The overall effect is to unify the tone of a play that usually comes across as divided between the serious political bits, and the comedy bits where the young Prince Harry (Sarah Amankwah) bums around with his disreputable mentor Sir John Falstaff (Helen Schlesinger). The tender scenes with Hotspur’s young wife Lady Percy are hysterically rewired into masterclasses in alpha male douchiness – Hotspur seems to be barely even listening to her as she waxes eloquent about her fears for him. Sure, Terry’s going against the text a bit. Her Hotspur is an angry, sardonic young man whose main motives appear to be bloodlust and boredom. Hotspur is usually interpreted as a noble idealist whose tragedy is that he’s more decent than the king he clashes with, but Terry pretty much goes the other way. He also used the realpolitik of the court to deliver more of a satirical punch and as we watched the young prince's pranking, for the English in the audience echoes of our own leaders' antics in the Bullingdon Club were never far away.Michelle Terry leads the return of her Globe Ensemble from the front: the actor-artistic director’s all-guns-blazing take on rebel lord Henry ‘Hotspur’ Percy is the clear highlight of her rep company’s second season. While in part one, Roberto Soto didn't really move past playing the character for laughs (pictured above right), the Argentinian Falstaff elicited far more sympathy, showing an aging man forced to face rejection and decline. In both productions, the fat knight Falstaff came across as a boastful, overdressed pendejo gordo. The styling throughout was ingenious: Falstaff's motley crew wore rolled-up Adidas tracksuit bottoms, studded denim waistcoats and baseball caps and even the prostitutes were fabulously dressed with Mistress Quickly's pink punk hair almost stealing the show. Sharply suited and expressionless behind sunglasses, the king's men calmly and ruthlessly met in the corridors of power to fight over control the country. In Szuchmacher's Shakespeare the actors were much more still. Constantino Moran played Hal with a well-judged smug elegance while Claudio Lafarga's Poins and David Calderon's Hotspur gave the work a wonderfully raw physicality.
As they interacted the men ran and jumped off these, creating an energy and dynamism that brought urgency to the political manoeuvrings. The set consisted of wooden ramps and platforms arranged in different configurations for each scene. The twist was that these gypsies were also tattooed and tie-dyed. The medieval style of the Mexican production harked back to the era of the play's first recorded performances: men in tunics and ragged layers, the king in a golden cloak. Young Mexican director, Hugo Arrevillaga, concentrated on bawdy wit, portraying Hal as an emerging hero and Falstaff as buffoon, while Argentine director Ruben Szuchmacher's darker perspective had the conspiring court shown as faceless secret service men and Hal as a spoilt, overgrown public schoolboy.Īs in much of this season, where the surtitles are synopses rather than translations and the audience may not speak the language of the performance, much work was done through costume design. The two pieces covered similar ground but were handled very differently. In the Mexican version of Part 1, the lazy borracho took a starring role.Įnrique IV, primera parte was performed by the National Theatre of Mexico, Enrique IV Segunda parte by Argentinian company Elkafka Espacio Teatral. There were also many opportunities for cultural stereotypes to be referenced: the idea that gossips and chantas rule the country was played with in the Argentinian production of Part 2, the arrogant grandeur of the powerful smartly mocked.
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