Henry IV, Part I is the richest of Shakespeare’s chronicle plays, partly for the fire and dash of its impetuous Hotspur, pre-eminently for the titanic verve of its waddling Falstaff. Between the two of them — the one filled with chivalric ideals of honor, the other cynically dismissing honor as mere “air” — stand all manner of men, and of human ambitions and failings and faiths. About equally between them, at the center of the play, stands a youthful Prince Hal, who must grow from being a thoughtless playboy and Falstaff’s roistering playfellow into Hotspur’s slayer and the eventual victor of Agincourt. With its carousing prince and its treacherous king and its traitorous rebels, with its grand-mannered plotting and grand-languaged speeches, Henry IV has considerable vitality without Falstaff.
All the same, Henry IV is almost unthinkable without Falstaff. Whether in the bottle scenes where he swaggers like a general, or in the battle scenes where he quivers like a jelly, this thieving, braggart liar, this gorging, guzzling “huge bombard of sack” who lives on his wits and gets by on his charm so bestrides the play that the great danger is he will completely distort it; he so domineers over it on occasion as to send royalty and even history packing.
One of the virtues of the Phoenix Theater’s lively production is that, as staged by Stuart Vaughan, it keeps a happy balance, values its martial clang and stir, sets broadsword heroics against tankard humor, and is never for a moment a one-man show. But it is no less a virtue of the current production that Eric Berry’s robustly nimble and resourceful Falstaff is by all odds the play’s best-acted role. Donald Madden’s Hotspur is properly dynamic too, though it substitutes mere energy for fire and dash. As Henry, Fritz Weaver makes a well-spoken tapestry King; only the Hal falls short, from too metronomic a speech and schoolboy an air.
But offering a play that in modern times has not always fared well with big names, the Phoenix has done an attractive job without any.
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