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A Henry IV That Doesn’t Know Its Own Strength
This play has underappreciated muscles that its director intermittently flexes.
At the same time, his Pistol (one of Falstaff’s companions and a natural double for Hotspur — both spark as quickly as their names) comes across as a generic buffoon, just another blinking lackey, rather than the swaggering, hair-trigger weirdo who speechifies in questionable Latin and casually lets drop absurd gems like, “Shall dunghill curs confront the Helicons?” Steven Epp — a former co-artistic director of Minneapolis’s Theatre de la Jeune Lune and no stranger to clowning of all stripes — speaks with a sardonic bray as Hotspur’s embittered, self-serving uncle, Worcester, and in a flustered, twittering soprano as the long-suffering, none-too-bright tavern flunky, Francis. As he lies dying, his final advice to Hal is chilling in its combination of desperate paternal care and implicit political consequence: “My Harry,” he tells his son, “Be it thy course to busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out, / May waste the memory of the former days.” In other words: Go start a war somewhere and everyone will love you for it.
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