The cast of Allen Bratton’s debut may sound familiar. Hal, the young heir to the house of Lancaster, wastes his hours in the Boar’s Head pub with his friends Poins and Falstaff. His father, Henry, tries to curtail his son’s bad behaviour, while seeking alliances that might shore up his troubled household. As the pair circle, enter Harry Percy, a dashing family friend who looks set to lock horns with Hal.
Names and themes from Shakespeare’s Henry IV echo through Henry Henry, which explores family, faith and aristocratic succession in 2010s England. Hal heads to pubs, kebab shops and parties, washing down cocaine with gin and beer. He is a rare visitor to the thinktank that nominally employs him, although he does manage to shuffle to morning mass and his father’s private members’ club, which he roguishly visits without a jacket and tie, so that the porter must dress him with whatever spares are available.
