Henry IV, Part One

At last Danel Seltzer's Falstaff has entered the present cycle of undergraduates, and if you listen to wise talk, you know already why to see this production. Sir John has been played often enough as an ale-soaked halfwit, his besottedness hesitantly offered as an excuse for his license; Mr. Seltzer is well clear of this feeble nonsense. Between magnificent gusts and wheezes, he calculates with serene deliberation each of the fat knight's lies, each of his aphorisms and fancies, and the result is to show that not only Mr. Seltzer but Falstaff too is always creating the character of Falstaff.

No performance more sophisticated or thorough has so far been seen at the Loeb, and the director, George Hamlin, might contentedly have recognized Mr. Seltzer's talent for fabricating first-rate supporting actors out of his own radiance, and left the show entirely to him. For it is clearly Falstaff's huge effrontery, his assurance that his weight and wit make him the incandescent center of his cronies which keeps Peto (Tony Corbett), Bardolph (John Anderson), and Mistress Quickly (Raye Bush) steadily alive. That radiance has happily restrained most--if not enough--of those extremely traditional and extremely irritating ceaseless palsies, grunts, and hysterics which directors of Shakespeare persist in preserving in all the comic scenes.

Mr. Hamlin, I say, could have left the show to Falstaff. But Mr. Hamlin obviously has a conscience and something of a recognition that actors in Henry IV must interpret their characters with a really careful consistency. Hal, Hotspur, and King Henry in particular are always talking about themselves and about each other, and the very least they have to do (even if one completely discards the question of continuity with Richard II and Part Two) is to develop themselves on the stage to justify the descriptions. This Philip Kerr's Hotspur accomplishes splendidly. Begining as a simple hothead, "nettled, and stung with pismires when I hear/Of this vile politician, Bolingbroke," laughed at by his elders (Northumberland and Worcester), Kerr refines and solidifies Harry Percy into a striking gay fanatic, the man who mistakes

Hal (David Rittenhouse) has considerably less luck. I have never seen this part well performed, and the obvious reason is Hal's damnably difficult problem of how to approach the moment where he chides "his truant youth with such a grace/As if he mastered there a double spirit/Of teaching and of learning instantly." Rittenhouse has the necessary grace both to enjoy the truant life and to reject it; what he lacks, I imagine, is simply the impression of immense energy ready to be turned to great deeds in war.

Now comes the puzzle: King Henry himself. Richard Simons, who plays him, and Mr. Hamlin, both inexplicably leave the rails from the play's first line. "So shaken as we are, so wan with care," Simons growls in the manner of a jumpy but undeniably vigorous bullfrog, establishing a style that never leaves him. Not a word of the part inclines me to believe anything but that Henry is chiefly a moraliser, that saving his vision of Jerusalem his is unimaginative, that his health is bad, and that his principal outward characteristic is almost uncanny self-restraint. Simons displays none of these qualities; their essential counterpoise to those of Hal is smothered.

But Henry cannot smother all, not a capable Glendower (Nick Delbanco) or a roaring mad Scots fighter (Robert Rose as Douglas), and absolutely not the visual effect of a production staged with a Prussian precision of technical detail. Indeed, the only serious technical flaw is in the trying matter of accents in an American production: the lead characters ought to agree on a degree of approximation to the Queen's English and on a pronunciation of Bolingbroke. Otherwise, the Loeb has poured its professional competence freely: there is much swordplay, adequately trained; Donald Soule's stolid set suits the play superbly; the devices on shields are undoubtedly authentic; perfectionists designed the costumes. Not much less, it must be admitted, should surround this Falstaff.

(A review of "The Conversion of St. Pelagia," which opened last night in Agassiz, will appear on Monday.)