"I know you all..."

Came back from a glorious Readercon—of which more later—and wound up unwinding with the BBC’s Henry IV, Part Two.  (I’d seen Part One last week.)

Stunning and unsatisfying, and I want to unravel why.

This really is Henry IV’s play.  Jeremy Irons is astounding as the dying king:  haunted, irascible, embittered, grim—and eaten, bone and marrow, by his guilt.  His cancer is Richard; his performance, living scans.  His scenes with Hal—a brilliant Tom Hiddleston—were scarifying.

It’s a beautifully attentive production—every servant, soldier, princeling, page, and whore is fully drawn, fully rounded.  This is not a backdrop but a world

And I loved this Hotspur.  (The Northumberlands were father and son:  the great Alun Armstrong and his Joe.)  Mad for certain, disjunct, distractible, obsessive, obnoxious, and so very very Northern.

But—

You’d’ve thought Simon Russell Beale was born to play Falstaff, had imbibed sack and sugar at his mother’s breast.  But damn it all, they went for pathos, they went for decay.  There's got to be some reason for Hal's fascination with Falstaff, yes?  Some wit and warmth?  But he was dying, England, dying from scene one.  SRB was actually funnier as Stalin (in Collaborators)--he had a kind of ranting roaring exhilarating comic energy, even as a psychopathic monster.  I would have loved a kindred Falstaff.

And now that I think of it, the design was part of the problem.  The Eastcheap characters were all in ditchbrown rags, to the point to Pythonicity; the court, in colder black and shades of gray, with a few scant splashes of deep red.  Elegantly sombre.  Austerely agitated.  They looked like ceremonious blackbeetles, somewhere in the castle cellars.  And the hollow crown was brass.

I think the director and designer wanted authenticity.  That is, to 21st-century eyes, distrustful of splendor.  But what medieval court was ever lusterless?  They knew their duty was to dazzle as the sun and stars.

And it wasn’t just the court who underdressed.   A subfusc Pistol?   A dun-colored Doll?  Drabs aren’t.

Maybe the production was shying--ere Henry was Fifth--from Olivier displays of glory.  Demythologizing.  Maybe they were recoiling from Richard.  Down, down I come; like glistering Phaethon.  Now there’s a king who played his symbols like a virtuoso, whelming in martyrdom.   (I haven’t seen the first play of this BBC tetralogy, but I hear it’s Fellini manqué.)  

steepholm sees the play as a balance of humours.

 “There's melancholic Henry IV; choleric Hotspur and Glendower; phlegmatic, self-controlled Hal; and not least, sanguine Falstaff. None of these men is satisfactory in himself, but combine them in the just proportion, and the play achieves a harmony beyond the reach of any of its characters. Now that I've put it that way to myself, the problem with playing Falstaff as SRB played him is apparent: it throws the humoural balance out of whack.”

A perceptive insight.  If Henry the Fourth is Saturn reigning, then you want your Falstaff to be jovial—Silenus at the least.

I would propose another imbalance in the film, of the mythic and mimetic.  Shakespeare knew not to make this history but something truer, being false.  Everything about this Falstaff’s performance is beautifully observed.  What’s missing is unseen.  (The force that through the green fuse...?)  Old as he is, he should be older still, a green man of the streets and cellars.  This winter king was dying in midsummer, moldy straw before Hal’s sickle blade had struck his heart.

Nine