Notwithstanding that we know the results (“Hotspur I” is not on the list of English kings) we have a rooting interest in him anyway, and it is heartbreaking to see him destroy himself. Hotspur is, perversely, a likeable villain, and Fauntleroy makes him so, thus honoring the text. Jonathan Toppo), who he must make his ally, and still later fatally, when he insists on going to battle with an incomplete army.
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You can see it early on, when he recites his grievances so forcefully that his Aunt Worcester (the great Naomi Jacobson) is unable to tell him how to surmount them, and later when he persistently deflates the pompous Glendower (U. He is manic and compulsive as with all such people, when he is successful (as he is in defeating the Scots early in the play, prompting Henry to wish that he was his son, rather than Hal) he is wonderfully so, and when he is not, it is catastrophic. Fauntleroy’s twitchy Hotspur is entirely plausible, and also fun to watch. Stanley Photography)įolger Theatre’s competent production gets some, but not all, of this.
Peter Crook, right, as King Henry IV and Avery Whitted as Prince Hal in Folger Theatre’s 1 Henry IV (Photo: C. Percy, also known as Hotspur, is “a machine on top of an animal”, as Anthony Burgess once said of Napoleon: so possessed by his warlike instincts that he tells his lissome wife (Maribel Martinez) that he does not love her in order to stop her inquiries into his battle preparations.
It is also a raucous comedy, in which the Rabelaisian Sir John Falstaff (Edward Gero) and his merry minions drink, thieve and swive their way to glory, with Prince Hal at their side, in a mockery of all the things that the Royal Court, and England, hold dear.Īnd it is also a cautionary tale, in which the mercurial Harry Percy (Tyler Fauntleroy), an Icarus who carries his own sun with him, squanders a chance to topple the crown because of his own impatience. Henry IV, Part 1 is the best of the Shakespearean histories, because it is a redemption story - not of Prince Hal (Avery Whitted), who rose from his Eastcheap debauchery to become England’s greatest king, but of his father, the feral Henry IV (Peter Crook), who, in learning to forgive his son, saved his own life, and his kingdom.