cervantes does something similar with Don Quixote, come to think of it. The two halves of Don Quixote are always published as a single volume; it's highly unlikely that the two halves of Henry IV were ever done back-to-back in Shakespeare's life time. Player Kings cleverly incorporates a fragment of Henry V, the scene in the tavern before the war when Mistress Quickly tells Falstaff's drinking buddies that he has died. He makes a good end and goes to Arthur's bosom. Which does not, really, follow on very well from the ending of Henry Fourth Part Two. There, Falstaff seems to be unrepentant, convinced that the King didn't really mean it when he exiled him that he will soon be recalled. Which could perfectly well have been true: Hal is nothing if not a hypocrite. But it rounds out tonight's mash-up admirably. Prince Hal, now promoted to Henry Ther Fifth ends up in the same robes as his father. I did wonder if he was going to give us a blast of "we few, we happy few" before the curtain went down, but wiser heads clearly prevailed.

It was Jimoh's Hal, in the absence of Ian McKellen, who was the big revelation of the evening. Very young, very confident; the future Henry V can too easily be steeped in rhetoric and the promise of future nobility, or else merely a straight man to funny Sir John. Jimoh takes the modern approach in which every stream of Shakespearean invective, and every introspective pentameter is spoken as if he made it up on the spot. As if it's exactly the kind of thing you might hear in a slightly dissolute Bristol night club. Maybe as a film and TV actor he's inclined to treat the lines as script and dialogue and screenplay and not as a Shakespearean Text. 

The producers attempted to make the production cinematic rather than theatrical. There is quite a bit of piped incidental music. I like the use of the modern national anthem, but could probably have done with out And Did Those Feet... when the old king snuffs it in the Jerusalem room of his palace. Subtitles keep being projected onto the curtains, telling us where and when we are and which battles and treaties have taken place off stage. This makes everything much easier to follow. The curtain is character in its own right. It gets the biggest laugh of the evening when it comes down slowly on the dead Falstaff at Shrewsbury, and then hurriedly goes up again when he turns out not to be. 

Unsurprisingly, it's the historical and political scenes which get excised and the comedy that gets left in. We don't really see enough of Hotspur and Northumberland for them to emerge as characters. (Hotspur doesn't tell us about teaching ravens to say Mortimer, and loses the great punch-line about Glendower, who, you will remember "can call spirits from the vasty deep".) Everything which is not a Really Great Scene is chopped out of Henry IV Part Two, which may make the second half even more formless than it need to be: but the scenes remain really great. Sir Peter Hall may think that Falstaff and Silence in the orchard lamenting their wasted youth is the best thing in the entire canon; but I think I prefer the death of Henry IV. Hal thinks his father has died; and puts the crown on his own head. (In this version, he just picks it up. It's quite a big crown.) His father wakes up -- like Falstaff, come to think of it -- and berates him with a high class stream of Shakespearean invective. "I never thought to hear your voice again" says the Prince. "The wish was father, Harry, to the thought" replies Dad. Hal responds, at some length claiming that he put on the crown because he wanted to take his Dad's burden away and to see if he could bare the weight of the crown himself. "God put it in thy mind to take it hence" says the King. "That thou mightst win the more thy father’s love, pleading so wisely in excuse of it." You are going to be a much better king than I ever was because you are such a terrific liar.

If Shakespeare meant us to think of Henry IV Parts One and Two and Henry V as a trilogy, then this scene calls into question pretty much everything Hal does in his own play. Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe Hal is a good king precisely because he can convincingly say things he doesn't mean, or because he sincerely means whatever he is saying at any particular moment. The word "hypocrite" originally just meant "actor". Both the Henrys are literally player kings. 

We saw the play on the evening of July 5th. Back in the real world, a not particularly fat knight had just visited a real palace to kiss a real king's hand.  (I believe the kissing is no longer literal.) The Patriotic Victorian schoolboy Shakespeare doesn't always survive contact with the actual plays; but Shakespeare still understands England and Politics and Monarchy better than anyone. Playfully adapted mashups like this allow us to hear his voice loud and clear. 

The Bristol Hippodrome has four gentleman's lavatories between about a thousand patrons; allows a twenty minute interval in a four hour play; charges "nine bloody quid" for two very small tubs of vanilla ice-cream, and treated us to a loud mechanical buzzing right the way through the second act. We were sitting next to a Reform voter. We know this because he told us so. Some of his best friends were black.



(*) "Well so can I, and so can any man: but will they come when you do call to them?"

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