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Phil Hopkins
Group Travel Editor & Theatre Correspondent
@philhopkinsuk
9:02 AM 30th October 2014
arts

It's Shakespeare I'm In Love With

 
Shakespeare is like a pint of Guinness, many drink it, few appreciate it, but those who persist with its flavours come to experience something not available elsewhere on the market.

However, previous insight or knowledge of what you are about to see is advised if you are avoid disappearing into an ocean of puns, or folds of verse so rich that they are likely to overwhelm!

So, whilst I have had the good fortune to know the inside outs of Hamlet, King Lear and a couple of other Shakespearian plays - thank you Miss Greenwood - it is another former teacher and Bard Boffin, Mr Gilbert, to whom I owe thanks for making me sound half intelligent on this occasion!

Bringing me nicely to the RSC's two-nighter, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, at Bradford's Alhambra, a rich, six hour diet of political intrigue, corruption, arrogance, vanity and insomnia - not unlike the Houses of Parliament I suspect.

Which, perhaps, is why the Bard is so eternal. He died aged 52, largely wrote a string of historically inaccurate plays and yet, somehow, remains as pertinent today as he did in the sixteenth century.

I had never seen these two plays before, part of the quartet of English 'histories', or the second tetralogy as this cycle has become known - Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 & 2 and Henry V.

However, it came as no surprise that we were greeted with a string of wonderful, flawed characters, sitting in total contrast, perhaps, to the unreal people of today?

In the week when Renee Zellweger was accused of having possible face surgery, so we were served up with a starter of oversized guts and deformed rejects of humanity, and a main course of power politics topped off with a sprinkling of tragedy and death. Some things never change.

In the Henry IV plays we visit many English counties and, more than in any other play of the sequence, the action ranges across all sections of society, from the Royals and nobility to both the urban and rural poor as well as the classless milieu surrounding Shakespeare's incorrigible rogue, parasite, humorist, philosopher and comic triumph, Sir John Falstaff, played magnificently by Antony Sher.

The word is that he was second choice to Ian McKellen but, without doubt, his was a premier performance and it is a great actor who, by his interpretation, creates in his audience an instant understanding of what is a demanding text.



The action centres round the rise to power of Henry Bolingbroke, usurper of King Richard's throne. The previous monarch ruled by divine right - 'the Deputy elected by the Lord' - but Henry has no such lineage and must prove himself to both the nobles and his people.

As the various factions split and civil strife follows, we witness plots, sub plots, tyranny and tragedy with Part 2 concluding as John of Lancaster and the Lord Chief Justice confer together in pleasurable anticipation of a war against France.

As King Henry advised his son earlier, the wayward Prince Hal - at least in Part 1 before he has to take on the majesty of state in Part 2 - the way to unite a people is to lead them to war abroad; didn't Mrs Thatcher do something like that in the Falklands? I believe it got her another term when everyone said that wasn't possible. Retention of the Islas Malvinas or power politics a little closer to home?

Long may the RSC reign for they are truly magnificent in their presentation of Shakespeare's work. The actors were all superb and it seems almost unfair to pick out one for unique praise for they were all brilliant.

Directors are key but, for once, you can look at the milieu of disparate humanity on stage and, once you have stripped back the make-up, wigs and costumes, you quickly appreciate that here is a company of actors at the top of their game.