Taking Historic Liberties

Henry IV, Part One
Royals and Rebels
The National Post

This low-budget Shakespeare is presented by a company called Royals and Rebels that presumably came into being just for that purpose. It is possible, of course, that they chose the name first and then scoured the libraries looking for a play that suited it, but it seems unlikely. Henry IV, Part One is the one in which rebels, led by the fire-breathing Harry Hotspur, rise up against the English royal of the title whose son Prince Hal is simultaneously giving grief by hanging out in taverns with the disreputable likes of Sir John Falstaff. This production is set in the time of the First World War: a period when, as you must know, opposing generals routinely challenged one another to single combat and the principal military weapon was the sword.

And while we're talking ludicrous: This show breaks hilarious new ground in the cause of gender equity. When Falstaff and Co. do their highwayman thing, their victims are played as women. (One of them, in a rare piece of actual rewriting, is described as "a rich widow from America.") They do not despair and beg for mercy, like their masculine counterparts in the text; they turn on their attackers and knee them in their respective groins. Indeed, they put up such a good fight that I wondered how the director, Sten Erik, could possibly keep faith with the play's storyline. However, he proves equal to the emergency. One of the thieves, Gadshill, has also been turned into a woman, and with just a few casual flicks of her dagger she has the situation under control.

One of the rebel leaders, formerly known as Sir Richard Vernon, also undergoes a sex change, which doesn't prevent her boasting about the prowess she will display, in person, on the battlefield -- a situation even less believable in the early 20th century than in the late 15th. By altering a character's gender you change the whole dynamic of a scene, and you cannot then simply play the text as written and expect it to make sense.

After which it's pleasing, if perplexing, to report that there are some good things going on here. Chief among them -- and a rarity in this play -- is the performance of the title role. Henry is a manipulative though not heartless usurper, and David Clark plays him as a glassy-eyed politician in a frock-coat. (My own theory about modern-dress Shakespeare, if anyone wants to know, is that it helps audiences far less than it's supposed to; if anything it patronizes them. But it does help actors, allowing them to present someone with a recognizable social, and therefore personal, role, rather than an amorphous being in an off-the-peg frock.)

This king enjoys baiting and humiliating his opponents, and he's very good at it; he also has a tormenting conscience. When he confronts his son, he lectures him as mercilessly as he would anyone else, until something cracks and he finds himself crying real and wholly believable tears.

Stephen Bogaert presents an arrestingly caddish Hal, very much his father's calculating son, torn between self- indulgence and self- disgust. He doesn't have much of an antagonist since Jerry Getty's Hotspur is a good- natured fellow. He isn't exactly helped by the lunatic decision to have him deliver his first long and dynamic speech sitting down with his back to us; the whole point of Hostpur is that he can't keep still.

This, though, is the only performance that's technically inadequate to the demands of the lines, and by current standards that's a very good strike-rate. Most of these actors a) know what they're talking about and b) can get it across.

Dennis O'Connor is not the funniest Falstaff you will ever see (at least I hope not, for your sake) but he has loads of sly, skeptical intelligence. The production goes sentimental in trying to turn him into a pacifist, but in bringing on the ragged, hopeless soldiers he has press-ganged, makes a valid point. (And here, yes, the modern dress does help.) And there's the rare pleasure of meeting a new Shakespeare character; the minute role of the Chamberlain, the thieves' informer, is brought to greasy acquisitive life by a mature actor, Howard Davis. He later doubles as Francis, the tavern drawer, who is usually played young; this actor, with his eyes briefly flickering at the thought of a royal advancement, gives him a new, poignant dimension. The evening gets better as it goes; by the end I even felt I'd like to see how they might all get on in Part Two.