John Morrison

Richard III

The Royal Shakespeare Company's designer Tom Piper writes interestingly in the programme for Richard III at the Roundhouse about the shift into modern dress from the broadly historical costumes used in Henry VI.  On the Guardian website I wrote last week about my irritation at the way the costumes for Henry IV and Henry V seemed to be a wacky mix-and-match selection of ahistorical elements from different centuries.  Piper's costumes for Henry VI were a more coherent blend of the medieval and the Elizabethan, though he explains that he wasn't trying for a rigorous period approach.  'Although people believe that the Henry VI trilogy is in period dress, I drew on influences from many periods: for example the major influence on the look of the soldiers is First World War uniforms, and they all wear contemporary army boots.  Jack Cade and his followers owe as much to Stanley Kubrick as to Bosch.  Many of the characters have coats which could easily be worn out on the street, they just lack pockets.'  Piper explains the shift into a more contemporary style of dress for Richard III as follows:  'At the end of the Henry VI trilogy Edward promises a lasting peace and declares an end to the civil war.  A shift into modernity is rather like the clean break with the past that he promises.'  I have to say I don't really follow this logic;  the continuity between the last part of Henry VI and Richard III is overwhelming, and the brave new world of peace never materialises.  In story terms, therefore, the logical thing would be to continue in a period framework.  Michael Boyd's direction at first seems to emphasise the continuity by picking up in the opening scene exactly where the previous play ends -- with Richard of Gloucester cuddling a swaddled baby, the infant offspring of his brother King Edward.  But this time, before he launches into 'Now is the winter of our discontent...' Richard's white swaddling sheet is revealed to contain nothing at all -- it's merely a large napkin on which he wipes his chin.  But as the play progresses and it becomes clear that mediaeval costumes have been swapped for modern ones, apart from the ritual elements such as swords and crowns, it's clear why Boyd decided that the last play in the cycle needed a slightly different approach.  While Henry VI is all Sturm und Drang, highly physical and full of movement, Richard III is less about civil war than about high-level politics, and it relies more on words than on violent action.  So there are no more flying trapezes and no more use of the space under the stage.  The use of music, sound effects and stage smoke is more restrained, quite rightly, so as not to get in the way of Jonathan Slinger's outstanding performance as Richard.  The switch to modern dress gives the play a different feel and also enhances the moments when the supernatural seems to break through.  Katy Stephens' Queen Margaret brings a sack on stage (sacks occur quite frequently in this cycle of plays) and as she curses Richard and the other Plantagenets, she reassembles the skeleton of her dead son.  The contemporary clothes worn by those who are watching this grisly spectacle seem to accentuate the frisson of horror.  There's another nice moment when we're reminded that violence isn't a monopoly of the late middle ages.  When Tyrrel murders the young princes, he proves to Richard that he has done the deed by showing him a photo he has taken on a mobile phone.  Slinger's performance brings to mind a whole string of psychopathic dictators and their henchmen.  At one point, while dreaming on the night before the battle of Bosworth, he suddenly sheds his deformities and does a pirouette across the stage.  Among last night's audience was Sir Antony Sher, who played Richard for the RSC back in the 1990s as a cripple on crutches.  I missed that production, but I've seen the part played on stage by Sir Ian McKellen and by Kathryn Hunter at Shakespeare's Globe.  I'm not going to make comparisons, but just say that I enjoyed this one the most because I'd had the opportunity to see Henry VI beforehand.  Robert Mugabe, Kim Jong Il and other dictators won't be coming to the RSC's Richard III, but the play's message about tyranny will never go out of date.  The slippery slope starts when people start to believe that the end always justifies the means.  As Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty writes in the programme notes, 'It begins perhaps with the sofa informality of the ''off the record'' meeting and ends with scriveners re-writing history and lawyers advising that a little bit of torture might be possible in extremis.'  Exactly.

Henry VI part 3

Blood. There's a lot of it about in the RSC's Henry VI trilogy, but it's highly effective.  Ever since as Julius Caesar (aged 16) in the school play I expired as a knife crime victim on the Capitol steps, having crunched a nice fizzy red blood capsule, I've wondered why gore on stage is sometimes effective and sometimes not. I think when there's too much, it doesn't work and the audience just see the fakery.  My wife, normally the first to duck under the seat when there's violence, stood totally unmoved through Titus Andronicus at Shakespeare's Globe. 'I just didn't believe in any of it,' she said.  There's a lot of genuine Grand Guignol horror in Shakespeare, with countless stabbings and disembowellings and scary moments such as the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear.  But Shakespeare came to realise that the most effective horrific moments come from inside the mind -- Lady Macbeth washing away non-existent blood, or Macbeth seeing Banquo's ghost.  In Henry VI there's a lot of both kinds of horror. Director Michael Boyd's use of ghosts is very deft;  victims repeatedly rise up after they have been stabbed and haunt their murderers.  Bodies expire and at the end of the scene, get up and walk off stage like souls heading for purgatory.  In the brilliantly staged battle scenes, fighters have blood smeared on their hands and temples.  But the gore is carefully calibrated, and this is one of the ways in which Boyd's production is so satisfying.  The only real moments when violence turns into pure unadulterated sadism come from Richard of Gloucester, the future Richard III, beautifully played by Jonathan Slinger, who turns the hunchback into a highly convincing psychotic. Everyone else uses violence as a means to an end, while Richard revels in it for its own sake. In the final scenes of part 3, Boyd's relative restraint with the fake blood in the previous 10 hours of drama pays off.  With the death of Henry VI, there is suddenly far more blood on stage than ever before.  Chuk Iwuji, stabbed by Richard, pukes it up in a great fountain.  And for the first time, the dead man doesn't get up.  Richard has to awkwardly drag Henry's body into the wings.  When King Edward enters with his queen to announce final victory over the Lancastrians and makes a circuit of the stage, his white robe sweeps the floor and picks up a dramatic crimson trimming.  At the same time the stage is carpeted in white and red feathers.  It's a brilliant moment which doesn't seem OTT.  Stage effects and visual metaphors work best when they take the audience by surprise, rather than being repeated ad nauseam.  Less can sometimes be more.

I'll probably have more to say about Jonathan Slinger after seeing Richard III on Saturday.  Part 3 was another opportunity to see Katy Stephens as Margaret of Anjou, a steely femme fatale from the same stable as Margaret Thatcher.  I was reminded of Francois Mitterrand's legendary remark after meeting the blessed Maggie: 'Les yeux de Caligula et la bouche de Marilyn Monroe'.  I wondered for an idle moment in part 2 if Jack Cade's rebels would start chanting 'Maggie Maggie Maggie! Out Out Out!' like 15th century poll tax rioters.  But sensibly, they didn't.  I think, as pompous theatre critics are wont to say, that we shall see more of Katy Stephens, whose CV indicates that she hasn't acted much in London before, apart from Tamburlaine at the Barbican.  She's a sizzling actress in the Diana Rigg mould and I would like to see her playing Lady Macbeth or in a few years time, Cleopatra.  She has great timing and delivery and, I suspect, a gift for comedy as well.  Part 3 also delivered a majestic performance from Patrice Naiambana as Warwick.  As the Histories cycle progresses, I'm getting a sense of how tightly-knit an ensemble this is and how they manage to be totally at home with each other, with their costumes and their weapons, and with the set and stage.  After some two years of rehearsals and performances, perhaps they should be.  But it's still a wonderful achievement and one of the theatrical events of the decade.

Henry VI part 2

A journalist friend of mine came back from reporting in Iraq a few years ago and said: 'Unfortunately there aren't any good guys.'  I feel a bit the same about Shakespeare's depiction of 15th century England.  Under Michael Boyd's inspired direction, this Histories cycle just gets better and better.  I felt last night's performance -- which had the audience cheering on its feet -- was the best yet.  The way Boyd has managed to conjure up a magical performance space at the Roundhouse makes me feel that this is the venue the RSC has been seeking in London ever since Adrian Noble's ill-judged decision to quit its traditional home in the Barbican six years ago.  None of the traditional proscenium arch theatres in the West End which in which the RSC has nested since then has delivered the excitement of the current series of performances. It's big like a circus tent but intimate enough for a speech to be delivered in a semi-whisper -- used to good effect when the disgraced Duchess of Gloucester encounters her husband. Boyd once again makes spectacular use of the space and of the relationship with the audience -- it's clear he's learned a trick or two from Shakespeare's Globe.  The rusty steel thrust stage, with its spiral staircase enclosed by a towered structure at the back, enclosed by clanging steel doors, is ideal for the 'Sturm und Drang' of action plays like this.  With ghosts emerging from under the stage and dead bodies suspended on ropes like purgatorial victims, we get a sense of the cosmology of Shakespeare's world.  Boyd uses deft theatrical code to bring to life some of the trickier passages -- the moments when the audience start consulting the programme's family tree of the Yorkists and Lancastrians.  When Richard Duke of York expounds his right to the throne by detailing his genealogy, he tips out a sack of stones on stage and uses them to plot his family tree. It's a simply trick, brilliantly done.  Clive Wood, superbly thuggish as Henry IV in the other part of the series, is excellent as Richard, the capo di tutti capi of the Yorkists.  Last night we got a glimpse of Jonathan Slinger as the young Richard III, and Chuck Iwuji developed his portrayal of the ineffectual Henry VI to great effect.  Geoffrey Streatfeild was an oily and convincing Suffolk, while Katy Stephens sizzled as his lover Margaret of Anjou.  John MacKay followed his aerial turn as the French Dauphin by putting Jack Cade up on a trapeze as well.  The Kentish rebel can be played as the mediaeval equivalent of an cocky trade union leader (a sort of Bob Crow) but MacKay turns him into a clearly unhinged charismatic figure, the founder of a millennial cult like the Khmer Rouge or the Lord's Resistance Army.  The mob are not just orthodox mediaeval peasants like the ones who decorate the Northern Line platform at Charing Cross, but a deeply sinister bunch who seem to have stepped out of a painting by Hieronymous Bosch.  They're following a pyschopath.  We haven't had a good riot in London since the poll tax, and the RSC gives us one.  Cade's supporters are steeped in blood, and when they drag an audience member on stage for a mock execution, it's deeply unnerving, not just a pantomime moment. When one of the gang shouts 'Kill all the lawyers!' a spotlight turns on the audience as the rioters pick out their next victim.  Death and violence beget more death and violence, and in this play the cycle of gore and betrayal is unrelenting.   Murder is just politics by other means, Shakespeare tells us.  He takes us into situations where the authority of the state collapses like a soap bubble in the clash of personal ambitions.  Once or twice in my career as a journalist abroad I found myself caught up in these violent moments, so last night when the Duke of York made his power play against Henry I started thinking of watching Boris Yeltsin's confrontation with the Russian parliament rebels in October 1993.  Forget documentary theatre;  I can't think of any modern political play that's half as exciting as Henry VI.  Sarajevo, Basra, Baghdad, Kigali, Kabul.  The unnverving thing about Shakespeare is that you feel he knows these places better than we do.

Henry VI part 1

This is Shakespeare week for me;  After the first part of the Henry VI trilogy on Saturday, I'll be back in the Roundhouse another three times to see the other two parts and then Richard III.  Can you have too much of a good thing?  Absolutely not.  Michael Boyd's long-term vision for the RSC seems to have paid off triumphantly.  I always enjoy seeing the Shakespeare plays that I don't know very well;  being unfamiliar with the text permits me to look at the play as if it was a piece of new writing, and I can feel genuine surprise at the experience.  I was going to avoid blogging about Henry VI until I'd seen all three plays, but the first instalment was so thrilling that I decided not to wait.

I've never seen Henry VI performed intact before;  in fact the only time I've seen it on stage was in a two-part adaptation a few years ago by Edward Hall's all-male company from Newbury under the title Rose Rage.  That had its moments but the chopping up of offal on stage to make the point about England becoming a slaughterhouse was repeated far too often.  On Saturday, worried that I might once again get my Yorkists and my Lancastrians muddled up, I quickly read the first three acts on my way to the Roundhouse.   It's an all-action play, written relatively early in Shakespeare's career, and lacks some of the psychological subtlety of the later histories;  but the rumbustious battle scenes fit like a glove into Michael Boyd's highly physical staging, with lots of ropes, ladders, platforms and trapezes.  At the opening the dead Henry V, barefoot and white as a sheet, descends the spiral stairs at the back of the stage and, flecked with blood, falls into his grave.  Later on La Pucelle (Joan of Arc) meets an equally spectacular death.  Boyd's high-octane theatrical treatment seems to work better on this play than it did with the more intricate Henry IV.   One neat touch I particularly enjoyed as a former occupant of the House of Commons Press Gallery was the opening scene of Act 3, when the Bishop of Winchester and the Duke of Gloucester knock rhetorical lumps out of each other in parliament.  Boyd posts vocal supporters of both characters around the theatre to boo and cheer, and the result is a 15th century session of Prime Minister's Questions.  As in Henry V, the French are a bunch of bling-obsessed, self-admiring prats (I so wish Gordon Brown could have taken President Sarkozy to the Roundhouse...)  Boyd's production highlights Shakespeare's up-to-date insight that in politics and war, it's the perception of the other side, not the reality, that frequently determines victory.  Talbot vanquishes the French until his luck runs out because his reputation as a warrior has preceded him.  And La Pucelle doesn't have to be a real witch to frighten the English;  it's enough that they believe she is one.  Eventually her luck runs out as well and her shadowy 'fiends' ignore her calls for help.  The play ends with a botched peace between England and France, a cynical deal that seems to foreshadow further conflict.  Where have we encountered that sort of thing before?   As well as the balletic and bloodstained battle scenes, this production delivers some memorable acting.  Chuck Iwuji captures the wide-eyed innocence of the young and hopelessly ineffectual King Henry, and Keith Bartlett is brilliant as the old warrior Talbot, whose death scene after his son is killed is genuinely moving.  Geoffrey Freshwater is once again outstanding as the scheming Bishop ofWinchester.  Geoffrey Streatfeild (Prince Hal/Henry V) here gets to play the juicy part of Suffolk, who brings back the femme fatale Margaret of Anjou as a bride for Henry but really wants her for himself.  The ambiguity of the scene between the two of them seems to me to match anything Shakespeare wrote in his more famous plays.  Margaret begins as Suffolk's captive but two pages later, she has managed to slip a noose around him without him realising it.  Newcomer Katy Stephens brings off an astonishing double act by twinning the roles of La Pucelle and Margaret, with barely a minute or two to get her breath back and change dresses in between.  As Joan she's callous, brutal and slightly unhinged, a war groupie who is turned on by blood.  As Margaret, she slinks erotically around the stage in a beautiful red dress, clearly a man-eater who spells trouble, a 15th century Carla Bruni or a Charlotte Rampling.  I can't wait to see what she gets up to later in the week. 

Harper Regan

I'm worried I may be turning into a West End Whinger.  Tonight I skipped the second half of a new play, something I do very rarely.  The last time was also at the Cottesloe, when I lost patience with Samuel Adamson's Southwark Fair a couple of years ago.  This time I didn't even retire to the bar for a glass of Merlot.  In fact it would have taken several bottles of Merlot to make me want to go back for the second half of this turgid new play by Simon Stephens about a woman who travels from her home in Uxbridge to her parental nest in Stockport where her father is ill.  She gets there too late and he's already dead, so she goes to the pub...Actually, I won't bother explaining what happens.  It's just too tedious.  By leaving before the final whistle I may of course have missed a scintillating second half which would have revealed Simon Stephens as the new Shakespeare. I haven't seen any of his other work, so I entered the theatre with an entirely open mind. But an hour of indescribable tedium, stilted dialogue and unbelievable characters was quite enough. Stephens seems for some reason to be very popular in Germany, where theatre is so heavily subsidised that it doesn't have to bother much about entertaining the punters and putting bums on seats.  I don't mind bad writing if at least there's a pulsating sense of energy underneath, but this was limp stuff.  Like Adamson, Stephens seems on the evidence of this play incapable of writing a scene that involves more than two characters.  The set is a dreary grey, rather like the outside of the National Theatre.  At some point I was hoping to sniff (metaphorically speaking) something nasty buried under the floorboards that would bring the play to life, but by the end of Act One it hadn't appeared.  The actors seemed to be doing their best to make us believe in the lines they were speaking, and no blame should be attached to the director Marianne Elliott, whose rising reputation should survive intact.  I'm sure my spirits will recover next week when I go to the three parts of Henry VI at the Roundhouse.  As for this play, I am sure it will be a big hit in Germany.

Howard Brenton

My detour to the Lyttelton theatre for a 40-minute NT platform with Howard Brenton was supposed to be the hors d'oeuvre of the evening but turned out to be the plat de resistance.  I'd never seen him before and having missed the whole Thatcher era while living abroad, I never got to see his early leftie plays.  So I was interested to hear him talk about Never So Good, his play about Harold Macmillan.  Rather than sitting down for a prim interview with a critic like most platformers, Brenton strode on to the stage alone, obviously delighted to be in the limelight, spoke for just a couple of minutes and gave straight answers to questions for more than half an hour.  Although I had reservations about the play, I warmed to Brenton himself, not because of his political views or even his playwriting skills, but because I liked his lack of pomposity and his troublemaking streak.  He confessed that the play's opening line 'I always had trouble with my teeth' was for a long time all he had of his play.  What he started out with was the idea of a satirical  attack on the old Tory right whose decay and collapse formed a prelude to the rise of Thatcher.  Macmillan was picked as a representative of everything Brenton hated in his youth.  'But I got seduced', he told us with disarming frankness.  'I began at the age of 65 to wander into a new area as a playwright.'  Brenton described his play as a pageant and an entertainment, described the thrill of reading Macmillan's unpublished diaries in the Bodleian library and the paradox of discovering that Macmillan's early book 'The Middle Way' advocated nationalisation and the replacement of the Stock Exchange with a national investment board. I'm still not sure that Macmillan was quite such a failure as Brenton makes him out to be.  After Churchill, Thatcher and Baldwin, he can probably be regarded as the fourth most successful Tory prime minister of the last century.  But Brenton is keen to give him his due and be fair.  Listening to him, I felt that the old Edwardian charmer had claimed another victim from beyond the grave.  Macmillan was a deeply moral man, which is why he failed to grasp the Profumo scandal, according to Brenton.  So there we have it:  former leftwing firebrand playwright gets to grips with his Tory hate-figures and changes his mind.  What we need now is for Brenton to do a play about Maggie and give her equally positive treatment.  Given a few more years, he'll be a national treasure like Kingsley Amis, or even Macmillan himself, who in Brenton's words 'had a sunny old age'.

Fram

Theatres don't generally like people writing about the first preview of their shows, particularly when the production is of an ambitious new play.  But when the National Theatre is concerned, the production standards are so high that nobody who sees a preview is likely to be short-changed. At last night's performance of this stunning new play by NT veteran Tony Harrison, the only minor glitch was the failure of the two leading actors to make it up out of the bowels of the stage revolve to take their curtain call.  Fram means 'forward' in Norwegian and it was the name of the polar exploration vessel which Fridtjof Nansen designed and built so that it would not be crushed in the Arctic ice.  Harrison's play is loosely based on Nansen's life, but it's less an exploration of the man's pyschology than an extended meditation on the themes and issues that dominated his career.  That makes it sound a bit dry; it isn't.  The play is visually a feast, so much so that I went away remembering the images, not the words.  Harrison's rhyming verse ranges from the sublime to the panto-level banal. Aurora rhymes with snorer, discussions rhymes with Russians.  At times his quirky in-jokes about poetry,the National Theatre and Greek tragedy (his forte) verge on the brink of being self-indulgent, but all this is redeemed by some superb scenes where his language has a lacerating sharpness.  The set by Bob Crowley, who is listed as co-director with Harrison, eclipses anything I've seen on the Olivier stage for its ambition and invention, ranging from Westminster Abbey to the Arctic ice via the Bolshoi Theatre and making imaginative use of slides and back-projection.  It's constantly surprising, with moments where the author illustrates his theme of humanity and inhumanity with disconnected tragic images, including two African children frozen to death as stowaways in the wheel housing of an airliner, and a Kurdish poet with his mouth and eyes sewn up.  Harrison gives us not just the gilded boxes and the red curtain and the music of the Bolshoi, but the real ballet as well , danced by the Royal Ballet's Viviana Durante.  She's worth the ticket price on her own.  Her appearance is peripheral to the theme of the play, but it adds to the extraordinary quality of this production.  That wonderful actress Sian Thomas, whom I last saw playing a Holocaust denier in a ghastly play at the Hampstead Theatre, has a great part in this one -- the actress Sybil Thorndike -- and makes the most of it.  The highlight is a scene where she intervenes in a rather lifeless discussion about whether photography or art can best convey the horror of the Russian famine of 1922 by acting out the drama of a starving woman who starts to eat human flesh.  It's an old-fashioned tour de force.  Harrison builds the drama around two pairs of characters, the first being Sybil Thorndike and her friend the classicist Gilbert Murray (also portrayed in fictional form in Shaw's Major Barbara at the National).  Their link with Nansen is that like him, they were early supporters of the League of Nations.  Harrison uses them to explore whether art can ever be a force for good. Can putting on a play ever help the starving?  Or should we accept Adorno's grim conclusion, quoted in the programme, that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric?   Eventually Murray (a delightful performance by Jeff Rawle) smashes the mask of tragedy which is one of the play's recurring images.  The other twinned characters are Nansen and his polar companion Hjalmar Johansen, who later took to drink and killed himself.  As Nansen evolves from egotistical Darwinian to selfless humanitarian, Johansen (Mark Addy) accompanies him like a cynical doppelgaenger. Johansen suggests that if Darwin is right, then surely we should forget our taboos about cannibalism and put each other in the stewpot.  The play ends on a more upbeat note, with the suggestion that morality and generosity can trump Darwin, and humanity can still cooperate to save itself.  Nansen believed that the weakening power of the sun would eventually push the earth into a polar freeze.  A century later when we're all worried about global warming, the scientific picture looks quite different, but the moral question is exactly the same. We have to help each other or die.  While Johansen is suitably Mephistophelian and has some of the best lines in the play, Nansen the worthy Norwegian comes over as a crashing bore, which gives Jasper Britton who plays him an almost impossible task.  He's a cypher without much inner life, and it seems to me that Harrison rather lost interest in him at an early stage.  This isn't a biographical play about character, however, but a work of images and ideas.  There are some minor characters (the ARA relief workers in Russia and the do-gooders Ruth Fry and Eglantyne Jebb) who seem to me inessential to the play, and there's a long scene in a London drawing room at the end of the first half which needs cutting.  But I would rather go to see an ambitious non-realist play like this one than a dozen run-of-the-mill realist plays by writers who don't have Harrison's powers of imagination.

Stanislavsky

In the totalitarian concrete bunker of the National Theatre, upstairs on the way to the Olivier stage, there's a fascinating exhibition of old Russian theatrical photographs on at the moment.  They show Konstantin Stanislavsky's early Moscow Art Theatre productions with the original casts, including Chekhov's wife Olga Knipper.  They include Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and Gorky's The Lower Depths, set in a doss-house.  Many years ago I saw this play at the Moscow Art Theatre and I think they were probably still using the same set, because it looked familiar.  There are also production photographs from Gogol's The Government Inspector and plays by Andreyev and Tolstoy.  Anyone who wants to see how Russian peasants and workers really dressed a century ago should go and see it.  The photos come not from Moscow, but from the Stanislavsky collection at Rose Bruford College.  I'd be interested to know how they made their way to London.

Henry V

A thrilling three and a quarter hours of acting from the RSC team at the Roundhouse.  But how will they ever manage to do both parts of H4 and H5 in one day on April 16th?  I should think Geoffrey Streatfeild will manage it somehow, but I wonder if the critics will really enjoy seeing all three plays in one day.  Streatfeild delivers a great mixture of heroism, dash and occasional uncertainty as Henry V, totally consistent with his performance as the wayward Prince Hal.  I was however confused and irritated by the eclectic postmodernism (EPM) of the sets and costumes, and I felt this play was over-designed.  Michael Boyd puts the French court on trapezes which descend from the flies and rise again, while the English are stuck on terra firma.  It's a great metaphor but I felt it would have worked better as a one-off rather than being repeated throughout the play.  The tennis balls also come down from on high and scatter themselves all over the French herald.  The thing about visual metaphors in the theatre is that they are hugely tempting for designers, but occasionally the director has to say no.  Otherwise the risk is of over-egging the pudding.  I remember the relentless repetition of the meat-chopping metaphor in Edward Hall's Rose Rage a few years ago, a two-part all-male version of Henry VI.  By the time the offal had been chopped for the umpteenth time, I felt like passing a note up on to the stage to say 'Thank you, Edward, we've got it, now can we move on please?'  My reaction to the trapezes at the Roundhouse was rather the same.  In the last act of Henry V fifteen plain pine boxes that look a bit like coffins are dragged on stage and covered with boards to create a temporary stage upon the stage, on which the concluding scenes are played.  There's a message here about the peace with France being built on a flimsy structure that rests on dead bodies, but it's rather too obvious.  And because this temporary structure really is flimsy, Streitfeild nearly measured his length last night when one of the boards became dislodged.  I also felt that, as in the first part of Henry IV, there was too much musical accompaniment.  Why is there a piano descending from on high to tinkle away during the French court scenes?  Sometimes in the theatre, as the great Peter Hall once said, LESS IS MORE.

My other beef about this production, which I'll be writing about at greater length on the Guardian website,  concerns the costumes, which seem to me an incoherent mix of mediaeval, Tudor and modern. Excellent actors like these don't need trapezes or cowboy boots to make Shakespeare meaningful.  You can take Shakespeare into any century or any country and make him meaningful, but you have to make up your mind where you're heading.

Henry IV Parts 1 and 2

Ah, the Roundhouse!  In its early theatrical heyday I went there in the 70s and 80s to see Ariane Mnouchkine's 1789! and the Rustaveli Theatre from Georgia.  I even recall some kind of radical media conference in about 1972 when the platform was stormed by a posse of feminists in dungarees. In 2002 I went to see the last RSC season there, which was excellent despite the company's financial implosion.  We saw The Tempest, Adrian Noble's Middle Eastern Pericles and an extraordinary Winter's Tale directed by Matthew Warchus and set in America, with Virginia hillbillies and Douglas Hodge playing Leontes with a sharp Noo York accent.  Since then the place has had several million pounds spent on it and is, not surprisingly, much better equipped and less scruffy. Most of the time it's now a rock venue.  But the essential circular space of the engine shed is exactly the same, and perfect for theatre.  Since it reopened I've been there just once,  to see Tim Supple's extraordinary Indian Midsummer Night's Dream in 2007.  My only doubts about that show concerned the acoustics, because not all of it was audible.  I've been wondering whether the current season by the RSC, in which artistic director Michael Boyd is putting on all Shakespeare's history plays over a two-month period, would be affected by the same problem.  Well, the good news is that the acoustics seem fine, and the RSC season has got off to a flying start.  The Roundhouse has been transformed with a terrific thrust stage that gives every member of the audience a great view.  At the back, there's a rusty metal spiral staircase with curved double doors in the centre at the bottom, rather like the doors to the 'tiring house' at Shakespeare's Globe.  Above the stage there's a complicated structure that allows the actors to abseil down ropes and climb down ladders, and even to descend at high speed in an iron cradle, so that the play becomes truly three-dimensional.  Boyd's History season is a high-intensity enterprise for the actors, all of whom are playing several parts, but it's a pity that the RSC won't be around in London for longer and that so few people will get to see work of this quality.    Since they abandoned their six-month seasons at the Barbican Arts Centre there's been a 'blink and you miss it' quality about the RSC's visits to the capital, and their peripatetic status has probably cost them the loyalty of a lot of their core audience.  But on the plus side, the Roundhouse as currently configured is a far better theatrical space than the Barbican. 

Michael Boyd has given his assistant director Richard Twyman prime responsibility for the second part of Henry IV, but the two plays form a seamless whole.  If anything, I preferred Twyman's part two because I felt it had less intrusive plinking and plonking by the musicians, and possibly because it's just a better play. David Warner is a magnificent Falstaff, like a gone-to-seed Father Christmas twirling his stick and his sword, and Clive Wood is an excellent and thuggish Henry IV.  This Henry is a usurper, a bad baron rather than a real king.  In the opening scenes Wood, rather than remaining seated on a grand throne, swaps seats with his barons and fingers his crown nervously. His status is deliberately pitched at the same level as the barons who will try to overthrow him. The highlight of the acting comes from Geoffrey Streatfeild as Prince Hal, who hits just the right notes.  His transition from tavern barfly to military hero is beautifully played and his repudiation of Falstaff at the end of part two suggests hesitation and uncertainty hiding under a decisive exterior.  Rather than sounding cruel and abrupt, the newly crowned Henry V seems a little ashamed to be casting Falstaff off with such cruelty;  when Falstaff blusters to Shallow that the king's public words don't reflect his private feelings, we feel he might just be right.  I've been watching Streatfeild's career since I first saw him on stage as a gifted teenage actor in the 1990s at Sevenoaks School, where it was clear that he was destined for a career in the theatre. A couple of years later I caught a student production of As You Like It which he directed at the Edinburgh Fringe, and more recently I saw him as Captain Stanhope in the highly successful West End revival of Journey's End.  It's a pity that if the Olivier awards panel sticks by the rules, neither his performance nor any of the others in the RSC season will be eligible for gongs in 2008.  (The rules say plays have to be performed 30 times in London to be considered.)

The costumes for Henry IV are by Emma Williams.  Half the cast, including most of the powerbrokers, are clad in black and white and the other half, the low-lifes, are in colour.  There's a feeling of cavaliers and roundheads which fits the play quite well.  But I was left puzzled and irritated by the arbitrary lurches between mediaeval, Jacobethan and later periods.  I'm quite happy to have my Shakespeare served up in mediaeval armour, in Elizabethan doublet and hose, or in 21st century suits or camouflage, but I like directors and designers to make their choice and stick to it.