Helen Shaw on the superb stagecraft illuminating Robert Ickes’s “Player Kings,” starring Ian McKellen, Benedict Andrews’s “The Cherry Orchard,” and Ian Rickson’s “London Tide,” with music by PJ Harvey.
Sir John Falstaff is among those resurfaced treasures. He’s one of Shakespeare’s most beloved characters: a roguish knight and petty brigand, who befriends the young Harry, a prodigal prince sowing his wild oats. In “Player Kings,” Robert Icke’s nearly four-hour adaptation of Shakespeare’s two “Henry IV” history plays, at the West End’s Noël Coward Theatre, Ian McKellen—himself a mischievous theatrical god—takes up the character’s traditional fake belly and air of ribald delight.
Our protective feelings for McKellen the actor have been put in service of the play’s pity for “sweet Jack Falstaff,” whom Harry will inevitably spurn, breaking his overtaxed, unworthy, lovable old heart. It also, in a sly way, makes us complicit: despite knowing everything, we forgive a bad man. Still, this “Cherry Orchard” is graceful—if not in its language then in its dramatic swiftness.
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