I think of the plays as dominated by Falstaff, but Eyre’s versions – in line with the whole season’s focus on the idea of kingship – place as least as much emphasis on the young Prince Hal’s troubled relationship with his father, Henry IV, as with his wayward, overweight tutor. It’s a brilliant moment, laying bare Hal’s vulnerability, his frailty, while also further clarifying his relationships with Falstaff and his father, and his rivalry with Hotspur too.
We are startled to see the mask Hal has made for himself break, so that he is again the frightened, adoring son eager for his father’s approval. The quiet contrast between Hal’s purposeful self-doubt – his spiritual humility –and the religiouse self-pitying sentiment of Richard II is understated but highly effective.Īnd if Hiddleston seems to play Hal with a cool, insouciant self-contained sense of entitlement, the shocked tears when his father slaps him in the face are thrilling.
Again, his piety is subtly emphasised here – we see him cross himself several times – and here it serves to show how wrong Henry IV is when he frets that his son might be as feckless a king as Richard II. I have written more about Tom Hiddleston as Hal in my review of Henry V. As a rule, I have tended to find the character something of a swaggering boorish dullard, but here the force of the man’s blunt personality was almost intoxicating: high on emotion, with a compelling, passionate, willful charm, he was a genuine counterpoint to the self-contained and withheld Prince Hal. In particular – and not to take anything away from Alan Armstrong – Joe is the best Hotspur I have ever seen. The casting of father and son actors Alun and Joe Armstrong as Northumberland and Hotspur is a stroke of brilliance. The correlation between the health of the body politic and the health of the king has rarely been more eloquently portrayed. And he is eaten away too by his son’s apparent recklessness and contempt for what Henry has bought so dearly, by the fear that Hal will fail to redeem his Plantagenat inheritance, and throw away all that Henry won. He is a man, as Prince Hal himself notes, eaten away by the responsibilities of power – and by the knowledge of what was done in order for him to claim it. Jeremy Irons as Henry IV dominates – no mean feat in a play that also features Falstaff – hollowed out though he is by the burden of the crown. The first thing to say is that, once again, the performances are matchless. I should probably say that the two parts of Henry IV are among my very favourite Shakespeare plays and certainly my favourite among the histories – and Orson Welles’ Falstaff adaptation, Chimes At Midnight is my some measure my favourite Shakespeare film – so I approached Eyre’s contributions to the Hollow Crown tetralogy with both excitement and trepidation. I have blogged an account of the Q&A here. There was a Q&A afterwards in which executive producer Sam Mendes interviewed Eyre and Simon Russell Beale, who stars as Falstaff. Once again, I was fortunate enough to be invited to a BFI screening of two films in the BBC’s new Hollow Crown season, Henry IV parts I and II, both directed by Sir Richard Eyre.
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