Henry IV part one
the stratford festival
the national post

After 13 years running Stratford, Richard Monette remains underrated as a director of Shakespeare. He isn't a purveyor of grand concepts, but you can usually keep those anyway. Few in Canada are as good as he at animating both a stage and a text. Henry IV Part One is a great play that can get off to a very bad start, opening as it does with an expository royal council scene -- all names and nobles and bulletins from the battlefield -- that could be an unconscious parody of the entire history play genre. It's transformed here by showing us Henry, the would-be crusader king, taking the sacrament before buckling down to worldly affairs. He switches instantly, in Scott Wentworth's sonorous and penetrating performance, from earnest and devout to calculating and suspicious, the two moods infected by one guilty conscience. It poisons his mind against his son Prince Hal, and also against Hal's opposite number, the rebel Harry Hotspur, whom, Henry shamefacedly admits, he prefers. The admission here is at once so wistful and so emphatic that it gets a laugh, surprising and satisfying. The great insight of Monette's production is that the play does not exist in watertight compartments marked "comic" (prose, Falstaff) and "serious" (verse, everyone with a title); both halves are both. Good classic juveniles don't come along every week, or even every year, and Adam O'Byrne, the gangling, impetuous youth who plays Hotspur, is a revelation. We laugh at him, sympathetically, in his first scene where the efforts of his elders to involve him in some serious conspiring are frustrated by his inability to keep his tongue off his own grievances. Everything they say sets him off on some new tangent. I've waited for decades to see the humour in this scene released; here it finally is, in torrents. We laugh with Hotspur when, with unflagging accuracy, he makes deflationary fun of his grandiloquent ally Glendower (Raymond O'Neill). There's a deadly point to the frivolity: We've just seen these men down on their hands and knees, poring over an outsized map of England, squabbling as to how they'll carve up the land. It's called counting your chickens. It's also called a terrible "look- out" for the country if they win. None of this makes O'Byrne's Hotspur any less gallant or, to those he loves, loving. Slain by Hal in single combat, he dies a great death; his adversary holds on to him so that he delivers his last words on his feet, a great improvement on the traditional speech from the floor.

It's a famous irony that Hotspur, who hates poetry, consistently delivers the most ringing verse in the play. Less noted is that he, who contemptuously calls Hal "the merry madcap Prince of Wales," is actually the more madcap of the two. Hal, the part-time pub- crawler, uses frivolity while Hotspur lets it use him. David Snelgrove gets Hal's earnest opportunism well enough; indeed, he touches most of the character's bases. But he strikes few sparks off them, and his return to his father -- the turning-point -- goes for nothing. As for his surrogate father, James Blendick gives Falstaff a fruity voice, a gentlemanly demeanour and, courtesy of wardrobe, an imposing belly, all as you would expect. There is little excitement here, but at least what there is comes in key places: The disparaging speech about honour, the tall story of the 11 buckram men grown out of two and the tavern masquerade in which Falstaff and Hal alternate the roles of king and prince. Blendick delivers a flavoursome impersonation of Wentworth's mournful monarch and there is an overall sense of the characters' worlds about to collide and disintegrate. The lesser rogues are more diverse than usual: Gadshill (Keith Dinicol), an imitation Falstaff with an eyepatch, Bardolph (Barry MacGregor), liquored beyond human hearing, and even the shadowy Peto (Tim MacDonald), given some identity as an eager apprentice.

There are also some things I could do without. The Shakespearean effect I most hope never to see again is the one in which a group of plotters freeze in their conversation while a troop of hostiles crosses the stage, and then start up again at exactly the same volume. Or any volume. I would also like some day to see people entering a tavern without laughing uproariously and then making a literal song-and-dance about it. And there are some things I missed: Falstaff, in defiance of a hallowed stage direction, is denied the chance to strike a blow or two before running away like his fellow highway-robbers. But the robbery itself is delightfully staged, the thieves parading by like pious pilgrims before beating up the travellers. And if you think that disguise is mean, you should see what happens in the real battle, the king dressing his nobles up in his own colours so they will attract the death-wounds intended for him. I've never seen this deception so graphically illustrated before. And this king is really pious.