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Recalling Ralph Richardson’s famed performance as Sir John Falstaff in a 1945 production at the Old Vic, Kenneth Tynan wrote that it had been “too rich and many-sided to be crammed into a single word”. I felt the same about Ian McKellen’s Falstaff in this slick, modern-dress adaptation of Henry IV Parts I & II, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian.

Donning a fatsuit to play Shakespeare’s antihero for the first time, aged 84, McKellen gives us a Falstaff who is “tragic almost from the start”: a “pub drunk, and in soiled shirt and braces”; a “wheeler-dealer, wheezing and snorting, adenoidal and dyspeptic”. Rather than a “carnivalesque” figure, this Falstaff is a “carnival grotesque”: it’s a “radically moving” and “richly complex” performance that deserves to be seen.

Director Robert Icke is known for his “thrilling reinventions or rewrites of classics”, said Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard. For this condensation of the two plays, which runs to over three hours, he has “neatly” streamlined the raucous and violent power struggles of Part I, and pruned Part II of some (but perhaps not enough) of its “waffling jokes and rueful diminuendo”. What emerges is a “luxurious feast” of theatre that shows how the plays still speak to our times, by asking “what it means to be a man and a monarch, and whether we should dedicate our lives to duty or pleasure”. 

McKellen is “magnificent”, said Sarah Hemming in the FT. Toheeb Jimoh is excellent, too, as Prince Hal, combining “youthful zest” with a ruthless streak and a stubborn refusal to face his future. And there are several “wonderful” supporting turns, not least from Clare Perkins as a fierce, funny Mistress Quickly. But while Icke’s staging has a “vivid immediacy”, his cuts come at a cost: the grievances of the rebels are not always easy to follow, and “some of the comic warmth” is lost from the second half. 

It makes the production less engaging than it might be, said Clive Davis in The Times. But whenever McKellen is onstage, this adaptation comes “bustling to life”.

Noël Coward Theatre, London WC2 (0344-482 5151). Until 22 June, then touring. 

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