Henry IV, Donmar Warehouse - review: 'Phyllida Lloyd has crafted a grungy and rebellious production'

This all-female take on Shakespeare is bold, strange and mostly a success
Highly charged: Harriet Walter in a detailed performance as Henry IV / pic: Helen Maybanks
Helen Maybanks
Henry Hitchings16 November 2014

This all-female take on Shakespeare is bold, strange and mostly a success. It condenses Henry IV’s two parts into two hours, focusing mainly on the first play and its examination of kingship and the sheer abundance of language.

As with her previous all-female Julius Caesar here at the Donmar, Phyllida Lloyd has crafted a production that is grungy and rebellious. Its essential conceit is that Shakespeare’s plays are being put on by inmates of a women’s jail.

The audience convenes at a nearby community centre before being shepherded across the road into the grey auditorium, which is patrolled by mean-looking guards.

Stripping away minor characters, Lloyd concentrates on the relationship between King Henry, his callow but courageous son Hal and Hal’s grotesquely flawed yet charming associate Falstaff.

In early scenes Hal and Falstaff share a few lines of coke and we notice that the king’s crown is made out of old Irn-Bru cans. This sets the tone for an interpretation that defies taboos and ripples with humour. The casting is fresh and intriguingly unlikely. Clare Dunne’s Hal is a laddish Chelsea fan and her key confrontation with Jade Anouka’s gym-fit Hotspur turns into a boxing match.

Ashley McGuire is a superb Falstaff, mixing the predatory swagger of a wheeler-dealing geezer with notes of vulnerability, while Sharon Rooney from television’s My Mad Fat Diary makes a memorable stage debut as Hotspur’s affectionate wife.

Harriet Walter is the play’s most seasoned Shakespearean. As Henry she at times sounds curiously like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. It is a characteristically detailed and highly charged performance.

Purists will find much to revile: textual cuts, pulsating music, variety of accents. But this is an intimate, strikingly physical staging.

Apparently it is the second part of a trilogy of all-female Shakespeare plays. I suspect that King Lear will conclude the experiment, which has so far been bracingly inventive.

Until November 29, donmarwarehouse.com

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