Peter Hall’s Bath seasons, as I have
said, often discreetly investigate ideas of Englishness. The
centrepiece of his company’s 2011 season is the diptych in which
Shakespeare, more than in any other of his plays, does the same. These
two dramas (or this one bifurcated drama) are not an exercise in
flag-waving like
Henry V,
although of course the reform of Prince Hal when he takes the throne
prefigures that other work; nor are they preoccupied with examining the
weakness of the body politic under a weak king as in
Richard II.
Between them, parts 1 and 2 take in the entire country: the crown and
the rebel faction; the court and the distinctly un-courtly; town and
country; responsibility and misrule. There is not a strong, unambiguous
political or social line to the plays: this is England, they say, some
aspects are better than others but all are us.
King
Henry himself is never less than earnest, and as part 2 progresses he
becomes physically consumed by the burdens of the throne he seems to
regret having seized but which he occupies conscientiously. David
Yelland looks more bearish than usual, but has always had a flair for
more rhetorically complex roles; here, he uses Hall’s sometimes
over-dogmatic insistence on end-stopping the spoken verse exactly as
the director intends, in order to increase both clarity and power of
delivery. His opposite number – his son’s other father, as it were – is
that great round man, Sir John Falstaff. Desmond Barrit, returning to
the role he played for the RSC a decade ago, confounds expectations by
not being exuberant. Much of Falstaff’s lugubriousness is parodic, to
be sure, and Barrit gets full value out of this aspect, transforming
his face so that it resembles that of a classics master drawn by Ronald
Searle but sitting unexpectedly above a mountain of flesh in
tatterdemalion costuming.
Tom Mison
gives early signs of Hal’s future correction of his ways. In the
play-acting scene in part 1 in which Hal plays his father and Falstaff
the prince, his lengthy excoriation of the fat knight begins as an
impersonation of the king, shifts into humorous playing-up to his
tavern companions, then he gets carried away and careers into genuine
passion, so that Falstaff’s speech of defence becomes both necessary
and sincere, and Hal’s final verdict, “I do; I will [disown him]”
sounds with an awkward awareness that the pretence has been broken. It
is no surprise that, when he repudiates Falstaff at his coronation at
the end of part 2, Barrit’s Falstaff does not for an instant doubt that
he means it; Falstaff’s subsequent “I shall be sent for soon at night”
is a rationalisation not for his companions, but to prevent his own
sense of the world shattering.
In a
company of more than 20, some doublings are especially appealing. Ben
Mansfield’s Hotspur in part 1 seems to begin arguments humorously
before his temper takes over; in part 2, his bombastic Pistol is in
some ways a lampoon of the other role. Philip Voss is sombre as the
rebel Worcester in part 1, and even a little camp as Shallow in part 2,
with Robert East moving from playing Hotspur’s father Northumberland to
a bouncy-yokel turn as Silence. Gregory Clarke and Mick Sands make
admirably discreet use of music, sometimes at the very threshold of
audibility. Part 2 has the edge, simply in terms of its Shakespearean
richness; Yelland and Mison are especially fine in the scene in which
Hal prematurely takes his father’s crown. But Hall has created a fine
two-panel portrait of all of England.
Written for the Financial
Times.