McKellen’s marvellous in a fat suit – shame the show’s thin on charm
Player Kings (Noel Coward Theatre, London, and touring)
Verdict: A crowning achievement of sorts ★★★☆☆ Underdog: The Other Other Bronte (National Theatre, Dorfman) Verdict: An unlikely story ★★☆☆☆
THE Royal Family under scrutiny, a sick King, a reprobate Prince ( named Harry), mutinous politicians, wars abroad. Director Robert Icke’s modern-dress conflation of Shakespeare’s richest, most rewarding history plays — Henry IV, parts 1 and 2 — could not be more timely.
Moreover, it’s a chance for Britain’s most distinguished theatrical knight, Sir Ian McKellen, 84, to pull on a fat suit and give us his
Sir John Falstaff: one of the Bard’s best known, most beloved, larger-than-life characters.
The production opens with a coronation. A spooky echo of our own, last year. An outstanding Richard Coyle’s cold, guilt-stricken King Henry looks pale and strained, clearly concerned about the state of the country, the state of his soul (having usurped the crown from Richard II) and the state of his eldest son.
Cut to an Eastcheap dive where a loaded, bare-bottomed Prince Hal (Toheeb Jimoh) has smashed open a nicked cash-register and is snorting coke from the back of a man on all fours, attached to a dog-leash.
This isn’t a sweet prince who slips down the pub for a laugh with the lads and a cuddle with his surrogate dad, Falstaff. Here roguishness has become nastiness, playfulness more like abuse, dissipation close to self- destruction. Jimoh’s humourless Hal plays dirty. His sense of honour is as warped as Falstaff’s but in his case, it’s no joke. This is a prince so depraved, he stabs his rival, Hotspur, in the back.
It’s a shocking moment and one of several striking decisions in Icke’s pacey production, which cleverly cuts and splices scenes and is wonderfully well- drilled — but is also drained of emotion.
There’s too little warmth between Hal and McKellen’s spluttering Falstaff, whose voice sounds liquid, as if he is permanently wet around the chops. Which he is — but we hear too much of it, thanks to the microphones. It may make Shakespeare more contemporary but it feels like watching telly. These actors don’t need to project and, as a consequence, their performances are underpowered and lack expression.
Part Two, a play preoccupied with age and death, begins with an inspired touch as Falstaff, now a celebrated war veteran, turns his famous ode to sack (sherry) into an ad, beautifully lit and backed by syrupy music. At last a glimpse of full-fat Falstaff as an outrageous but irresistible old charmer.
McKellen is magnificent; his comic timing peerless. But he’s never big enough, funny enough or lovable enough to inflate a fitfully flat show.
■ UNDERDOG gives us Charlotte Bronte as you’ve never imagined her: in a Jane Eyre-style frock — of livid scarlet — with black bovver boots.
Foulmouthed and furious, Gemma Whelan’s Charlotte rails against a society that oppresses women and turns them into dog-eat-dog rivals. Then proceeds to behave like one, barking at her pretty little sister Anne (Rhiannon Clements, in mauve) for being a ‘ church mouse’ and barely acknowledging her middle sister Emily (Adele James, in blue), or her remarkable Wuthering Heights.
It’s a fact that when Anne died of tuberculosis aged 29 and Charlotte inherited the rights to her radical novel The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall, she refused permission for a reprint.
Jealousy? Or, as this Charlotte claims, a desire to protect her reputation from Anne’s ‘splashy and immature’ book which ‘gutted’ her own family for ‘ a bit of fiction’. Unlikely, but it may explain why playwright Sarah Gordon presents the eldest of the famous literary sisters as mean- spirited, unlikeable and, above all, unsisterly.
I prefer the more traditional portrayal of this talented trio, scratching away in their freezing parsonage in Haworth, buoyed up by shrewd sisterly appreciation of each other’s individual literary styles. Competitive, as sisters can be, but not cut-throat rivals (and I speak as one of four).
A blanket of grasses and foxgloves bloom on the banks of the moors in the opening scene. Only to lift, exposing the straggly, etiolated roots beneath. The wonder is that the Brontes managed to make so much of so little.
Natalie Ibu’s vibrantly performed, animated staging throws up some splendid cartoonish images. When the girls decide to publish under male pseudonyms, they put dinner jackets over their dresses. Clubbable men wear striped coats, and when they puff on their pipes, smoke spews from their top hats.
Finally, Charlotte appears locked in a glass-walled museum case. This play makes her no easier to read. Back to the books.