By Dave
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsevrEUXJHo
Available until: Unknown
Henry IV Part 1 is a history play with a bit of everything.
Maybe not quite everything because there isn’t a romance, but it has drama
(including a lot of fighting at the end) and it has comedy. It has a lot of
great characters, with a great mixture of the historical and the (probably)
fictional. There was a real Sir John Falstaff, but he doesn’t seem to have been
very much like the one who appears in this play.
This is another Zoom production, the third version of this play I’ve seen on Zoom. The thing about Shakespeare is that you don’t usually get everything on first reading (or first watching). There are always new things to learn, new things to notice.
There are a lot of familiar faces in
the cast, as well as a lot of faces which I hope will become more familiar as
we work out way through the International Actors Ensemble productions. The performances
are really good and even when the conversations aren’t directly focused on the difficulties
between the characters, you can still feel a lot of the tension.
Jonathan Fuller is great as Henry IV,
his voice has authority (brilliantly imitated by Hal at one point in the play)
and there’s something about him that commands instant respect. I’m not sure I’d
behave like Hal does if Henry was my dad, though!
Seton Pollock is fun as Hal and it is
actually nice to see him treating people who aren’t on his social level as
friends but there is something in Seton’s performance that suggests that
although he does like to mess about, he is also aware of his duty, much as he
dislikes it sometimes.
Falstaff is always important in this
series of plays and Aaron T. Moore again shows his versatility. He shows
Falstaff’s personality brilliantly and he’s great at the humour but I do get
the impression this Falstaff isn’t just a layabout. He does care about more
than having enough money to drink. Ruben Francis, Emma Drysdale and Angelique
Malcolm are hilarious as Bardolph, Ned Poins and Mistress Quickly.
There probably aren’t many roles, if
any, which Montgomery Sutton can’t play but his Hotspur still surprised me.
It’s an angry and intense performance which is sometimes uncomfortable to
watch, it’s so convincing. But it’s not just angry words, there’s also a real
sense that Hotspur is an intelligent guy and a very dangerous adversary. He is
horrible to his wife too (he doesn’t even get her name right, though this could
be Shakespeare’s mistake) but he and Valentina Vinci’s feisty Lady Hotspur
almost seem to enjoy insulting each other.
It was great to hear some Welsh from
Gruffydd Evans as Owen Glendower (another character you really wouldn’t want to
annoy) and Lynwen Haf Roberts as Lady Mortimer, who I believe has no actual
lines written by Shakespeare in the play, he just writes in the stage direction
that she speaks in Welsh. I don’t speak Welsh so it could be they’re telling
you spoilers about the end of the play or saying things about the American
president which are very negative and completely true but I’m sure one of the
Welsh-speaking bloggers will let me know if this is the case. Stephen Whiley,
David Meadows, Paul Robertson and Hamish Somers are also worth watching out for
as four very different Earls.
This is a very enjoyable production of
an often challenging play. And it is a complete play. Although Part II does
continue where this one left off, I would call it a sequel rather than the
second half of the same story. Committing to Part I doesn’t mean you have to
stick with it for Part II – but if you enjoy this half as much as I did, I’m
sure you’ll want to. Though if you like Falstaff, there is the small matter of
a play called The Merry Wives of Windsor too…
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