There is no word filled with more darkness and foreboding when used in reference to a Shakespeare play than “relevant.” What is a theatergoer to do when he takes his seat a few minutes before curtain, opens the program just given to him by a solicitous usher, and finds the portentous phrase “startlingly relevant to contemporary American audiences” etched like Belshazzar’s warning into the final paragraph of the director’s note?
Faced with the prospect of 3 1/2 hours of Shakespeare interpreted through yesterday’s New York Times editorial, does he scream? Does he stay to see medieval kings portrayed as Proud Boys, or does he run? Paralyzed by indecision, he vacillates between quietly slipping past the solicitous usher and preemptively throwing himself headfirst over the balcony. Too late! The lights go down as the sound of synthesizers fills the theater. He grips both arms of his chair.
Transplanting Shakespeare plays from their original historical context can be done well, but time-traveling productions, particularly for the history plays, have their work cut out for them. Directors risk going mad with the power this kind of flexibility grants them over the play’s text. Untethered from particular circumstances, characters deform, plots twist; William Shakespeare’s words crack and sometimes break beneath the burden of the director’s ambitions to make the play say something relevant (read: politically relevant) to contemporary audiences. Such is the case with the Folger Theatre’s production of Henry IV Part I, which ended its run at Washington, D.C.’s Folger Shakespeare Library this week, though thankfully less calamitously than the program note implied.
Director Rosa Joshi stages the story of the Percy family’s rebellion against Henry IV in an amorphous, cyberpunk dystopia. This setting distracts from other, far more interesting ambiguities inherent to the characters and themes of Henry IV Part I, the second play of Shakespeare’s so-called Henriad. Consisting of Richard II, Henry IV Parts I and 2, and Henry V, the Henriad relates the ascent of Henry of Monmouth, son of Henry IV, from an apparently ill-spent youth to his reign as Henry V, one of England’s most celebrated rulers, revered for his victory over the French at the Battle of Agincourt on St. Crispin’s Day, 1415. In Shakespeare, we first meet him as “Prince Hal” in Henry IV Part I.
Taken as a whole, the Henriad is a kind of meditation on leadership and power: How should a good leader act? What makes a good leader? Is all power corrupting? Shakespeare’s answers to these questions aren’t necessarily obvious. The characters of these plays and their circumstances are complicated, sometimes terribly or tragically so. As such, the flawed heroes and sympathetic villains defy easy classification along modern political fault lines. Such classification risks distorting the characters, simplifying and flattening them out.
The primary victim of this dynamic in the Folger production is the play’s titular king, Henry IV. In the director’s note, Joshi describes him as “authoritarian.” Just in case the audience doesn’t pick up on actor Peter Crook’s scowling and yelling, Joshi dresses him up in the uniform of an SS officer stationed on the Death Star. In doing so, she renders this difficult character cartoonish, at times even ridiculous. Near the play’s beginning, Crook’s Henry demands that several of his reluctant vassals kiss his hand before leaving. What difference his clothes make! A 15th-century king draped in purple might make such a demand and be taken seriously; a man dressed like a space fascist cannot. The scene makes Henry IV look weak, silly, and delusional.
The lesson of Joshi’s Henry IV seems to be that heavy-handedness and authoritarianism are expressions of weakness and breed terrible problems. The relevance of this reading of the play to our current political moment, from one view of things, is obvious and not worth elucidating. Certainly, Shakespeare is interested in tyranny and its repercussions, but interpreting Henry IV narrowly as a dispositional “authoritarian” misses half the story, one with sobering lessons for persons of any political persuasion, but particularly for those out of power.
Richard II, the play that preceeds Henry IV Part I in the Henriad, tells the story of how Henry Bolingbroke rose to the throne, overthrowing Richard II to become Henry IV. The play begins with conspicuous similarities to Henry IV Part I. A hot-headed young nobleman raises a problem to the king’s notice; the king’s subsequent bungling of that problem catalyzes an armed rebellion against him, led by the young nobleman. In Henry IV Part I, that hot-headed young nobleman is Henry “Hotspur” Percy; in Richard II, it’s Henry Bolingbroke himself.
Bolingbroke was arguably justified in usurping King Richard. But we also see that in Bolingbroke’s ascent to the throne, and in his subsequent labors to keep the throne, Henry IV finds himself treading the same ground as his predecessor, faced with the same decisions and betrayals, making similar mistakes. The hard lesson here is not that authoritarians will get theirs. Rather, it’s how much of himself Bolingbroke compromises to become Henry IV due to the grim necessities of political power and contentious regime change. If Bolingbroke is an authoritarian, he has become one in response to the challenges of overthrowing the last one. Even resistance fighters can become tyrants.
The Folger production’s other problems are generally rooted in the same soil as its flawed portrayal of Henry IV — namely, the impulse to update Shakespeare. These included silly costuming choices, irritating applications of the airhorn sound effect, and Michael Jackson-inflected line dances in the buildup to fight sequences, a la the Beat It music video.
In every case, the effects of these “relevant” or added elements were negative, unnecessary dead weight on an otherwise enjoyable production. Edward Gero’s Falstaff, for instance, was sublime, striking a perfect balance between buffoonery, villainy, and pathos.
The reactionary moral here is that there is great merit — and plenty of “relevance” — in simply executing Shakespeare well.
Caleb Whitmer is a writer living in Washington, D.C.
