Deposing Falstaff

The Harrys reign in Shakespeare & Company Henry IV

by Carolyn Clay

HENRY IV, PART I. By William Shakespeare. Directed by Tina Packer and Kevin Coleman. Combat directed by Tony Simotes. Set and costume design by John Pennoyer. Lighting by Michael Giannitti. Music and sound design by Don DiNicola. Movement by Susan Dibble. With Malcolm Ingram, Jason Asprey, David Wiles, Allyn Burrows, Jonathan Epstein, Leslie Toth, John Hadden, Hugh d'Autremont, Dan McCleary, Rob Pensalfini, Derrick Sanders, Josef Hansen, Ann Podlozny, Jane Nichols, Walton Wilson, Craig Bacon, Christine Calfas, Erik Sherr, and Brett Penney. Presented by Shakespeare & Company at the Mount, Lenox, through August 31.

Sometimes you feel like a motherless child -- and according to Henry IV, Part I co-directors Tina Packer and Kevin Coleman, the play's Prince Hal and Hotspur do too. With nary a mom in sight or subtext, the directors' notes contend, it's no wonder the pair of warring Harrys come to define "honor" by male standards of physical bravery and warlike behavior. Doubtless, were there a maternal presence in the play, the wastrel heir and young "Mars in swathling clothes" would be gentle wusses -- like, say, Coriolanus.

Well, be of good cheer, the production's less shaky than some of the analysis. Shakespeare & Company artistic director (and resident feminist) Packer's only problem with the Bard -- whom she serves with an acolyte's fervor and a slyboots' savvy -- is that he is less interested in the effect of women's voices, and of their absence, than she is. But she's certainly right that women have little impact in Henry IV, Part I. Like Julius Caesar's Brutus, Hotspur refuses to confide in his wife. And his rebel ally, Mortimer, can't communicate with his, since they speak different languages. Lady Mortimer is literally background music (though here something of a spitfire), appearing in just one scene, in which she reluctantly sings her husband off to the wars (though he never shows up) in Welsh.

The directors are correct that "Henry IV is a play about honor, the rite of passage for young men, the sins of the fathers being passed on to the children, the clash of cultures and class warfare." And their particular take -- that the eventual battlefield heroism of both Hal and Hotspur is a rite of purgation, a way of wiping away the shame of their fathers' roles in deposing Richard II -- is supported by the text. Because that's the aspect of the play that most holds the directors' interest, the trajectory of Hal and Hotspur toward Shrewsbury and their encounter there, amid some of the most persuasive Shake-spearean combat you are likely to see, is what drives this Henry IV, Part I. The seemingly surefire Falstaff scenes, by contrast, almost fall away.

That's ironic, since it was Jonathan Epstein's rollickingly successful turn as Falstaff in last season's Wild West-set Merry Wives of Windsor that spurred this season's Henry IV, Part I, the first history play to take the outdoor mainstage in Shakespeare & Company's 20-year history. Of course, it's a history featuring one of the Bard's most beloved comic creations -- the fat knight Falstaff, with whom the Prince of Wales, lacking a car phone on which to disgrace himself in ribald chat with a matronly mistress, spends his days drinking, whoring, and even engaging in a blatant cover-up of a robbery. Often what happens in Henry IV, Part I is that the tavern scenes -- particularly the great one in which Hal and Falstaff take turns playacting as Henry IV berating his "ticklebrain" son and "tun of man" companion -- eclipse the main plot, in which Hal must sack sack and his wayward ways to help Henry IV quelch a rebellion hatched by Hotspur, Hotspur's father and uncle, the Scottish Earl of Douglas, and the Welsh magician Owen Glendower. In so doing, the Prince rejects "that reverend vice," his surrogate dad, for his more nobly besmirched real one and, at some emotional cost, becomes a man.

At Shakespeare & Company, with its great expanse of needle-strewn, twinkling woods, the tavern scenes tend to get lost in the forest, whereas the court and conspirators' scenes are clear and sometimes even fiery. Moreover, the oft-rickety battles are well populated, well choreographed, pageantlike yet athletic (even if Erik Sherr's blue-painted, wild-haired Douglas, shrieking up out of the bushes on a regular basis, is a bit much).

Epstein, though a fine actor and a likable, sack-spitting Falstaff, seems insufficiently larger than life, and he triggers the pathos of the old bucket-o'-guts and reluctant army officer rather too soon. (And for some reason his avoirdupois is less convincing in this year's motley than it was in last year's buckskins.) It is not the actor's fault, however, that in the great outdoors, without a suggestion of a domestic setting, the tavern scenes seem somehow remote. Packer and Coleman have also drizzled them with a mist of sadness, as if in the midst of drunken revelry the Prince is already banishing Falstaff, along with his own loathed youthful self, and the fat knight sees the writing on his walking papers.

Epstein, at least, stays real, in both his rapscallionry and his cowardice, whereas the usually excellent Jane Nichols, as a cigar-sucking Mistress Quickly, pushes. When exposed and hooted as a chicken and a braggart, Epstein's Falstaff manages a delicious combo of wounded dignity and craft -- not to mention a vehement rebuttal to the text's cornucopia of fat jokes: "You starveling, you elf skin, you dried neat's tongue, you bull's pizzle, you stockfish!" he calls the Prince. (Remember that one the next time you want to vilify Kate Moss.) I, for one, was not too enchanted with the decision to turn Falstaff's famous disputation on honor ("Who hath it? He that died o' Wednesday.") into a call-and-response chat with the audience, though Epstein makes the most of it. "What is that honor?" he asks the crowd. "Food!" pipes up a groundling inexplicably. "Good but wrong," replies Falstaff. "Air."

The standout performances in this Henry IV are by Dan McCleary, whose stocky, passionate Hotspur is both a warrior and brat (a sort of 15th-century Sean Penn), and Allyn Burrows, who as Hal wears the despair beneath his debauchery, the knowledge of brutal responsibility to come, from the beginning. Upon waking in act one, scene two, disheveled, hungover, and abed with a beached Falstaff, he toys with putting a pistol in his mouth. And when Poins leaves him after the two have cooked up the plot to rob Falstaff of his robbery booty, Burrows's Hal cries harsh tears: "I know you all, and will a while uphold/The unyoked humor of your idleness." Yet this Harry has a boyish, antic bent that goes so far as to have him make goofy faces as King Henry is revving up to read him the riot act (and even pop him one). He shapes up, of course, and the battlefield encounter between the reformed prince and an unusually somber Hotspur is the most visceral and moving sequence in the production, the Tony Simotes-choreographed fight with heavy swords hair-raising and sweaty, Hal's tender and respectful speech over Hotspur's corpse touchingly spoken.

The production is for the most part well-spoken, fast-moving, and decipherable, rife with maleness of both the blunt-military and the Robert Bly varieties (the latter in the pow-wow, over a weird metal sculpture that might be a campfire, of Hotspur and Glendower). Britisher and Syracuse University prof Malcolm Ingram is at first a bit tinny as Henry IV, but his exasperation with Hal, and with the recalcitrant rebels, rings true, and his usurpation guilt tugs palpably at his regalness. There are good performances, too, by Jason Asprey as a cockney-rascal Poins (the Peto and Bardolph are less colorful), John Haddon as a coolly calculating Earl of Worcester, Walton Wilson as an ooga-booga but imposing Glendower, and Rob Pensalfini as the noble but usually quite boring Sir Walter Blunt. As for Packer's theory (somehow I don't believe it's co-director Coleman's) that what the play needs now is moms, sweet moms, I'd keep mum about it.