Word: hotspurs
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...theater's premiere, directed by Timothy Mayer, is if anything too faithful and tame. Shakespeare's play depicts a civil war brought about by a usurper King and the self-serving pretenders to his throne. Some productions emphasize the martial valor of the King's ablest rival, Hotspur; others exult in the merriment and dissipation of the Prince of Wales' favorite companion, Falstaff. The closest that Mayer comes to taking a point of view is to underline the play's presumption that history is made by men, not social forces: he ends many scenes with one or two figures frozen...
...wonder whether Coe actually heard Christopher Walken play or read Shakespeare before hiring him. The vocal deficiencies I cited in his Hotspur last month have not diminished. I don't want to give the impression that Walken's experience has been entirely in film, when in fact he has done a dozen Shakespearean roles on stage, including Hamlet eight years ago. I should think, however, that a person who has had all these outings and has now arrived at the age of 39 still so ill-suited to Shakespeare's verse would decide to turn his efforts else where...
...interests, personalities: now the apoplectic boss, now the courtly charmer, now the scholar and Renaissance man, now the buccaneer business baron. If Turner were a character from Shakespeare, and he has that kind of incandescence, he would be in equal parts the nobly ambitious Prince Hal, the impulsively belligerent Hotspur and the comically self-indulgent Falstaff. Says Schonfeld: "If Ted Turner were a color, it would be red-the red of the surface of the sun." Adds another Turner aide, insisting that he not be named: "Do I like Ted? Do you like a volcano?" Turner's wife Jane...
...role of Hotspur is in the hands and, alas, the voice--of Christopher Walken, winner of an Academy Award for The Deer Hunter. He has done a lot of Shakespeare in the past, though one would never guess it from his current performance. His regional American accent is all too prominent. His line-readings often make no sense. There are guttural sounds, snarls, nasalities, and a tendency to make every third line a climax. He seems to operate on a well-known theory; when in doubt, shout. There are better ways to convey pride, strength, and fearlessness. All this...
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...