Around the Roundhouse
For me, it’s just the theatre down the road, but for most of the seven hundred plus audience in the Roundhouse — formerly the Round House –for yesterday’s ten hour RSC marathon of the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V it was a bit of an outing. Nicholas de Jongh went so far as to buy a pair of cheap blue sunglasses in Sainsbury’s during one of the meal breaks.
He probably needed them later on when producer Thelma Holt passed him a bright pink peppermill after the siege of Harfleur. “Why are you giving me this?” exclaimed Nick, “Is it a dildo?” On stage, the peppermill-do was obviously transformed into Fluellen’s leek, which Jonathan Slinger — is he the best Fluellen ever? — crammed down Pistol’s gullet.
We measure out our theatre-going lives on days like these. I met a man from Aberdeen who had come down to London just to be there, really, and incidentally try and buy tickets. He had gone across the road for lunch because the service was so slow in the venue itself. He had already seen Henry V and thought the French were rather sent up. To which I replied, “Jolly good.”
Nick Allott, Cameron Mackintosh’s right hand man, breezed by in a pink sweater; not another gift from Thelma, surely.
In the first meal break, critics were given an air-line style (economy) lunch box — “mature Lincolnshire poacher cheese with crisp salad leaves and vine-ripened tomatoes” was a bit of a joke description. In the second, there was a more appetising choice of menu in Belgo’s across the road.
Having downed my mussels and chips, I retired to the Enterprise pub on the corner opposite Marine Ices. A cool dude in shades (not Nicholas de Jongh) orderd a port and lemon — they had no port, so he ordered a brandy and orange juice — and told me he’d never seen a Shakespeare play but he quite liked Athold Fugard.
Then a fight erupted on the other side of the bar. Two teenagers hurled themselves viciously at each other for about three minutes until separated by a couple of theatre-goers. David Warner, his beautifully filigreed, melancholic Falstaff all done and dusted, slouched in for a soft drink with his actor buddy David Horovitch. They were sorry to have missed the rumpus.
Warner bitterly remarked that some critics who had disliked his performance in Stratford last year had turned up again. I said that his performance had improved, or at least changed, almost out of all recognition, and they were likely to note this.
One thing’s for sure, as I agreed with RSC actor Adrian Schiller in another interval, Prince Hal and Falstaff are equally unlovely characters and both given their full nasty rein by Geoffrey Streatfeild and Warner.
Another Geoff, Geoffrey Freshwater, scores a notable double as an overwhelmingly ingratiating Justice Shallow and a bulbously oleaginous, slightly pissed Archbishop of Canterbury, expounding the Salic Law (why Henry should go to war), surely the longest and most boring speech in all the Bard.
Runner-up for the “double” prize is Alexia Healy as a wonderfully shop-soiled Doll Tearsheet and a stunningly beautiful Lady Katherine, King Henry’s French queen.
Michael Boyd’s production is noisy and exciting, though people swinging on ropes becomes tedious after a while; but the French court lolling on trapezes — nice echoes of the Peter Brook Dream — is a triumphant idea, and the battle of Shrewsbury, a chorus of counterfeit kings caught in silhouette, a small masterpiece of interpretative staging.
The impromptu theatre within a theatre must have cost a fortune — £2.3million someone suggested; the RSC couldn’t themselves supply a figure — but it works brilliantly. Such a shame it’s only there until the end of May. How will this lavish indulgence help balance the RSC’s books, I wonder?
