[In the following excerpted review of the 2000 Shakespeare season at Stratford-upon-Avon, Jackson describes the relatively “somber” mood of Michael Attenborough's Henry IV, the production's thematic emphasis on fathers and sons, and several strong performances, especially Desmond Barrit's witty but reticent Falstaff and William Houston's enigmatic Prince Henry.]

The two parts of Henry IV were presented with sparing use of symbolism. The overall effect was somber. The first play began with a tolling bell and chanting, as Bolingbroke kneeled at the front of the stage. He uttered as if in prayer his impassioned declaration of intent to lead an army to the Holy Land, while the as-yet-unidentified figures of Blunt and Westmoreland stood upstage, priestlike in their long-skirted gowns. After the news of dissent and potential rebellion and the king's resolve to meet the threat head-on, the scene ended with Henry standing in front of the throne at the back of the platform. Before he began to move, Falstaff's head emerged through a hole in the stage at his feet, as though erupting into the world of politics, war, and conscience. Hal crawled from underneath the throne, and the golden sheet draped over it was whisked upward, transforming the palace into the tavern. This association of Falstaff with the lower regions, not pursued subsequently in such literal terms, was the only symbolic moment of this kind. The juxtaposition of real and surrogate fathers was pursued, however, and paternity was in the air. On the battlefield in 5.1, the king lingered to look at Falstaff and the prince as he left the stage. In the sherris-sack speech that concludes 4.2 of Part 2, Falstaff spoke the words “If I had a thousand sons” with real wistfulness. As the knight limped off at the end of the speech, the sick king made a halting entrance for his final scene.

The treatment of the crown itself continued to echo Richard II. David Troughton removed it with difficulty and obvious relief, and put it on again with a sense of its physical oppression of the spirits. When he did not wear it, he tended to clutch it protectively to his bosom: the pillow on which he instructed his attendants to place the crown rested on his chest rather than beside his head. It was as much a sign of psychological dependency as a symbol of state. Lifting up the crown, Hal felt its weight and held it with the same possessive gesture as he took up the tone of his father's meditation. When the king and his son were finally reconciled, at the end of 4.3, they sat side by side at the foot of the bed, Bolingbroke holding the crown with a newfound familiarity, relaxed now that he was sure of its passage to the next generation. At the same time, he could now both speak to and touch his son with affection—an earlier tentative contact in 3.3 of Part 1 (“A hundred thousand rebels die in this”) ended in no more than a manly tap on the shoulder, and the first real embrace had been an awkward one in clanking armor after Hal saved his life at Shrewsbury.

The production's great strengths were its support of fine individual performances within the context of an ensemble, and the skillful pointing of significant actions. Falstaff was surprisingly gentle: quick-witted but never domineering, he was thoughtful and often amused by his own agility of mind or (in the monologues on honor and on sack) surprised to find how far his rather earnest cogitation had taken him. These were meditations rather than showpieces, and on the battlefield at Shrewsbury he was touchingly anxious to remain alive—“Give me life, say I” was spoken more as a plea than a defiance, with his arms stretched out in supplication. To point up Falstaff's relishing of his wit, Barrit caressed key words appreciatively but not self-indulgently, and he never roared or gave way to a false joviality. The opening of the second half of Part 1 (3.3) found him sitting on the tavern “throne” with his feet up, looking drawn and tired (“as melancholy as a gib cat or a lugged bear”), while Bardolph sat at his side, complacently darning a stocking. The comic twists in his sentences (such as “never went to a bawdy house above once in a quarter—of an hour”) were ruefully humorous, with no intrusive attempt to twinkle. Even in his lies about the Gadshill debacle, when consternation gave way to an enjoyment of his improvisation, Falstaff was not vulgarly triumphant, a reticence that served him well when the burlesque of Hal's interview with his father grew serious. After the first “Banish not him thy Harry's company,” Falstaff moved upstage to the side of the throne and placed his hand tenderly across the prince's bosom and on his arm. After a long pause he repeated the line, this time pleadingly, then returned to kneel in front of the improvised “state” before “Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.” The long pause before Hal's answer, “I do, I will” (spoken firmly and coldly by Houston as he looked out above Falstaff's head), was part of a shared moment that both understood. This was a feeling Sir John, capable of bravado but using the flourish sparingly. Stretched out under the table on which the tavern throne still stood, the sleeping Falstaff was a touchingly vulnerable figure. (As the prince read the tavern bills taken from his pocket, Peto fingered one of Falstaff's rings with a cutpurse's instinctive gesture.)

By the beginning of the second part, Falstaff was sick: sores marked his face, his walk was halting—like the king's—and his inquiry about the physician's opinion of his water was genuinely anxious. Falstaff seemed at low ebb, cut off from news of the goings-on at court. At the same time, he was quick to recognize and rebuke offensive behavior. The meeting with the lord chief justice was not as comfortably comic as the Falstaff of the late Robert Stephens, far more genially confident of his status, had made it in Adrian Noble's 1991 production. Fang and Snare, two gaunt officers who could have been drawn by George Cruikshank for a Dickens novel, were no real threat to Sir John, and his wheedling of the Hostess made a ready enough appeal to her underlying affection for him. The scene with Doll Tearsheet (2.4) showed Falstaff at his most vulnerable. Doll, herself pale and almost wraithlike, was not only affectionate but caressed him feelingly: for all his size and sickness, Falstaff was still attractive to her. Although the passage where the musicians play while Falstaff sits thoughtfully with Doll on his knee had a genuine tenderness, the scene as a whole was played with enough broad comedy to keep sentimentality at bay … Doll vomited into a trap down which a servant had just exited, and when Falstaff entered, a chamber pot was brandished carelessly and then emptied into the trap on the command “empty the jordan.” The surrender and subsequent dispatch to execution of Coleville of the Dale (of a piece with the inglorious “victory” brokered elsewhere in the forest) and the self-glorifying lies of Justice Shallow were fuel for Falstaff's wonder at a world whose very iniquity now lacked energy and panache. Shallow and Silence (Benjamin Whitrow and Peter Copley) were an outstanding double-act, with Silence soundlessly mouthing along to the reminiscences, he had heard so often before and even supplying “Lusty Shallow” before the speaker could get it out. In the wintry second orchard scene (5.3) Silence's sudden outbreaks of singing (in a thin, fine tenor voice) were accompanied by strange, happily self-absorbed little dances. For all the geniality and wistfulness of the scenes, Shallow was nervously self-regarding and greedy, eager to be on the make again by riding on Falstaff's coattails, and this qualified any sympathy for his loss of a thousand pounds when his patron was dismissed by the king. In a similar vein, Attenborough's production did not shirk the brutality and waste of military or civil life: Falstaff's callous attitude toward his soldiers disgusted Westmoreland and embarrassed Hal. In Part 2 the arrest of Doll Tearsheet was made especially brutal by the omission of the officer's joke about her giving birth to a cushion: a genuinely pregnant Doll was punched viciously in the stomach before being hauled off to prison.

Attenborough brought out the parallel family tragedy of the Percies. The second part opened with the agony of Northumberland (Christopher Saul), assailed by the ghostly voices of “Rumor” from all sides of the theater, recalling the king at the beginning of Part 1. Like him, Northumberland knelt, but then he prostrated himself, embracing the earth. His wife and Hotspur's widow were introduced as silent figures at the end of the scene. In Part 1 the relationship between Hotspur (Adam Levy) and his wife (Nancy Carroll) was played without sentimentality, her threat to break his little finger being spoken angrily rather than as a “feminine” endearment. Hotspur's energy was unassailable, though, and in this play the same actor made him a much more credible and formidable figure than the callow military cadet he had been in Richard II. Hotspur's anger at the letter in 2.4 was directed at the paper itself: he screwed it into a ball and threw it on the floor—and then lay down and harangued it. At the end of 3.1, after the haunting melody of the Welsh song, the wives of Hotspur and Mortimer were left onstage for a moment, united in grief.

William Houston was a thrillingly unnerving Prince Henry, sharp-eyed, clear-voiced, and altogether impossible to fathom. He was more good-natured in trading insults with Falstaff and in facing him down in the first than the second part, where he spoke directly to the audience, as though stepping further back from Falstaff. As for “I know you all,” in a discussion with students Houston described the difficulty of finding the feeling for this after working his way through 2 Henry IV and rehearsing and playing Henry V. On the days when the sequence began again, he had to try to forget the play he had just been in and the King Henry he had already become. In the Henry IV plays Hal seemed (appropriately) to be learning the ways of the world, politically as well as emotionally. At the Battle of Shrewsbury what he saw of Falstaff made him rueful but not priggish, and he kept his distance thereafter. In the final scene with his father he was passionate and intimate in a way he had never been with Falstaff, and it seemed in retrospect as though the knight had always initiated any physical intimacy. The new king's coldness toward his former companion was absolute but also entirely predictable to all but Falstaff himself. In the final moments of Part 2 the lord chief justice faced down Falstaff, who bowed slightly, put on his hat, and left the stage. Prince John scowled at the departing figure and exited, leaving the justice gazing after him with a look of concern. The effect was not simply of pathos but of a more general malaise. …