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Henry IV

  • opened: 5/4/2004
  • closed: -
  • Donmar Warehouse
  • Box Office: 08700 060 6624
  • Details: To June 26 2004
  • Summary: Visit theARCHIVE to hear a debate. Only the third major London production since Pirandello's play was first premiered here 80 years ago, Michael Grandage's contemporising revival of Henry IV boasts a new translation by that most Pirandellian of British playwrights, Tom Stoppard. Ian McDiarmid takes the eponymous role as a seemingly deranged nobleman who has remained 'in character'as the medieval German emperor ever since a bizarre horse-fall 20 years earlier, his delusion accommodated with increasing reluctance by his attendants. The latest in a recent line of reexamined European classics at the Donmar, the erudite risk has paid off, reaping a positive critical response thus far. Michael Billington in the Guardian awarded three stars: 'Grandage's production rushes through Pirandello's dense exposition at such a lick that we are left gasping: we have to assimilate the historical background, the complex relationships of the hero's visitors, and such crucial information as the fact that the fake king was always a self-observing performer. Fortunately, the production calms down with the arrival of Ian McDiarmid's incarcerated hero; and what McDiarmid brings out, with immense subtlety, is the character's Beckettian solitude.' In the Evening Standard, Nicholas de Jongh picked up the Beckettian theme: 'He [McDiarmid] does not so much look like a man madly playing a king, as one of Samuel Beckett's crumbling, crumpled relics, almost on their last legs.' Praising the production as a 'revelation' he added that McDiarmid's performance 'clarifies the disquieting nature of Pirandello's message about masks and illusion: we can conceal our real selves so well that we all remain fundamentally unknown.' Ian Johns in the Times was full of praise: 'In Ian McDiarmid's magnificent central performance, tender and traumatised, we see the architecture of his sanity and madness as he shifts between grave dignity, sardonic scepticism, mocking play-acting and anguished credulity. When he talks of having grown old in his kingly persona, you feel the cornered isolation of someone who has been denied basic human contact by his charade. The role is Hamlet for someone 20 years too old for the part and McDiarmid makes it his own.' In the Daily Telegraph, Charles Spencer cheered: 'Stoppard's lively new version which updates the action and the dialogue to the present day and wisely edits Pirandello's more prolix passages, achieves a fine marriage between the play's intellectual ideas and its sudden glimpses of deep emotion.' In the Independent, Paul Taylor argued that McDiarmid 'has the measure of the role's mighty meditative range. An eccentric embodiment of one of Pirandello's preoccupations, he plummets down to notes of devastating profundity describing how, in a world of treacherous contingency, the only place of safety - and the terrible trap- is to turn yourself into a parody of the immemorial fixity of a work of art.' In the Daily Mail, David Gillard thought 'Michael Grandage's production is slow to take fire but is blessed with a riveting central performance from Ian McDiarmid, returning to the stage for the first time since leaving the Almeida.. This is a blazing, passionate, beautifully spoken performance and one that rightly dominates the evening.' In the Daily Express, Robert Gore-Langton praised McDiarmid - 'a fabulous, turbo-charged actor, his voice trills with disgust and triumph as he reveals to his gobsmacked retainers that he's actually saner than they are'. But added: 'Elsewhere the performances are terrible... in a drama that for all its experimentalism, has probably had its day.'
  • Author: Luigi Pirandello; Tom Stoppard
  • Director: Michael Grandage
  • Composer: Adam Cork
  • Lyricist: n/aSet Designer: Christopher Oram
  • Lighting Designer: Neil Austin
  • Costume Designer: Giorgio Armani
  • Choreographer: n/a
  • Cast Details: David Yelland (Belcredi); Robert Demeger (Doctor); Francesca Annis (Matilda); Tania Emery (Frida); Ian McDiarmid (Henry IV)