Fathers & Son
March 2013
Bell Shakespeare: Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2
Not usually mentioned amongst the glittering peaks of Shakespeare’s dramatic works, nevertheless Henry IV Parts 1 & 2 together represent a brilliant and moving tour de force. Here the Bard not only examines the eternal father-son relationship and the politicking of succession – ever relevant to our riven, factionalised national body politic – but also introduces us to one of his greatest comic creations, the immortal Falstaff. This old barfly poet with a razor wit is one of the last of the original, mercurial, Rabelaisian, medieval life-loving breed of carousers, with his sack and his capon and his whoring, in love with the moon and the poetry of life, tuned to detect food and drink and women as much as he is tuned to detect hypocrisy in any form. Falstaff – played here by John Bell himself, is a remnant of a disappearing England – with Prince Hal’s ascension to the throne, “pragmatic and in some ways Machiavellian,” suggests Bell, comes a world of rationalism, science and well-crafted political scheming that is foreign to the essential goodness and naïveté of Falstaff.
Bell has known the play since he was fifteen. He fell in love with it then, and that love has stayed with him ever since. “Parts 1 and 2 together, as one continuing saga – it’s quite an extraordinary achievement,” Bell believes. “It’s Shakespeare at his most realistic, in terms of the observation of everyday people. There’s no dramatic gloss over characters such as Falstaff, Bardolph, Peto – they are all authentic, drawn straight from life.”
And indeed linguistically, this is one of Shakespeare’s richest plays, with its tavern brawls, its evocation of whoring and thievery, and its many drunken speeches drawing heavily on a grassroots vernacular, set off against some typically noble royal speeches in the context of war and civil rebellion.
“The court characters only speak in verse, and the tavern characters in prose,” points out Bell. “Prince Hal is the one who speaks both, jumping between the two, as he moves between the palace and the pub.”
Bell had always felt apprehensive about taking on the character of Falstaff, feeling it was not within his range, “not really the sort of role I should go for”. But friends encouraged him, and he’s now having the time of his life. Worried about whether he was up to the physical and temperamental side of playing Falstaff, Bell now finds it a great release. “There’s something in myself that responds very easily to Falstaff.” Rather than trying to become the role, which Bell admits he has done recently with some of the more serious Shakespearean roles, it’s now just a matter of playing, and enjoying. “Letting the child within yourself out for a run,” he suggests, which is “the essential part of acting.”
Falstaff is one of the last pre-rational, pre-Enlightenment figures – he is, indeed, a life force as much as a character. “There is a kind of medieval quality about him,” insists Bell, “that disappears with the Elizabethan Age, with people like Bacon, Walsingham – very rational, scientific sort of people. Falstaff is a Rabelaisian figure – he’s all appetite, indulgence and inspiration, but at the same time he’s got a fantastic intelligence, a native intelligence and wit, and a great scepticism, which I respond to very strongly. For all the noble sentiments that are held up – he sees them all as being ridiculous, absurd.”
Nothing illustrates this so well as Falstaff’s famous speech about honour – a fiction that serves man only when he is dead.
“On the surface he’s just a liar and a fraud and a coward and a drunk – there’s nothing you can say objectively that’s very admirable about him. But he has that zest for life, and enjoyment of life, that is quite Epicurean in a way, and that’s irresistible.”
But there is no room in the new England, among the pragmatists and statesmen, for the medieval figures of Falstaff and Hotspur – opposites in so many ways but also complementary representatives of a vanishing age and its codes.
The father-son relationship is here, as so often in life, a fraught and painful one. Throw all this into a contemporary Australian context, and we find Hal a teenager going off the rails, walking the fine line between anarchy, self-destruction and self-preservation, slumming it but always with the threat of perhaps going too far and not being able to come back. The battle for possession of Hal, as Bell explains, between his father and his surrogate father Falstaff is intensely moving, and always relevant.
Bell Shakespeare presents Henry IV at the Arts Centre Melbourne, Playhouse, from March 14 to 30.
Photos by Pierre Toussaint and Lisa Tomasetti.
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