Word: falstaff
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...Falstaff very much holds the stage here, now in witty talk of this or that, now in tavern scenes with Doll Tearsheet or Mistress Quickly, now in his travels through the Gloucestershire of Shallow and Silence. He is still marvelously exuberant, ingenious, incorrigible, but his revels are now ending. He and his cronies, whether sluts or simpletons, are tarnished with age and touched with pathos. But. more than that. Henry IV draws near his end, and soon a playboy Hal's untroubled head must wear the crown. Shakespeare now, against the last thinned merrymaking of rascals, counterposes the making...
Henry IV, Part I. The repertory group of Manhattan's Phoenix Theater has done so well with Falstaff, Hotspur, and Prince Hal that it has decided to do Part II when the present run ends April...
Henry IV, Part I is the richest of Shakespeare's chronicle plays, partly for the fire and dash of its impetuous Hotspur, pre-eminently for the titanic verve of its waddling Falstaff. Between the two of them - the one filled with chivalric ideals of honor, the other cynically dismissing honor as mere "air" - stand all manner of men, and of human ambitions and failings and faiths. About equally between them, at the center of the play, stands a youthful Prince Hal, who must grow from being a thoughtless playboy and Falstaff's roistering playfellow into Hotspur...
...same, Henry IV is almost unthinkable without Falstaff. Whether in the bottle scenes where he swaggers like a general, or in the battle scenes where he quivers like a jelly, this thieving, braggart liar, this gorging, guzzling "huge bombard of sack" who lives on his wits and gets by on his charm so bestrides the play that the great danger is he will completely distort it; he so domineers over it on occasion as to send royalty and even history packing...
...Stuart Vaughan, it keeps a happy balance, values its martial clang and stir, sets broadsword heroics against tankard humor, and is never for a moment a one-man show. But it is no less a virtue of the current production that Eric Berry's robustly nimble and resourceful Falstaff is by all odds the play's best-acted role. Donald Madden's Hotspur is properly dynamic too, though it substitutes mere energy for fire and dash. As Henry, Fritz Weaver makes a well-spoken tapestry King; only the Hal falls short, from too metronomic a speech...