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Missed opportunities By Robert Avila MANY OF THE plot points in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, and Henry IV, Part 2, read like a dream-colored anagram of contemporary political melodramas: A prince turns his back on the ruthless world of his father, the king – a usurper with a tenuous hold on the throne – preferring instead to party with his low-life friends. Eventually he turns his back once more, this time on his former comrades and drinking buddies, to assume the trappings of power as a birthright (receiving the parting paternal advice to distract his querulous subjects with patriotic rallying before a foreign foe). Add to timeliness the incentive of a successful new adaptation by Dakin Matthews, whose condensed three-act merging of Henry IV's parts 1 and 2 made a stir on Broadway last year, winning the Tony Award for best revival. Needless to say, the idea of staging a version by California Shakespeare Theater, where Matthews was artistic director in the mid-1980s, has an air of giddy possibility about it. Unfortunately, director Mladen Kiselov's production lets that air out pretty quickly, leaving us with a frequently stilted and unfocused treatment. As part of the production's depression-era schema, a large metallic cylinder stands center stage, reminiscent of the armor-plated conning tower of a modern warship. It neatly contains the whole of Narelle Sissons's set, splitting open to reveal the antithetical halves of a single hierarchical world: on one side of the rust-colored wooden interior we have the rustic environs of a humble and rather lawless tavern, on the other a military barracks. Beaver Bauer's costumes offer the scheming royals and aristos understated '30s finery, while the denizens of the tavern of Mistress Quickly (Joan Mankin) come decked out in the timeless vestments of the colorfully subaltern, with accents reminiscent of The Road Warrior's wasteland survivors or Peter Pan's pirates. To the chagrin of the dour representatives of law and order, Prince Hal (Sean Dugan) has opted to run with the group of merry outlaws led by the expansive (in every sense) Sir John Falstaff (Reg E. Cathey), a surrogate father, but one about whom he is increasingly ambivalent. Played as a jazzman toting a baritone sax, Cathey's vital and free-spirited Falstaff is unfairly taken for a corrupting influence on the wayward prince, but it's Falstaff's love for Hal that becomes the older man's undoing, not the other way around. Casting this relationship as one between an African American artist and a slumming white male (who will leave his mentor in penury upon reaching the top of the social pyramid) gives it a particularly American resonance. But this contrasts with the largely arbitrary way the '30s theme overlays the play. Moreover, Kiselov spends at least as much time balancing the humanity of Hal and his political and military rival, Henry Percy (a.k.a. Hotspur), as the two head to a showdown on the battlefield, a theme that never catches fire despite Graham Shiels's rambunctious Percy. In short, while providing nice opportunities for Stacy Ross as Lady Percy and Warren David Keith as self-aggrandizing leader Glendower, the scenes retained to flesh out Hotspur's quarrelsome humanity (and that of his fellow rebels) never compel, especially as the more interesting triangle between Hal and his competing fathers gets inconsistent attention. Less than inspired directorial touches, like placing a royal court stenographer in striking distance of the able James Carpenter's dyspeptic king or a photographer snapping photos of politically meaningful handshakes, become wearisome in their repeated use. Likewise, the persistent jazz score can prove distracting, even jarringly out of place (Benny Goodman's "Sing, Sing, Sing" in the battle sequence verges on frivolous and undercuts Falstaff's brilliant mockery of authority's deadly hypocrisies). If the best parts naturally feature Sir John and the denizens of Mistress Quickly's tavern, it's not just because of the humor of these scenes but also the remarkable antidote Falstaff provides to all the pompous blather of the historical characters, those would-be agents of national destiny so redolent of today's powermongers. There's no better illustration of this than Falstaff's wonderfully economical deconstruction of the word "honor" in the second act. (A little while after which, having played possum on the battlefield, he underscores his "catechism" with a final nod to Percy's lifeless corpse: "There's honor for you.") Falstaff's insistence on playing by his own rules – never with malice but always with an eye to (literally) expanding through pleasure his own personal realm, which is to say, his own person – stands as a bulwark against the totalizing power of the state, which relies on an inner consent as much as on a monopoly of violence to marshal the people under it, a consent Falstaff is constitutionally unable to give. The Henrys and Hotspurs of this world, dressing up murder with cheap calls to duty and patriotism, deserve a blast of Falstaff's invigorating laughter and staunch, utterly sane individualism – a welcome inoculation for us too against our own national drama now building to a third act sometime around November – and Matthews's shrewd adaptation makes delving into such terrain readily feasible. But Kiselov's confused, lackluster production largely squanders the opportunity. Under the circumstances, Falstaff's cry for more life in the midst of the cheat of the battlefield has an unwelcome ring of irony to it. 'Henry IV' runs through Aug. 1. Tues.-Thurs., 7:30 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m. (also July 31, 2 p.m.); Sun., 4 p.m., Bruns Memorial Amphitheater, 100 Gateway, Orinda. $13-$52. (510) 548-9666, www.calshakes.org. |
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