It is a wonder that among Ian McKellen’s great, long roster of Shakespearean roles, he has not taken on the corpulent comic antihero of the Henry IV dramas before now. He makes a radically moving Falstaff in Robert Icke’s handsome production of the two joined-up history plays, turning Shakespeare’s embodiment of rude life – the carnal and carnivalesque – inside out.
In 1950, Kenneth Tynan wrote that Ralph Richardson’s turn as Falstaff was not comic because “it was too rich and many-sided to be crammed into a single word.” McKellen’s is a richly complex portrayal too. His Falstaff is tragic almost from the start, all colour drained from his cheeks. He is not so much carnivaleque as carnival grotesque and a wheeler-dealer, wheezing and snorting, adenoidal and dyspeptic – a pub drunk and in soiled shirt and braces.
McKellen is not without comedy but the humour is delivered drily, without the jolliness that Falstaff’s physicality usually brings. “What is honour?” he says when he is called to the Battle of Shrewsbury, and it sounds less pragmatic than philosophical and plaintive here.
Adapted and directed by Icke, this is a slick modern dress production with a magnificent brick-backed set designed by Hildegard Bechtler, a playful use of curtains, and some thrilling scenes of hedonism and gang criminality, accompanied by drum’n’bass (sound by Gareth Fry) and arresting shades of light and dark (lighting by Lee Curran).
Falstaff’s crew of revellers and rustic yokels seem like a cross between Rooster’s “friends, outcasts and leeches” from Jerusalem and a modern, Fagin-like gang of burglars and pickpockets, with Falstaff as their head, and Mistress Quickly a particular highlight in Clare Perkins. We meet Hal (Toheeb Jimoh) staggering among them in underpants precariously slipping off (have we seen a mooning prince before?).
But the coming-of-age drama around Hal and his difficult journey towards royal duty feels slightly in the shadows. The centripetal force is Falstaff who has a genial rapport with Hal but the latter seems secondary, although Jimoh plays the fun-loving prince well as he is buffeted between a severe patriarch in King Henry (Richard Coyle) and a wayward proxy father in Falstaff. His relationship with the king is all brute distance until the deathbed scene which brings sudden passion.
Hotspur (Samuel Edward-Cook), for his part, is ardent without being volatile, alternatively dressed in army fatigues and a suit to show he can straddle the role of soldier and politician. Some scenes take place in Westminster with characters resembling parliamentary apparatchiks and the modern dress chimes with our times, but the contemporary resonances of rebellion, warfare and politicking are unclear.
There is a shift in tone between the two parts: the first is staged as a gothic thriller, of sorts, with long shadows and suspense. The shorter latter half feels oddly anti-climatic. Falstaff now looks like a slippery musical hall entertainer in hat and cane after being decorated for his false glories on the battlefield. He is more mournful and almost dismisses the love that flares between him and Doll (Tafline Steen).
At just over three and a half hours, it is far shorter than the RSC’s 2014 twin productions starring Antony Sher as Falstaff (irrepressibly, magnificently jovial), which were almost three hours apiece. The necessary truncations here mean that its pace is faster but there is less development of its themes.
Certainly, McKellen is well worth seeing for his showmanship (when is he ever not?) and if this is part of a growing wave of “commercial Shakespeare” shows, led by big name stars in the West End, it is an attractive addition.
• At Noël Coward Theatre, London, until 22 June then touring
