Chimes At Midnight

I wanted to write a little about the Donmar Henry IV, since along with director Phyllida Llloyd's Julius Caesar and the as-yet unannounced third part of Shakespeare-in-women's-prison trilogy it forms a cheerfully independent-spirited stab in the side of the Shakespeare industry, not intellectualised or trendy enough to be tarred with the avant-garde brush while still quite capable of making white male critics smash their monocles in outrage that this sort of thing gets public funding.

Foucault would have a field day what with all the sexuality and prisons involved, but the production is so swift and light on its feet (everyone's favourite Shakesperean characters the Messengers refreshingly enter and exit so fast they practically shatter their kneecaps on the walls) that to get too bogged down in continental frippery would seem to miss the point. This is clear and breezy Shakespeare that gets the text across without dwelling too much on Interpretation, and that can only be a good thing. That said, certain elements of the text are highlighted by the prison setting not so much through brilliance of conceit as simple stripping away of pageantry and nonsense.

What had never occurred to me about the play, but what removing the trumpets and swords and expansive battlefields clearly reveals, is just how depressive almost everyone in it can appear. Falstaff as played by Ashley McGuirre is a lifer in this production, old age creeping up on her without anything to show for the years spent behind bars but what social standing she can muster amongst the other inmates. The jokes and the ribaldry, the childish need to have the last word and never be sincere conceal a deep pain and fear of advancing time. What is in that word honour? Substitute the word honour for just about anything that might be considered worth having for a prisoner and you start to see the hopelessness of Falstaff's situation. What's the point of taking life seriously when it has nothing to offer you?

what is that honour? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth he hear it? no. ‘Tis insensible, then. Yea, to the dead.

The overwhelming pointlessness of counting out each day and pretending to care are spat out painfully clearly by McGuirre's delivery, her "No"s combining the petulance of a child with the weariness of one old enough to know the child is right to be petulant.

Or take King Henry himself, as played by Harriet Walter. "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown" indeed, but never has this seemed less general and more particular than in Walter's telling. This isn't about the heaviness of rule when set in a prison; this is about trying to escape the past. Henry seeks to "steep his senses in forgetfulness" because his previous deeds won't let him go; as Henry he regrets his treatment of Richard; as a convict she cannot escape her sins. Depression means that being weighted down by your own being, being unable to escape except in sleep and lusting after a Jerusalem that means absolution and will never come.

Hotspur meanwhile is down on the Wikipedia page for PTSD as being the first recorded sufferer:


Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth,
And start so often when thou sit'st alone?
Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks;
And given my treasures and my rights of thee
To thick-eyed musing and cursed melancholy?


asks his wife, and indeed this version of Hotspur is never quite in the room with us: Jade Anouka is a whirlwind of energy, completely ignoring his poor wife's entreaties and focussing above all on action, action, action. At one point he starts an unnecessary series of situps while discussing an upcoming battle - we get the sense that Hotspur's method of dealing with depression and PTSD is just to do things and never reflect, which is why eventually, perhaps, he is not the equal of Harry Monmouth. His father is played as withdrawn in his sickness, apparently another casualty of nameless horrors.


Just about the only character not dealing with the kind of hopelessness that characterises severe institutionalised depression is Hal - and in this production, he is the only inmate we know is about to get out soon. His final rejection of Falstaff is accompanied by the return of the prison guards as the remaining inmates once again face another day of oblivion and the bright light Hal represented ascends to kingship. Strip away the historical trappings of the History Plays and you're faced with human drama of people facing their own mortality and pointlessness every bit as much as Macbeth sees "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow". For those who find the tavern scenes and low comedy of these plays tedious, this a bracingly bleak reminder of the tattered and bruised humanity that Shakespeare ometimes seemed incapable of leaving out of his plays.