Of course, the big draw here was to have been Sir Ian McKellan performing probably the only mature male Shakespearean lead he’d never attempted, Sir John Falstaff. The dramatic vehicle for this virtuoso personification, “Player Kings”, offered a mash-up between “Henry IV parts I and II”, with less of the court politics and more emphasis on the boozy knight and his low-life circle. Sadly, McKellan had to withdraw following a fall from the stage in London, so the leading role was taken over by understudy David Semark - a great opportunity or a thankless task, depending how you look at it. Obviously he was never going to spark the charismatic aura that a star name carries with it, and he was perhaps a mite young and fit for the part, but Semark has a gorgeous speaking voice and occupied both role and stage with all the self-aware pomposity that Falstaff embodies. This, however, couldn’t rescue the production from audience disappointment and there were quite a few empty seats and a noticeable number of departures at the interval. The problem wasn’t, I suspect, the re-casting of Falstaff so much as the glacially slow pace of the production, which never seemed to generate enough rhythm to carry us along with it. The patchy abridgement of Shakespeare’s text didn’t help either – at a running time of three and a half hours it could have been trimmed back considerably further without damaging the Falstaff parts of the plot. Still, for those with patience there was much to enjoy in this modern dress version which imbued the Boar’s Head Inn (well, caff) with a thoroughly sleazy atmosphere and gave us a highly attractive Prince Hal (Toheeb Jimoh) who managed the shift from delinquency to responsibility with sound conviction. King Henry (Richard Coyle) gave the disconcerting impression of having just stepped out from a group portrait of our current royal family, and a neat coup de theatre saw the curtain almost descend on a battle-battered Falstaff only to rise again just as he did. The single most memorable moment of stage magic came when the redoubtable Geoffrey Freshwater’s Bardolph, requested to cheer up his master, gamely piped up with a rendition of that subtle comedy classic “Oh what a beauty, I’ve never seen one as big as that before”, a Carry On touch of which I’m sure the Bard would have approved.

Gail-Nina Anderson