...
Henry believes him--or is taken in by him...but whether it's genuine or not, Henry believes him. So the last thing I say to him is to..."Go and beat up the French, like we always used to, to take your subjects' minds off the problems at home; go to the Falklands and beat up the Argentinians and get reelected; give them something to shout and cheer about"...And Hal takes my advice.
...
For my Henry...in spite of all the hopes and yearnings, there was never going to be an arrival in a Jerusalem of any kind: he died as they were carrying him off the stage.70
Although we do not see the death of Falstaff, we know by the end that, rejected and humiliated in front of the people he wishes to impress, Falstaff has not long to live--a fact confirmed by Mistress Quickly in Act 2 Scene 3 of Henry V--"The rejection of Falstaff is, as it should be, a crucial moment, encapsulating much of the evening."71
In 1982 the stately dignity and solemn procession of the coronation was interrupted by Falstaff's embarrassing shouts:
In the final sequence, Joss Ackland sustained both his awareness of mortality and his vigour, revived from senility by the prospect of power. The rejection was electrifying. He maintained an upright dignity as he was publicly rebuked, and his first "My lord" to the Lord Chief Justice had all the old defiance; with the second "my lord" he at last fell silent. There was one final telling moment. The Lord Chief Justice was obviously moved to sympathy with Falstaff, reacting with shock not only to the harsh treatment of another old man but also to the extent to which the King's zeal for justice exceeded his own: already the pupil had left the master far behind. In such moments, this Henry IV responded fully to the rich implications about human behaviour that so distinguish these two plays.72
Ackland's Falstaff did not crumble until the King had gone and the order arrives to carry him to the Fleet, making it "a powerful and moving scene...in its presentation of the crushing of an individual by the panoply of the regal and political organisation."73
In the following extract, Desmond Barrit's description of the rejection scene encompasses many of the ideas central to Part II: of disease connecting and spreading from the monarchs of court and tavern; fatherhood to Hal; and how the political machine crushes the personal:
The king, we soon learn, is very ill, so Hal has had to be preparing himself for kingship. Falstaff, too, is ill--very clearly so, in our production--the pox and the gout having manifested themselves on his body...I always work on the assumption that the audience doesn't know the play, and I certainly did that for the rejection scene...Whether Falstaff has any deeply hidden, sub-conscious inkling of what is going to happen to him it is hard to say, but in no way is he consciously expecting it; he's the sort of person who always goes for the optimistic option. I think he believes that now Henry IV is out of the way he can at last become Hal's father...Falstaff's silence is the really extraordinary thing about this meeting...I think that, for once in his life, Falstaff was going to beg for forgiveness...is going to appeal to him to remember their past, their great friendship, the good times they have had together. But he isn't given the chance to speak at all...He then starts trying to convince himself that he mustn't worry about it, that Hal is only behaving like this because he has to do so in public: "I shall be sent for soon at night" [5.5.86-87]. I used to say that, not to the other characters on stage, but to myself. He's trying to be firm with himself...But, of course, he knows that they won't be and that there will be no going back...the crime for which he is being imprisoned is that of loving someone too much, the crime of being a good friend--well, and a bit of a rogue as well. Hal has to move on; there is no choice. And Falstaff, I'm sure, dies of a broken heart.74
William Houston's Hal showed "no vestiges of fondness for his old lowlife companions as his coming of age leads him to dwell on his imminent assumption of power. He has a propensity for paranoia, and his grin is maliciously vulpine."75 Benedict Nightingale pointed out how his "heart is clearly moving on to another plane," feeling that he will, as he assured his father, become a responsible king. However, Houston's performance gave the audience cause for concern in handing power to such a "cold fish": "That's a gain, but maybe also a loss. Was I imagining the tiny worried look Clifford Rose's ultra-honest Lord Chief Justice gave when Houston and his chilling brother, Dickon Tyrrell's Prince John walked off?"76
The dehumanizing effect of power was symbolically visualized in Terry Hands' 1975 production by Henry's coronation robe:
5. Alan Howard, "all gold from forehead to toes" in his coronation robe, "lumbers like some gorgeous robot over to the palpitating [Brewster] Mason" as Falstaff in Terry Hands' 1975 RSC production.
In comes [Alan] Howard, all gold from forehead to toes, and lumbers like some gorgeous robot over to the palpitating [Brewster] Mason. He wears a mask, and it seems that the mask has trapped and depersonalised him. But, after a few moments, he lifts it, and it's the same Hal underneath, saying what he must and hating himself for saying it: man as well as totem, but totem as much as man. As Mr Howard sees it, the character is constantly trying and failing to achieve human wholeness, an integrity of personality in which public and private selves are reconciled.77
In a haunting last image:
Hands stresses the finality of Falstaff's decline with a short tableau. The stage has been cleared of kings, courtiers and riff-raff: only the tangled, white branches of a dead tree stretch across, wall-to-wall bones. The massive figure of Brewster Mason's Falstaff stands, head bowed, beneath them. He could be dangling in the drying wind.78
In order for Hal to rule he must eliminate the former division of his self--between court and tavern, duty and extravagance. The necessity of casting off Falstaff is never really in question. As much as the audience enjoy the adventures of this extraordinary character, Shakespeare never lets them forget what a rogue he truly is:
As Hal distances himself from the tavern and is reconciled with his father, the signs of Falstaff's rejection are there to be read. In consequence of Falstaff's opportunist recruiting activities and the unleashing of his predatory instincts towards Shallow, the audience has in a sense been prepared for his inevitable rejection.79
Hal's rejection of [Falstaff] is, thus, a tragedy in miniature, and not just for the sake of Sir John's feelings. "If I had the choice between betraying my friends and betraying my country," E. M. Forster once wrote, "I hope that I would have the courage to betray my country." Hal thinks otherwise; and that is his tragedy, inevitable perhaps, even creditable, but painful, nonetheless.80
THE ACTOR's VOICE AND THE DIRECTOR's CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH MICHAEL PENNINGTON, ADRIAN NOBLE, AND MICHAEL BOYD
Michael Pennington, born in 1943, was brought up in London and read English at Cambridge University. While at university he appeared with the National Youth Theatre. He went on to join the RSC, playing small parts in The Wars of the Roses directed by Peter Hall (1964). He has since returned to the RSC on many occasions, playing Angelo in Measure for Measure (1974), Edgar in King Lear (1976), Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost (1978), Hamlet (1980), and Timon in Timon of Athens (2000). He has numerous radio and television parts to his credit, as well as film roles. He has written books on acting Shakespeare and Chekhov. In 1986 he and Michael Bogdanov founded the English Shakespeare Company (ESC), dedicated to taking Shakespeare to new audiences. Their inaugural production, The Henrys, comprising the two parts of Henry IV plus Henry V, in which he played Prince Hal/King Henry V, was enormously successful. Richard II, the three Henry VI plays, and Richard III were subsequently added, and their Wars of the Roses toured the world to great acclaim. He launched his one-man show, Sweet William, about Shakespeare's life and writing and his own relationship with those works, in 2006. He talks here both about playing the part of Hal and about wider aspects of the ESC staging of the two parts.
Adrian Noble, born in 1950, arrived at the RSC from the Bristol Old Vic, where he had directed several future stars in productions of classic plays. His first production on the main
stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford was the acclaimed 1982 King Lear. Two years later, his Henry V sowed the seed for Kenneth Branagh's film. Among his other major productions during his two decades at the RSC were Hamlet, again with Branagh in the title role; The Plantagenets, based on the Henry VI/Richard III tetralogy; and the two parts of Henry IV. Noble's 1994 A Midsummer Night's Dream was made into a film. He was artistic director from 1991 to 2003, since when he has been a freelance director. His production style is characterized by strong use of colors and objects (such as umbrellas), and fluid scenic structure. He talks here about his 1991 production with Robert Stephens as Falstaff, making reference to both Part I and Part II of Henry IV.
Michael Boyd was born in Belfast in 1955, educated in London and Edinburgh, and completed his MA in English literature at Edinburgh University. He trained as a director at the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre in Moscow. He then went on to work at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, joining the Sheffield Crucible as associate director in 1982. In 1985 Boyd became founding artistic director of the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, becoming equally acclaimed for staging new writing and innovative productions of the classics. He was drama director of the New Beginnings Festival of Soviet Arts in Glasgow in 1999. He joined the RSC as an associate director in 1996 and has since directed numerous productions of Shakespeare's plays. He won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Director for his version of the Henry VI plays in the RSC's This England: The Histories in 2001. He took over as artistic director of the RSC in 2003 and oversaw the extraordinarily successful Complete Works Festival in 2006-07. He followed this up with a cycle of all eight history plays, from Richard II through to Richard III, with the same company of actors. This transferred to London's Roundhouse Theatre in 2008 and won multiple awards. He talks here about both parts of Henry IV.
These plays can be thought of as individual works, as parts of a pair, or of a tetralogy, or even of a longer cycle of English history plays. There are cross-references across the two parts, back to Richard II and forward to Henry V. Some audience members know the backstory and the forward-story, some don't. How do you cope with all this?
MP: Each of the history plays has to stand alone--that's how Shakespeare planned them--but it's almost as if he had an idea that they might one day be seen in sequence, as they often are now, because each generally "trails" the next episode of the story at its end. So Part II closes by looking forward to Henry V's French campaign, and indeed the end of Henry V to the reign of Henry VI. With the Henry IVs it doesn't really matter if the audience doesn't know Henry V since it's in the future, except as general interest as to how Henry V became Henry V. The backstory of Richard II is more of a problem: you need to know about the shakiness of Henry IV's claim to the throne and his own conscience--if he has any--about having usurped. The only real answer is to make sure the actors make the audience truly listen to Hotspur's argument against Henry in Part I and what the king himself says, so that they miss none of it. It's a matter of emphasis in the acting, of determination to get it across.
AN: In two ways. First of all one, has to start with the very simple premise that people are buying a ticket for one show, therefore it has to stand alone. But from the point of view of the acting company and as somebody involved at the RSC with the history plays for quite some time, I'd say it's very hard not to appreciate the wider context, going back to the Henry VI plays. It seems to me impossible that Shakespeare did not have an architectural form in his head as he wrote them. The Henry VI/Richard III tetralogy was the first time since Sophocles and Euripides that someone had attempted a cycle of interrelated plays for the secular stage. It hadn't happened for two thousand years. I cannot believe that, writing it as a man in his mid-to late twenties, Shakespeare wasn't conscious of that. And of course they were enormously successful, so slightly later in his career, when his gaze cast upon the Henry IV plays, I think he must again have had some sort of ghost of the architecture in his mind all the time. But because the first tetralogy tackled events that chronologically took place after those of the second, you get a very strong sense of moving forward toward anarchy and chaos. If you look at all eight, you start with the formality of Richard II and end up with the butchery of Richard III. It's a divine untidiness. In the second tetralogy you can see the architecture but also a maturity of construction and a depth of characterization within each play, which makes them highly satisfactory as individual plays.
MB: We conceived our Henry IVs as part of an eight-play cycle of Shakespeare's history plays, and a large proportion of our audience saw them in this context. Clive Wood had not only played Bullingbrook in Richard II but, as Richard of York, had spent three plays trying to take the crown from Henry VI and failing. We staged the plays initially in the order of their writing so York was seen on a Sisyphean journey toward the crown, which faltered in Henry VI Part III and began again with renewed vigor and sophistication in Richard II. The Henry IV plays revealed the eventual fruits of his labors as bitter.
Shakespeare had five very successful histories behind him as he wrote the Henry IVs, and Henry V was a popular title long before Shakespeare wrote his version, so I think it's fair to say that both author and audience were conscious of context as they experienced the events of Henry IV.
These plays move between very distinctive settings: royal court, rebels' castles, Eastcheap tavern, Gloucestershire orchard, battlefield. How did you and your designer set about creating these contrasting worlds?
MP: On their own terms, eclectically. The court wore Edwardian dress, the rebels harked back variously to the eighteenth century and forward to twentieth-century warfare; the tavern was more or less 1980s, the Gloucestershire orchard perhaps a little pre-First World War, the battlefield went back to medieval chainmail and broadsword. All the time we were responding to the temperament of the characters and the atmospherics of each scene and asking the audience to accept unexpected contrasts. The plays are in a sense about the entire history of Britain.
AN: Bob Crowley designed the set and Deirdre Clancy the costumes. We started with a very beautiful wooden floor fringed with gold, that both functioned as a practical space and had a strong resonance that could operate as a metaphor. The second thing we decided was that we would spend a lot of our money (because in the end it comes down to that) on the Boar's Head in Eastcheap, because we felt it was an aspect of the play that really needed to jump into the audience's imagination. In any of Shakespeare's plays, some parts require what I would loosely call "social realism" and some don't. King Lear does not require much social realism. The Merry Wives of Windsor requires a lot, because the plots operate and are triggered by different things. There are certain aspects of Henry IV Part I that require that social realism, and the Boar's Head tavern is one of those.
The tavern in Part I was a well of life: it absolutely teemed with energy and life. The tavern in Part II was a much emptier place. It was a lonely and quite sad place, a place for losers, a place where folk were in danger, so everyone got out very fast when they were told there was another war starting. I used it for Henry IV's great monologue, "How many thousand of my poorest subjects / Are at this hour asleep?" [3.1.4-5]. I had King Henry wander through the tavern, in which the down-and-outs and the losers were all lying drunk and asleep.
This relates to the structure of Part II, which is absolutely brilliant. It all works contrapuntally. It's contrapuntal between town and country, between war councils and petty quarrels. And one of the great pieces of counterpoint is at the death of King Henry IV. Henry IV dies in the Jerusalem chamber in the Palace of Westminster and the next scene is in Gloucestershire. From the very beginning of Part I he has wanted to go to the Holy Land. He keeps talking about how he wants to go to Jerusalem and eventually he does go there, but he goes there in death. I had his sons and the courtiers lift his body and carry him, and as his bed was lifted aloft and he came weaving downstage then upstage, I did a transformation into the countryside in Gloucestershire. I had a huge canopy with ladde
rs poking up through it and all you saw were the legs of the actors. They were up the ladders, throwing apples down, and the dead body of the king was carried up through the canopy, up through this orchard, the orchard of England. We did this strange picture in slow motion, so it was like he'd gone to heaven, and so we had this fabulous juxtaposition which I think completely fulfilled Shakespeare's purpose. It was a wonderful juxtaposition of the realistic--we had real beekeepers and real apple pickers in the orchard--and the imagistic, the metaphorical. The man had finally found his way to Jerusalem: it was just eighty miles up the Thames in Gloucestershire. So we found a way in Part II of being much freer, much bolder, in the integration of the scenery with the structure of the play.
MB: Henry's court was characterized by a simple silver bowl of water where he tried to wash his hands of the blood of Richard II.
Eastcheap was dominated by a battered old armchair that had taken the shape of David Warner's Falstaff, and was framed by a large and tattered red velvet drape, which spoke of warmth, theatrical artifice, and backstage assignations. Staff and customers also emerged from and disappeared into a smoky purgatory beneath the stage.
Nearly all the castles from Orleans and Bordeaux in Henry VI Part I to Harfleur in Henry V were carried by our great rusty Louise Bourgeois-style tower, that rose from its hell mouth gates up past an "I'm the King of the Castle" balcony to an ambiguous spiral stair, which rose to and fell from the grid seven meters above the stage.
Gloucestershire was a bale of hay, some bunting, blossom, and a barbecue.
The Oxford Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part 2 (Oxford World's Classics) Page 18
