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.
