Word: hal
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...fearlessness. All this is regrettable, for Hotspur is penned as a virtuoso of language. I kept getting the impression that Walken was rehearsing for Stanley Kowalski and repeatedly wandered onto the wrong set. (The AST's 1962 mounting of this play had similar problems with a Hotspur played by Hal Holbrook...
...best surprise of the production is Prince Hal, originally to have been played by Richard Thomas, who withdrew to work on a television film. His successor is Chris Sarandon, whose Hal turns out to be just splendid. I had seen him on stage and screen in modern parts, but nothing prepared me for the admirably trained classical actor he proves to be. Sarandon is now 40, but he has no trouble convincing us that he is a young man half his age, right down to the way he lolls on a bench He speaks clearly, clearly, and musically...
Reports of the historical Hal's fun-loving and riotous youth date from his own time. But Shakespeare gives him just one self-revelatory soliloquy in which Hal claims that his carousing is essentially an act and that he knows full well what will be expected of him as a mature ruler. The notion that he is a pretender as well as the Pretender has upset many critics (Quiller-Couch went so far as to brand the speech Shakespeare's "most damnable piece of workmanship"). But it can make sense of one perceives that there are two Hals. Good...
Quite shrewdly, Shakespeare brings Hotspur and Hal together only for the climatic personal duel at the play's end Here director Coe has made a serious mistake He bade his fight master. B H Barry, to stage the combat so that Hotspur repeatedly gains the advantage and could dispatch the Prince, but repeatedly chooses through sheer bravado to spare Hal and permit him to rearm Hal's combative skill is thus cheapened, and his eventual victory is made hollow, the result of mere chance. (It is, by the way, not known who slew the historical Hotspur...
Still, Coe's epilogue is affecting, with Hal all alone, facing front. He plants his sword firmly in the ground, makes the sign of the cross, picks up his weapon, and determinedly and sedately walks off upstage--a man who-unlike his father, has learned from intentionally mixing with all strata of society and is well along in the process of equipping himself for his destiny as the model hero-king, Henry...