A couple of weeks ago, Ian McKellen posted a photo of himself in his latest role — a sleazy-looking chap in a black leather jacket clutching a glass of something strong. “Shakespeare’s ultimate gangster” read McKellen’s caption.
So who is this definitive Shakespearean hard man? Richard III? Macbeth? The sly, double-crossing Edmund from King Lear? No, it’s Falstaff, the roguish old knight who hangs out with Prince Hal in east London’s less reputable taverns in Henry IV. McKellen plays the ancient scoundrel — reputed to be Elizabeth I’s favourite character — in Robert Icke’s new staging, which repackages the two parts of the original into one bumper evening entitled Player Kings.
Falstaff is one of drama’s great comic creations — an entertaining braggart who spends much of his time boozing and boasting. He’s witty, venal and duplicitous. But, suggests Icke, look closely and there’s something much darker at work.
“Falstaff is a professional criminal,” says the director, 37. “He’s not a sort of jolly, velvet-clad Santa figure. The very consistent picture you’re given of Falstaff is somebody who, when he was a bit younger, would have been really quite frightening. And the problem is he is now fat and old. So what is the retirement plan? How do you deal with the fact that you can no longer dominate physically and the younger lions are snapping at your heels?”
In a drama about succession, that reading is key for Icke. While in the palace Henry worries about his errant son and his own fragile grip on leadership, Falstaff, young Prince Hal’s ersatz father, is likewise facing a potential power struggle. That makes Hal’s involvement with him and his fellow criminals all the more troubling and dangerous.
“I guess I’d had this view of [the plays] that Hal was involved in some japes,” says Icke. “It was slightly wild and they were nicking traffic cones or whatever. But actually the sums of money involved are huge; they’re violent; people die. Everyone thinks Hal is going to be dead before he’s 30.”
This is the type of diamond-sharp insight that has made Icke one of the UK’s most exciting directors over the past decade. Familiar works often look fresh in his hands: his superb 2017 Hamlet (with Andrew Scott) felt new-minted; his 2015 Oresteia delivered a two-millennia-old drama as an urgent examination of justice. He has a knack for unlocking a piece live on stage. For Schiller’s Mary Stuart (2016), a coin toss each night at the start of the show about Mary and Elizabeth I determined which actor would play which queen, drawing the audience into the jeopardy at the heart of that play.
There’s no such unifying gesture for the history plays, Icke says — Shakespeare is just too rich. But coursing through Player Kings is the observation that power is transitory and, to some extent, performative. The new title picks up on one of the funniest, most poignant scenes, in which Hal and Falstaff, prepping Hal for a visit to his father, take it in turns to pretend to be monarch and son. It also reminds us that Henry IV usurped the throne.
“It occurred to me that Henry IV’s only been on the throne for four or five years,” says Icke. “And this situation was never the plan. It’s not like Hal is Prince Harry. It’s not like he was born into [the royal] family.” Instead, we should understand that Hal has long had this gang of friends.
“You’re watching a group of people who sort of knew where they were and who he was. Then suddenly his dad’s the king. And nobody’s quite worked out how to assimilate that, including him. There’s something in the whole pattern of the play about people caught between the past and the future, trying to maintain a status quo which is not maintainable . . . That’s what I see as being the DNA structure of the story.”
Compressing the plays into one sitting will, he hopes, bring out those symmetries. But it does make for a mighty long night. Icke is unrepentant. “Theatre’s very strange,” he says, laughing. “It’s maybe the only thing in the world that people are happy to pay more to have less of. They buy a crazily expensive ticket and they’re like, ‘Oh great! It’s only 11 minutes long!’ That’s never been my feeling — as an audience member, I always love the big evening.”
For Icke, who grew up in Stockton-on-Tees, north-east England, the litmus test for a show is whether it would appeal to the 14-year-olds he knew at school. His productions — even of Aeschylus and Sophocles — are set in an approximate present and he jokes that he’s had a “Shakespeare security gate” in rehearsals for Player Kings, confiscating bogus “Shakespearean” acting: “You know, men who put one leg up on a stool and you’re like, ‘What are you doing? Nobody ever stands like that!’”
The job, he argues, is to deliver a play, however old, with the urgency of a new text. To those who balk at contemporary adaptations and modern-dress stagings, he cites a 1590s drawing made by writer Henry Peacham that appears to depict a performance of Titus Andronicus. “What’s fascinating is that, though Titus Andronicus is very definitely set in ancient Rome, the actors are all in Elizabethan dress. And you think, OK, so the gesture of these things from the beginning was not ‘Let’s recreate some sort of naturalistic historical period’ but something much looser . . . I would argue that the only authentic way to perform it is in contemporary costume because we know that’s what they did.”
Icke has recently spent time working with the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, where, he says, the tradition is to make “new things out of old things”. He staged Sophocles’ Oedipus there, delivered as a moral thriller set on election night. A new English version (with Mark Strong and Lesley Manville) will arrive in the West End this autumn just as the US (and possibly the UK) is gripped by-election fever.
Many of his shows focus on an individual — Hamlet, Elizabeth I, Orestes, the physician at the heart of The Doctor — called to action and plunged into uncertainty or conflict. Why so? Drama, he replies, excels at ambivalence, at foregrounding the complexity of truth and the gaps between fact and narrative. For him, that’s critical right now.
“In all sorts of ways we live in an age of very forceful certainty — certainty that isn’t quiet and thoughtful, but aggressive and self-advertising. The dominant mode is pitched battle. But it’s OK if there’s no clear right and wrong or if there are three right answers. It’s useful. Truth takes lots of different forms.”
‘Player Kings’, Noël Coward Theatre, London, April 1-June 22, then tours, playerkingstheplay.co.uk. ‘Oedipus’, Wyndham’s Theatre, London, October 4-January 5, oedipustheplay.com
