Old Play Off Broadway

Henry IV, Part II follows Part I into the Phoenix Theater with much the same general success. It is far less often performed than what is popularly regarded as its better half, but it ill deserves neglect. Beyond its own rich claim to recognition, it forms with Part I something vastly and variedly Shakespearean. The two Parts, moreover, are in organic relationship and poignant contrast. And though there is considerably less history in Part II, there is actually more history in the making.

Falstaff very much holds the stage here, now in witty talk of this or that, now in tavern scenes with Doll Tearsheet or Mistress Quickly, now in his travels through the Gloucestershire of Shallow and Silence. He is still marvelously exuberant, ingenious, incorrigible, but his revels are now ending. He and his cronies, whether sluts or simpletons, are tarnished with age and touched with pathos. But. more than that. Henry IV draws near his end, and soon a playboy Hal's untroubled head must wear the crown. Shakespeare now, against the last thinned merrymaking of rascals, counterposes the making of a king. The self-condemning new voung monarch is suddenly self-reformed, is indeed a little holier-than-thou, and a great deal royaler, as he moves forward toward what, in Henry V, will be Shakespeare's most blazing success story. Falstaff, where the destiny of princes and the history of England are concerned, is but an incident. And so, in a wrenching, cruelly realistic scene, the young King before whom Falstaff has jubilantly knelt cries out. "I know thee not, old man," banishing him forever.

The warmth of the play's humor is the lustier for the chill in the air, and Falstaff is almost the nimbler with his fortunes in decline. As in Part I, Eric Berry plays Falstaff with, fine, resourceful gusto; among his playmates, Gerry Jedd's Mistress Quickly, Franklin Cover's Silence and Ray Reinhardt's Pistol are all good, and John Heffernan's Shallow something better. The time-honored comic scenes keep their blend of rust and magic. The royal scenes, full of a rhetoric that needs a humanizing voice, fare a good deal less well. But where humor and humanity cooperate. Stuart Vaughan's staging is dynamic, and the two parts of Henry IV play a rewarding part in a largely unrewarding theatrical season.

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