In desperation, Henry finds that he must turn to his clownish oldest son. Hotspur, previously the greatest of Henry’s generals, now sets out to remove him from his throne, and Douglas, Hotspur’s erstwhile captive, becomes his ally. The captive Mortimer marries Glendower’s daughter (Kaitlin Manning) and switches sides Northumberland and his family fall out with Henry over a dispute concerning Hotspur’s prisoners. It is as though he is trying to escape his father’s pull to land in some other place, where good Sack is substituted for war, and political machinations are replaced by merry pranks.īut life is real and earnest, and victory has the consistency of jelly, in history as well as Shakespeare’s histories. Story’s Hal, on the other hand, is lighter than air, and as evanescent as a bottle of apple wine drunk on a beach on a summer’s evening. Hotspur’s uncle Worcester (Jan Knightley) calls him “political” and we see it and know it has been his salvation. Soon the King departs, and the heir apparent drops down to the ground, whistling the sound which will call his friends for another night of dangerous stunts and hard drinking.įoucheux’s Henry has the gravity of a planet, and we can see that his every utterance is the product of exquisite calculation. Wilson) and with Peto, Gadshill, Bardolf and the magnificent buffoon, Falstaff (Patrick McAndrew, Karwczyk, Steve Beall and Delaney Williams, respectively). His father’s problems are not his own, and he longs only for another night of carousing with his good friend Ned Poins (Matthew R. He yawns stretches shakes his head he has heard this all before, a hundred times or more and he does not give a fig for it. Hal hears all this, on a ledge fifteen feet above the monarch’s chambers. If only he could have a son like Hotspur, King Henry cries, instead of the lamentable Hal (Tom Story): a drunken fop, prone to foolish behavior with disreputable friends. But in the North, great news: Northumberland’s other son Hotspur (David Graham Jones) has slain a slew of Scots, and captured their leader. To the West, Glendower has captured Mortimer (Marcus Kyd), the son of the King’s ally Northumberland (Brian Hemmingsen). His English crown, won so recently through bloody battle, is at risk from troops led by the Welsh mystic Owen Glendower (David Bryan Jackson) and by Douglas (Mark Krawczyk), the fearsome Scot. It is dark in the great castle, and the King (Rick Foucheux) is troubled.
#HENRY IV PART 1 FOLGER FULL#
From the first moment the air is full of the awful uncertainty of that unstable age, at the dawn of the War of the Roses, and the stakes are unmistakably high. And what a magnificently powerful job Folger does with it, thrusting us through four-hundred-year-old dialogue into a world almost two hundred years older than that. Oh, what a wonderful story this is, the apparently fictional but well believed and beloved account of England’s greatest King, when he was but a drunken sot, the scourge and embarrassment of his father.
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