All the War's A Stage

The season's best dramas center on power and conflict in our new world.

By Carla Power | Jun 20, 2005 Newsweek Magazine

Nicholas Hytner is too canny to reduce Shakespeare to the simple role of a propagandist for pacifism. Editing out Shakespeare's ambivalence about war robs him of genius, argues Hytner, director of the Royal National Theatre. "If a [Shakespeare] play deals with the glory of conquest, it will also deal with the squalor of conquest as well," he says. His current production of Henry IV (through Aug. 31) opens with a grim vision of that squalor. Widows keen over corpses lying by stubby, charred trees. A gaunt Henry Bolingbroke presides over a joyless court; you can't help hoping Falstaff gets onstage fast. When he does, he is a one-man antiwar movement, streaking across the warscape, all tummy and red trousers. Played by Michael Gambon as a bohemian cowardly lion, he is, as Shakespeare scholar Harold C. Goddard wrote, a symbol of "the opposite of force." Yet despite Gambon's appeal, there is an acknowledgment of the usefulness of violence, notes Hytner, in the "great chivalric coming of age" of young Prince Hal's growth from party boy to responsible heir. When Hal (a wonderful Matthew Macfadyen) throws down his glove to challenge his rival Hotspur to a duel, only to have his father, Henry Bolingbroke, kick it coldly aside, it feels more like a slap than a paternal impulse. In Shakespeare's universe, notes Hytner, "there's the notion that it's honorable and necessary for one man to kill another for him to become fully a man."