Shakespeare on Stage: Volume 2 E-Book

Julian Curry

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 657

Beschreibung

'This book gives some of the very best of Shakespeare's twenty-first-century colleagues an opportunity to share insights that can only come from playing him' Nicholas Hytner, from his Foreword Twelve leading actors take us behind the scenes of landmark Shakespearean productions, each recreating in detail their memorable performance in a major role. Roger Allam on his Falstaff in both Henry IV plays at Shakespeare's Globe Eileen Atkins on Viola in two productions of Twelfth Night seventeen years apart Simon Russell Beale on Cassius in Deborah Warner's modern-dress Julius Caesar Chiwetel Ejiofor on his Donmar Warehouse Othello, directed by Michael Grandage Sara Kestelman on Hippolyta and Titania in Peter Brook's iconic white-box Dream Ian McKellen on one of Shakespeare's most demanding of roles: King Lear Michael Pennington on stepping in at the eleventh hour as Timon of Athens Alan Rickman on re-evaluating the melancholic Jaques in As You Like It Fiona Shaw on Shakespeare's Shrew, Katherine, in Jonathan Miller's production Patrick Stewart on his Las Vegas-set Shylock, a role he has played many times Harriet Walter on Imogen in Shakespeare's late romance, Cymbeline, at the RSC Zoë Wanamaker on her National Theatre Beatrice, directed by Nicholas Hytner Each actor leads us through the choices they made in rehearsal, and how the character works in performance, shedding new light on some of the most challenging roles in the canon. The result is a series of individual masterclasses that will be invaluable for other actors and directors, as well as students of Shakespeare – and fascinating for audiences of the plays. 'Absorbing and original… Curry's actors are often thinking and talking as that other professional performer, Shakespeare himself, might have done.' TLS on Shakespeare On Stage: Vol. 1

Leseprobe

Julian Curry

SHAKESPEAREON STAGE

Volume 2

Twelve Leading Actorson Twelve Key Roles

Foreword by Nicholas Hytner

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Dedication

Foreword by Nicholas Hytner

Introduction

Acknowledgements

1. Roger Allam on Falstaff

2. Eileen Atkins on Viola

3. Simon Russell Beale on Cassius

4. Chiwetel Ejiofor on Othello

5. Sara Kestelman on Hippolyta and Titania

6. Ian McKellen on King Lear

7. Michael Pennington on Timon

8. Alan Rickman on Jaques

9. Fiona Shaw on Katherine

10. Patrick Stewart on Shylock

11. Harriet Walter on Imogen

12. Zoë Wanamaker on Beatrice

Synopses of the Plays

About the Author

Other Titles in the Series

Copyright Information

For Alex and Torrenhoping their lives will be enriched by Shakespeare as mine is

Foreword

Nicholas Hytner

A novel can tell you everything you want to know about what it’s trying to say, but plays are by definition incomplete. They are instructions for performance, like musical scores, and they need players to become music.

Working on Hamlet, Rory Kinnear and I repeatedly found that Shakespeare simply left stuff out – stuff that would have made the play last as long as War and Peace if he’d put it in. What, for instance, are we supposed to think has really gone on between Hamlet and Ophelia before the play starts? That things have gone on is plain from the pile of letters she returns to him. ‘I did love you once,’ he says, though he never says why he’s stopped loving her; and I have seen this done so sardonically that it’s impossible to believe. And a couple of lines later, he says, ‘I loved you not.’ Which doesn’t make it any easier to know whether he did, though it’s the kind of contradiction lovers go in for. In any event, it feels like there’s a missing scene near the start of the play that shows you how they are with each other before things start to go wrong.

But the genius of the play, as opposed to, say, War and Peace, is that it implies multitudes as much as it contains them. Shakespeare was an actor, and he leaves a lot of the work to his actors. The text forces any Hamlet to ask questions which he answers through the way he delivers it. What did he feel for Ophelia? What does he feel now? What does he want from her? What – within himself and in Denmark – makes it impossible for him to trust himself or trust the world around him? A play’s meaning is conferred on it by the act of playing it. In the way he said ‘I did love you once,’ Rory Kinnear told you in five words what might have taken Tolstoy five chapters.

Simon Russell Beale is fond of describing acting as three-dimensional literary criticism. And in my personal experience, the most mind-expanding insights into Shakespeare have come from actors in the rehearsal room, usually without the long introductory preamble with which directors generally preface even the most banal of suggestions. As a tribe, we can barely ask an actor to move to the left without making a speech about it – but actors just get on with it. One day in rehearsal, without warning, David Calder – who played Polonius in Hamlet – approached the end of his speech of advice to Laertes and flinched. He seemed to dry. And then, under the heavy weight of what felt like deep personal shame, he said: ‘This above all: to thine own self be true, / And it will follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.’ From the heart, like many fathers, he wants his son not to make his own mistakes. Mired in a corrupt court, he is incapable of dealing truthfully with others, and of being true to himself. And David Calder’s Polonius knew it.

It would be equally plausible to present the Polonius of tradition, a man incapable of self-knowledge, puffed up with self-regard. But I was electrified by David’s illumination of three lines worn thin by their relentless repetition, out of context, usually by public liars wishing to burnish their credentials as truth-tellers. I knew immediately that the Calder Polonius had helped Claudius assassinate the old King, and was tortured by his own treachery. I started to think that the old King was probably a disaster for Denmark, that – like Richard II – he had to go. This was the real Shakespeare: an actor who provides for other actors an infinite myriad of ways of telling his stories and of being his characters. His intuitive openness to interpretation is mistaken for complexity. His relish for ambiguity is taken as a challenge to those who would pin him down. But they are functions of his calling: he writes plays.

This struck me with particular force when staging Othello. It has often been noted that Iago’s ‘motiveless malignancy’ in fact comes, in his soliloquies, with a superfluity of motives, as if he himself has difficulty locating the source of his depravity. What Shakespeare has done, of course, is to pay his fellow actor the compliment of trusting him to complete Iago for himself. He provides the actor with a solid enough starting point: Iago is consumed by the promotion of Cassio. But thereafter, the play works overtime not to lock Iago down, and seems to invite the actor to allow himself to be surprised by what happens to Iago: a man driven by envy and hatred, who isn’t fully in control of what happens next (as none of us are), to whom the action of the play occurs spontaneously (as life happens to all of us).

The desire of literary critics over four centuries to solve Iago as if he were a puzzle seems to me to be missing the point. The solution is the actor. The playwright writes from the premise that the dots can’t be joined on the page, and writes with the confidence of an actor who knows that, if they are any good, his colleagues will do the rest of the job for him. This book gives some of the very best of Shakespeare’s twenty-first-century colleagues an opportunity to share the insights that can only come from playing him.

Introduction

Julian Curry

Much of the brilliance of Shakespeare lies in the openness, or ambiguity, of his texts. As Nicholas Hytner points out in his foreword, whereas a novelist will often describe a character, an action or a scene in the most minute detail, Shakespeare knew that his scenarios would only be fully fleshed out when actors perform them. He was the first writer to create character out of language. Falstaff has an idiosyncratic way of speaking that is quite distinct from Juliet, as she does from Shylock, and he from Lady Macbeth. An actor receives subliminal clues about their character, merely by the way they express themselves.

George Bernard Shaw wrote long prefaces and elaborate stage directions; his texts are littered with instructions to actors and directors as to how his plays should be done. This can be helpful, but as often as not it’s limiting, even annoying. Shakespeare, conversely, wrote hardly any stage directions. The best known is ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’ in The Winter’s Tale – which incidentally is far from proscriptive: is some unfortunate actor bundled into a bear costume? Or is the bear surreal, an effect of sound and lighting? Directors have carte blanche. The only solution rarely adopted is to put a live bear on stage. On occasion Shakespeare does give a precise indication of stage business. In the courtroom scene of The Merchant of Venice, Gratiano says: ‘Not on thy sole but on thy soul, harsh Jew, / Thou mak’st thy knife keen’ [4.1]. Then the actor playing Shylock understands that he should take out his knife and sharpen it on the sole of his shoe. Other stage directions take the form of implicit but less precise suggestions. When Hamlet says to Osric, ‘Put your bonnet to his right use; ’tis for the head’ [5.2], the actor playing Osric knows one thing for sure: his hat is not on his head. How else he is using it is up to him.

There are times when the actor may decide to do the opposite of what the text seems to indicate. For instance, when King Lear exits saying to Goneril and Regan, ‘You think I’ll weep? No, I’ll not weep... this heart / Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws / Or ere I’ll weep’ [2.4], the suggestion appears to be that the actor will remain dry-eyed. Ian McKellen immediately burst into convulsive sobs. I found this very moving.

Shakespeare doesn’t tell his actors how to play their parts; he gives hints but leaves the decisions up to them. My interest in writing this book, and the companion volume that preceded it, is the myriad options available to performers of Shakespeare’s texts, and the choices they make. Theatre is written on the wind. Even the most brilliant performances exist only in the moment, and will endure nowhere but in the memories of those present. Actors are notoriously reluctant to define and discuss how they act, but luckily they are often willing to talk about their past performances.

In 2011, the first volume of Shakespeare On Stage found itself on a shortlist of nominees for the annual Theatre Book Prize. It focuses on thirteen of Shakespeare’s leading roles, therefore covering roughly a third of his plays. This left plenty of uncharted territory. I was delighted when Nick Hern Books agreed that we should continue the voyage of discovery.

As with the earlier volume, my guiding principle was to approach excellent actors who had played leading roles in memorable Shakespearean productions, and to ask them if they’d be willing to reveal if not how they acted, at least what they did. I also wanted to know how the show was set, what they wore, and what went on around them. Having been lifelong in the business, many of my intended targets were friends who were easily accessible, and most generous with their time.

Preparing for each encounter was a labour of love. Of necessity it involved a thorough refresher course, going back to the plays and spending long hours with nose in text. I also read critical studies and pestered archivists for back copies of reviews. I was determined to approach the interviews as well briefed as possible, in order to frame productive questions. At times it felt like the work of a barrister. The difference is that whereas a barrister’s questions are designed to steer the witness towards a desired answer, mine were simply intended to get juices flowing and tongues wagging. I concentrated on mechanics rather than theory. As far possible I made the question ‘What did you do?’ rather than ‘How did you do it?’

The conversations were tape-recorded, usually at the actor’s home. I followed, as closely as was practicable, the following sequence: (1) Put the performance in the context of its time and place, director and designer. (2) General questions about the production and the character. (3) Specific questions about the performance, working through the play from start to finish. (4) Summing up.

Interviews are listed alphabetically by the actor’s name. To try to impose any other arrangement didn’t seem helpful. The order does not follow a pattern, and chapters can be read at random.

This book is an account of twelve performances, by the actors who gave them. Each interview focuses on a single performance, and the production in which it featured. They span fifty years, from Eileen Atkins’s Viola in 1961 to Patrick Stewart’s Shylock in 2011. What they have in common is a uniquely personal account of a creative process. I’ve been delighted by the frequent departures from lazy assumption. For instance, Sara Kestelman describes A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in an immaculate white box, devoid of all vegetation, and of infants with wings pretending to be fairies. Simon Russell Beale, who looks anything but lean and hungry, was triumphantly cast as Cassius. Patrick Stewart’s Shylock ruled over a business empire set in Las Vegas. Ian McKellen repeatedly questions the assumption that King Lear goes mad, just as Alan Rickman finds the adjective ‘melancholy’ inadequate to describe Jaques. I’m not aware of any other continuities or recurring themes. On the contrary, each one quite naturally occupies its own territory, and I’m happy with that. It also seems that, as a by-product, the actors have in fact revealed a great deal about themselves and their own working methods. As such, I hope the reader will enjoy the range and diversity of responses, and that it will be of interest to other actors, students and theatregoers alike.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the Society of Authors for a very generous grant which bought me time to interview the subjects, and to write this book; and to Sue Webb, Mary Chater, Matt Applewhite and Nick Hern for their invaluable support and encouragement. Finally, and most especially, thanks to all of the actors who kindly gave their time to be interviewed.

Roger Allam

on

Falstaff

Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 (1596–8)

Opened at Shakespeare’s Globe, London on 14 July 2010

Directed by Dominic Dromgoole

Designed by Jonathan Fensome

With Oliver Cotton as Henry IV, Sam Crane as Hotspur, William Gaunt as Shallow, Barbara Marten as Mistress Quickly, and Jamie Parker as Prince Hal

Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 were first performed in 1596–8, the source material coming mainly from Holinshed’s Chronicles. Many people consider them to be among Shakespeare’s very finest plays. With their astonishing breadth of scope they are outstanding examples of his genius for juxtaposing diverse dramatic elements. King and commoner, poetry and prose, town and country, war and peace, political strategy and the rumbustious low-life comedy of the tavern – all blend seamlessly into a rich dramatic entity.

The two plays can stand alone or as integral parts of Shakespeare’s cycle of eight English history plays, beginning with the deposition of Richard II in 1399, spanning the Wars of the Roses, and culminating with the death of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. The Royal Shakespeare Company was the first to perform all eight plays, under the umbrella title The Wars of the Roses, in 1964.

It is interesting to view them in the wider context, both for their historical sweep and for the development of characters. The two parts of Henry IV reverberate backwards to Richard II and forwards to Henry V, most notably in the theme of Bolingbroke’s usurpation of the crown. His remorse sets in the moment after Richard II’s assassination. That play concludes with Boling-broke announcing ‘I’ll make a voyage to the Holy Land / To wash this blood off from my guilty hand’ [5.6]. The vein runs through both parts of Henry IV and it is echoed by Henry V in his prayer before the Battle of Agincourt: ‘Not today, O Lord, / O not today, think not upon the fault / My father made in compassing the crown’ [4.1].

King Henry IV himself is hardly recognisable from the vigorous, confident and astute Bolingbroke of Richard II. Over the two plays he becomes increasingly frail and fretful, sleepless and haunted by his sin. He eventually dies, as sick in soul as in body. Conversely the upwardly mobile Prince Hal sheds his youthful playboy image, ruthlessly rejects Falstaff, and evolves into the dashing and heroic King Henry V.

Bestriding the action, literally like a colossus, is Sir John Falstaff. He is old, grossly fat, disgraced and totally unscrupulous. He eats, drinks, lies and steals, suffers from verbal diarrhoea and celebrates his way through life… when not snoring. He towers over both plays and is arguably the best loved and most colourful of all Shakespeare’s great characters. He appeals as rogue, wit, anarchist, reprobate, life force, raconteur, bon viveur, philosopher. Even his cowardice is endearing. His final rejection by Prince Hal ends Part 2 on an almost unbearably harsh note: ‘I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers. / How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!’ [5.5]. However, such was his popularity that, according to legend, Queen Elizabeth begged Shakespeare to bring him back, resulting in The Merry Wives of Windsor. The critic A.C. Bradley wrote ‘In Falstaff, Shakespeare overshot his mark. He created so extraordinary a being, and fixed him so firmly on his intellectual throne, that when he sought to dethrone him he could not.’

Both plays have large casts with a wide diversity of characters. Opposing the Lancastrian King Henry IV and his army are the Yorkist rebels led by Harry Hotspur, an individual so fiery and charismatic that young leading actors have often chosen to play him rather than Prince Hal. The dotty old justices Shallow and Silence, reminiscing in their Gloucestershire orchard, are glorious original creations. There is also a gallery of colourful smaller roles. Francis the tavern drawer who says little but ‘Anon, anon, sir!’ can be fun to play, as can Falstaff’s country bumpkin army recruits. My only involvement in the Henrys was as the warriorlike Earl of Douglas in an undergraduate production with the Cambridge Marlowe Society. As a fresh-faced nineteen-year-old from Devonshire, I was ill-equipped to play the ‘hot termagant Scot’ [5.4]. I wore a ginger wig and big bristling beard in an effort to look butch and fearsome, and struggled with the accent. The director John Barton did his best to squeeze highland ferocity out of me. We worked tirelessly until the line ‘Another King? They grow like Hydra’s heads!’ came out, as I recall, something like ‘Yanitherrr Kung? Tha-grrroo-lak Heedrrra’s heeds!’

Roger Allam had a huge success when he played Falstaff at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2010. His performance won that year’s Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor. I interviewed him at his home in South-West London the following year. I discovered that Roger is not only a superb actor but a fine cook, who effortlessly rustled up a very tasty lunch before our talk.

Julian Curry: You’ve done a lot of Shakespeare. How do you rate these two plays?

Roger Allam: They’re amongst the very finest, I would say, some people think the finest. You get such a broad canvas, with a wonderfully complete picture of England: the court and the countryside, the rebels, the aristocracy and the low life of the tavern. Even the smallest parts are written with reality and humanity, they’re magnificent. And the Shallow and Silence scenes in Part 2 are almost Chekhovian.

What was it like working at the Globe?

I’d been one of those people who was instinctively against it, I guess due to having spent a long time with the RSC, where they became quite neurotic about the Globe.

Why was that?

There was the notion of it being kind of ‘thatched cottage’ Shakespeare – I remember that phrase being used – and anti-intellectual. I suppose the same kind of suspicion happened in music when it became fashionable to play authentic period instruments. So I wasn’t enormously sympathetic to it as an idea. I went to something in the first season that I thought was utterly awful and confirmed all my prejudices against the Globe, and I never went again. In retrospect that was rather foolish, because I missed a lot of Mark Rylance’s work, which I now wish I’d seen. I didn’t go again until the year before I played Falstaff, when I saw a friend of mine in Trevor Griffiths’s play [A New World] about Tom Paine. And I was very impressed, particularly with the audience they’d built up. This slightly rambling play, which I think had been adapted from a film script, was packed with 1,500 people watching it.

That’s the capacity of the Globe?

Yeah. And they were really lively. I thought: My God, if you put this play on in the Olivier auditorium at the National it would empty the place. One of the things Dominic Dromgoole has done tremendously well is to start commissioning and encouraging authors to write for that space, to build up a repertoire.

So they do other work besides Shakespeare?

Well, they do at least one, possibly two new plays a year. It’s brilliant, because it means writers can have quite a large cast, which they don’t often get at other addresses. It stops the place becoming purely a Shakespeare house. And it helps writers, I suppose, to examine a more Shakespearean style.

There’s no artificial lighting, so you have to perform in daylight. Was that a problem?

No, actually, no. It’s something you get used to. Of course it means you can’t achieve all the effects you can in other theatres, such as standing in a spotlight surrounded by darkness doing your soliloquy. But you’re always engaging with the audience. After seeing that Trevor Griffiths play, when they offered me Falstaff I realised it’s the perfect part to play there, because he never stops talking to the audience. Another great thing about the Globe is that you can get in for a fiver if you’re prepared to stand, and that’s half of the house. Seven hundred people pay five pounds. There’s no other theatre like that in the land. You get a totally different feel when there are seven hundred enthusiasts. Well, of course they’re not necessarily all enthusiasts, because the other great thing about it only costing five pounds is that people who might not be normal theatregoers can think: Well, I’ll just pop in and see whether it’s any good or not, and I can bugger off if I don’t like it! And that’s wonderful. I’ve quite frequently kept my seat in the stalls because I’ve thought: This has cost me fifty quid, so I’ve got to stay! The only drawback to that theatre is the placement of the pillars, which are a permanent fixture. There’s nowhere you can stand on the stage where every single person in the audience can see you. Absolutely nowhere. So really, I guess, the pillars should be six or eight feet further upstage.

What was the weather like during your production?

We were quite lucky, we only had two really bad days. There was one afternoon when Ian McKellen came to see Part 1, and it just rained and rained and rained from beginning to end. Amazingly there were still two hundred groundlings, as they’re called, in the pit.

Was that the time when you segued into King Lear’s ‘Blow winds and crack your cheeks’?

No, that was the press show, which was also torrential.

A part which spans two plays is quite a luxury, isn’t it? Gives you a longer journey.

Yes, I guess so. Actually you’re not so much aware of that because you just think: Well, there’s Part 1 and then there’s Part 2, which is such a different beast. Part 1 has a natural momentum that Part 2 lacks.

Did you rehearse both plays at once, or singly?

At first we rehearsed both at once, then we left Part 2 alone and got Part 1 ready to open. While we were previewing Part 1 we went back to rehearsing Part 2, and got that ready to preview. So we’d done some performances of both, and then we went back to Part 1 and got used to doing the two together.

Did you open both parts on the same day?

Yes, for the press.

You were directed by Dominic Dromgoole. How did he work?

He’s extremely knowledgeable about Shakespeare, and he’s passionate about the Globe. He was very keen on the history of the Mummers, which have lots of links to these plays. He has a wonderful sense of anarchy and fun, but also authority, so he runs a very good rehearsal room. I guess we just did the usual thing: we sat round and talked quite a bit, and then we got the plays up on their feet and started working on them. He was very open to suggestions, which is always nice, but also good about saying: Hang on, you don’t really want to do that, do you? Which we all need at times!

Was the text more or less complete?

No. We were always looking for cuts, and I was very willing because, my God, Falstaff goes on! The part’s a monster. I don’t know how much of the text we performed, but certainly some of the monologues were cut quite a lot. One of the unexpected perks of working there, having thought that it was an anti-intellectual place, is that they have a whole department of scholarship focusing on the history of the Globe, and which actors might have played the parts first.

In Shakespeare’s company, originally?

Yes. Which can lead to certain clues. I found a book about Shakespeare’s clowns in the library, which is terribly interesting about their development coming out of the Tudor interludes, and Tarlton. The author is convinced that the first actor to play Falstaff was Will Kempe, who was immensely famous at the time. It would have been like having Tommy Cooper playing Falstaff, some really beloved comic, or Eric Morecambe. And indeed a lot of the writing of the part is like a brilliant homage to the improvisatory style of a stand-up comic. The book examines those notions very well.

I think of Kempe as more of a lightweight. He was also famous as a dancer, wasn’t he?

Yes, but he was a big man. I found that resource very stimulating. There’s plenty of information about what it must have been like round there when London Bridge was the only way over the Thames, and executed heads were stuck on spikes above the bridge. There’s a little row of houses next to the Globe, charming houses, one of them with a blue plaque saying it was built by Christopher Wren to use while he organised the rebuilding of St Paul’s. Next to it is an alleyway called Cardinal Cap Alley. I thought: How delightful – so I went down it, and you can see into the gardens of the houses. The following day I was looking in a book called Filthy Shakespeare (which is extremely entertaining) by a woman called Pauline Kiernan. She manages to find filth on more or less every page. And she says Cardinal’s Cap was a brothel near the Globe. It was run by the wife of Edward Alleyn the actor, on rented land that was owned by the bishops of Winchester.

The whores wore long white gloves and were known as ‘Winchester geese’, isn’t that so?

‘Winchester geese’, that’s right. A Cardinal’s Cap is also an Elizabethan slang term for an erect penis. So you can imagine punters saying to each other: ‘King Lear’s boring, let’s hop out and go down to The Stiff Cock for a shag.’ You start thinking about all sorts of aspects of life in that part of London when the plays were first done.

Tell me about the sets and costumes.

It was done in period. In Mark [Rylance]’s time there used to be a rule, I believe, that you had to be able to pack up every show into a single skip. You tend to get less of that now, depending on the director. But rather wonderful, I think, because with easier changeovers they can do twelve or fourteen shows a week, and that’s how the place runs economically. I think over the season I was there, they probably had about five different companies of actors.

One skip containing all the sets and costumes?

Well, not any longer. It was one skip for the costumes and another for the set and props. But you couldn’t do that any more, because they now tend to build more elaborate sets. And we had the stage built out a bit, with steps going down into the yard.

The yard is another name for the pit, where the groundlings stand who pay five pounds, is that right?

Yes. There’s also an upper level that we could use. It gave a sense of vertical space for the tavern, which was very good.

So the tavern was on the upper level?

No, no. The tavern was mainly on the ground, but at times we could go down some steps into the yard, or upstairs. And you could also go down under the stage through a trapdoor. There was a sense, therefore, that the tavern was on many levels. We went along and had an illegal rehearsal one afternoon in that old pub, The Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street. It was originally built after the Great Fire as an inn to house the builders. The place is an absolute warren, with all sorts of upper and lower levels, rooms leading off other rooms, and so forth. I suppose our setting was a gesture towards that.

Why was the rehearsal illegal?

Because we didn’t ask permission.

Oh I see. You just went along and had a pint, and then did some rehearsal.

Had a sandwich and a pint and worked on the play.

Of all Shakespeare’s actorly characters, Falstaff must be the biggest ham of the lot, and he certainly kissed the Blarney Stone. Most have a good relationship with the audience, but at the Globe it was extra special. Did you get much feedback?

Not a lot. They’re very lively, but pretty well behaved. There was one occasion when I said to Hal in the tavern ‘If I tell you a lie, spit in my face and call me horse.’ And three girls who’d been to see the play several times shouted ‘Spit in his face!!’ [Laughs.] But that happened very rarely.

There aren’t many biographical clues to Falstaff’s past in the text. Hints perhaps, rather than clues. How did you prepare? I’m daunted looking at that huge stack of books.

Well, I just brought them down to remind me. Preparation always depends on how long you’ve got, which I can’t quite remember. I rang my friend Simon Callow and he sent me a number of books on Falstaff that were very useful. But I tend to prepare in quite a haphazard way. I don’t read these books from cover to cover; there’s so much written about Falstaff, so I tend to dip into them for stimulation. The character was originally called Sir John Oldcastle, but pressure was put on Shakespeare to change the name. Oldcastle was burnt as a Protestant martyr. He was a friend of Henry V, but allegedly rebelled against him at one stage. I believe Dominic Dromgoole found somewhere that at this rebellion, which was really half-arsed, they were disguised as Mummers. I don’t know whether that’s apocryphal or not, but I like to imagine it’s true. It was interesting to think of him as a character who embodies a mythic ‘olde England’. Now this is remarkable: Morgann’s Dramatic Character of Falstaff is a whole book written in the eighteenth century defending Falstaff against the accusation of cowardice. A whole book! I then read in Harold Bloom’s book a brief description of Ralph Richardson’s Falstaff, which he played in 1945, talking about the ‘old soldier’ element, the weariness of war. So I thought about that as well. Roderick Marshall’s Falstaff: The Archetypal Myth is terribly useful. He examines other cultures where there’s a figure who’s often fat, and a sort of a tutor. Here’s what Marshall says… [Reading.] ‘A grotesque fat, feral, oversexed, crapulous, witty, profane, old/young creature in times of trouble undertakes to misrule/rule a waste country, and educate the heir of its sick and dying monarch in practices calculated to restore peace and prosperity. But when the prince has learned his lessons, usually two battles are fought. In the first of these the tutor buffoon, with a following of bizarre recruits, helps the prince to win a notable victory over demonically powerful adversaries. After this victory the prince is crowned, the teacher rejected, imprisoned and sometimes killed. Following the tutor’s death the king, now fully initiated into the exercise of superhuman powers, goes on to win the second battle in his own right and establish joy and fertility in his kingdom.’

Isn’t it interesting how little Shakespeare actually invented, and how much he recycled!

Yes. Well, he’s saying that Falstaff, whether consciously or not in Shakespeare’s mind, has similarities with many characters in other cultures where this story is examined. Silenus, the tutor of Dionysus, for instance. The wizard Merlin, King Arthur’s tutor. Krishna, the Bhagavad Gita instructor.

So it’s an extrapolation from various similar relationships.

He’s saying that Falstaff takes his place in this mythological strand, if you like. So the research was tremendously stimulating. And it took me outwards into something very different from the usual, more psychological readings. Of course, working at the Globe, it’s not that you’re going to eschew psychology. But it’s, perhaps, not at the top of the list. Graham Holderness’s book Shakespeare: The Histories is very good as well. He talks about the carnivalising imagination, a world where a chivalric medieval prince could meet a band of sixteenth-century soldiers led by a figure from immemorial carnival. I’d never thought of Falstaff as a creature of carnival, either. Listen to this. [Reading.] ‘He wears heavy straw padding in his gut and shoulders, and a mask with teeth and whiskers. His beard is daubed red and he sometimes has a calf’s tail. Like Vice in the morality plays he carries a lath, a sort of cane, with which he beats people. He has a rout of followers with names like Johnny Jack, Little Wit, John Finney, Little Devil Doubt. And he has one called Old Tossit who, Bardolph-like, spends all his time drinking until his nose looks like a ball of fire.’

These go back centuries before Falstaff.

Yes. So the first audiences must have been aware of them, if only subliminally. Falstaff would have been part of those traditions. He was an incredibly sophisticated creation, but with a lot of referring back to earlier popular culture.

Did you beg, borrow or steal from other Falstaffs?

I’m not consciously aware of stealing. But I obviously thought about Falstaffs I’d seen in the past, especially about him being an old soldier which, as I said, Richardson was very informed by. There were various signposts. Things I did nick, or was influenced by, were not necessarily from other Falstaffs. Around that time Mark Rylance did Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth, which was absolutely wonderful. Reviewers said Mark’s was a Falstaffian character, and indeed that play is also consciously tapping into a kind of mythological olde England. Seeing it I thought: Aha, maybe that’s the way to go. It led me to imagining Falstaff for a while as a kind of Pied Piper, playing lots of musical instruments. Well, of course that’s completely impractical, you can’t do it. [Laughs.] But it did help to get some music into the play, and we used a very old folk song in the tavern called ‘Hal-an-Tow’.

You played the mandolin at one point, is that right?

It wasn’t a mandolin, it was an Elizabethan cittern. Then late one night while we were still rehearsing, I saw a repeat of Sharpe on the telly, Napoleonic war stuff starring Sean Bean. Pete Postlethwaite was brilliant as a wonderfully vile, horrible and weird character. There’s one scene where the army’s charging up a hill, very boldly and bravely trying to take a town from the French. Postleth-waite gets down under some dead bodies and pulls them over him, and hides and survives. I thought: Oh, that’s good, that’s really good. It influenced the scene when Falstaff pretends to die, which I wanted to make as convincing as possible. So then I thought maybe he carries a little bottle of blood around with him. Again, Dominic had this idea that he should eat all the time. It seemed perfect, to be constantly snacking. But of course you can’t really do that because he talks such a lot he’s barely got time to drink, let alone eat. However, we looked for opportunities, and I thought maybe when he goes to war he’s got a belt with various goodies. A cup for his sack would be nice. And, wondering what he might have with him, I looked at a book called Food in History. They’d sometimes take little treats like potted meat. Food preservation didn’t change much for thousands of years, they either salted it, dried it or pickled it. The Elizabethans had a thing which they boiled down into kind of a hard, biscuity Marmite, like stock cubes. Add boiling water and you’d have soup. So there was a bit of that in my belt, along with the fake blood and the potted meat.

This was when you were going out soldiering?

Yes. It was very much about the soldier surviving, by way of Ralph Richardson and Pete Postlethwaite.

Falstaff is a debauched old coward, an impudent braggart, a vain and drunken hypocritical liar, and he’s morbidly obese. So why do we love him so much?

I think the reason we love him so much, and Hal loves him, is that he’s fun. I was very much exercised by the notion that they should have a good time together – otherwise why is Hal with him? He doesn’t need to be. In certain ways Falstaff’s a bit like a child, an infant who does the first thing that comes into his head. For instance, I don’t think there’s a plan to deprive Hal of the honour of killing Hotspur, it’s just there. He makes stuff up, and then almost believes it. Gets carried away, like when he’s recounting the Gad’s Hill robbery.

He’s got quite a cruel streak, hasn’t he?

I don’t think it’s real cruelty. But he does treat people appallingly.

Bardolph and the Hostess seem to get the worst of it.

Bardolph gives as good as he gets. But then Bardolph is a man of fewer words, thank God – otherwise the play would go on forever!

Describe your costume, beard and wig.

I had my own beard, I grew one of immense proportions. My hair was long and they added a piece to it, and put some white in the beard. That made my head look enormous.

How fat were you, on a Falstaffian scale of one to ten?

We tried various paddings and I reckon I was pretty fat, although some people thought not enough. There was a problem that my armour squashed the fatness in, so when I put it on I looked rather thinner than, perhaps, I would have wished. With the armour off I was pretty big, but also energetic. We thought: Well, yes, Falstaff is big and fat, but he goes on long marches with the soldiers. So he’s not without energy.

At one point he says he can’t move ten yards without collapsing in a pool of sweat.

He goes off on one. He exaggerates. He’s already got to Gad’s Hill and someone’s nicked his horse and it’s pitch black. I’m not saying he isn’t big, it’s just that I don’t think he’s someone who can’t move about at all, because he does go to the war and he can draw a sword and defend himself if pushed.

The entire part is in prose. Why do you think Shakespeare did that?

Well, the clown’s part was always written in prose, which can add to the belief that Kempe played it. It’s the greatest clown’s part ever written. Prose is also a contrast to the more formal verse of the court. It puts him more in touch with the world of ordinary people.

Falstaff is very well read, isn’t he. He quotes the Bible, and Galen, and he knows the law. He may be a clown, but he’s nobody’s fool.

I’m not sure whether he actually read Galen, but he knows his Bible.

I can easily imagine Hamlet by himself, taking the character out of the context of the play. But I don’t know about Falstaff. What do you suppose he would do without company?

Talk to the audience! Hamlet by himself could read a book, whereas Falstaff would talk to the audience, whether they were there or not, because it’s through talk that he exists.

You were saying that you played the cittern.

Yes. I asked Claire van Kampen, who did our music, what instruments they might have played in the pub. And she suggested the cittern. Apparently there were a lot of them in barbers’ shops. They had flat backs so you could hang them up on a peg neatly against the wall. They were tuned a bit like a ukulele, except in a different order. So I bought a ukulele and retuned it like a cittern.

When did you play it?

We went into ‘Hal-an-Tow’ in the pub as a celebration of the fact that Hal still had the money. It was between that section and going into the mock-King scene [2.4].

You pissed into a pint-pot at one stage?

Yes. Well, no. It was a proper pot, not anything you drink from.

Is Falstaff an alcoholic? Do we ever see him drunk? Do we ever see him sober? Or is he always somewhere in between?

Probably somewhere in between. He’s never incapable. I suppose the drink helps him go further into flights of fancy. He never loses the ability to talk incredibly wittily. Shakespeare’s contemporary, the playwright Robert Greene, is considered by some to be another possible model for him. He was a famous drunk.

Reviews mentioned your ‘ripe, roguish charisma’. On the other hand, another Falstaff was described as ‘draining the bitter dregs of life’. Did you show much of that side of the character?

I think he goes that way in Part 2, where there is a vein of melancholy. In Part 1 he is more like certain people one can think of – indeed some in our own profession – who seem to stay stuck in their youth, going on hard drinking and whatever when they’re way too old. As Part 2 develops he has more intimations of mortality. The tavern scene in Part 2 has a very different, a less joyous tone to it, than the one in Part 1.

Your Falstaff was also described as a ‘dangerously manipulative operator’. Does that ring a bell?

I’m not sure that he really has a developed plan. He’s not like Richard III, he’s not like Rupert Murdoch. I imagine Rupert Murdoch, until recently at least, woke up every morning thinking: How much more of the world can I get today? Obviously somewhere in Falstaff’s mind is the notion that Hal can be useful, and when he becomes King it’ll be great. He often mentions the sum of a thousand pounds. It’s like: If only I had a grand; if I could just get a grand, I’d be fine. I often think like that as well. If I had a million, just one – or let’s say five, to be on the safe side – then I could relax; I’d have enough for my old age. That comes up very much in relation to Shallow. What’s the line about how thin he was?

‘When ’a was naked, he was for all the world like a forked radish… yet lecherous as a monkey, and the whores called him mandrake’ [Part 2, 3.2].

That’s it, always ‘called him mandrake’. And now he’s become a squire, now he has land and beefs. Whereas Falstaff has reached a point in his life where he can’t believe that he’s still basically just living off his wits.

Okay, let’s start moving through the play. Act 1, Scene 2. Your first scene opened with Hal doing up his pants after a night with Doll Tearsheet. What’s Falstaff doing?

I was just asleep.

Where are you and what time is it?

We’re waking up in the morning at Hal’s place. I guess we’re in the Palace, unless Hal has rooms in the City or somewhere. We’re certainly not in the pub.

One critic wrote that ‘Allam and [Jamie] Parker play off each other with joyous ease’. Tell me about Falstaff’s relationship with Hal. He seems to be half surrogate father, and half naughty little boy himself.

Well, yes. Another thing that struck me was that, actually, Hal learns a lot about paternal care, in a sense looks after Falstaff. He gets him out of trouble constantly, more than the other way round. But Hal sees a whole other side of life through Falstaff and meets people he wouldn’t otherwise have met – all the tavern folk, for example.

How much is it genuine affection, and how much is it greed and social ambition, that makes Falstaff bond with Hal?

I think they’re difficult to disentangle.

Are they?

Yes. I say he hasn’t got a plan, but obviously it would be a fine thing if he could get his grand – maybe a bit more – and with luck he could in future become the most powerful man in the land. In that first scene there’s a thought that he might be made a judge. But Falstaff isn’t getting much benefit from Hal at the moment…

He does pick up the tab.

Yes. Hal picks up the tab – of course you’re right. And I guess that first scene is something of a staging-post in Falstaff’s influence over Hal, to get him to agree to take part in a robbery.

In Part 2 Poins tells Hal that he has been ‘engraffed to Falstaff’ [2.2]. I’m curious to know what else there is in it for Hal, beyond enlarging his horizons.

Enjoyment. It’s difficult, I suppose, for someone rich and powerful to know how much anyone else is a true friend, and how much they’re a friend because you’re rich and powerful. But there’s genuine enjoyment. And I suppose (to get more psychological about it) you could say that Hal can attack his father through Falstaff, by being with him instead of with his father, and also by insulting and being viciously rude to Falstaff. But that’s something we might have a different take on, because there was a style of affectionate insult that was current for Elizabethans at the time. A certain word was in vogue – I think it’s mentioned in our programme. There was a group of people who would trade in it. You see that today, when actors get together, and greet each other fondly with ‘How are you, you old cunt!’

That’s very much Falstaff’s mode, isn’t it, to attack the people who are dearest to him. So they obviously enjoy each other’s company and fool around together a lot. But the first scene seems to have a shadow over it. There are hanging references, and Falstaff changes the subject. How serious is that?

I don’t think Hal is threatening Falstaff, saying: I’m going to hang you. But there’s gallows humour in the fact that Falstaff is a thief, and if he got caught he could hang.

So it’s not entirely remote.

It’s there, certainly.

His moods seem to change all the time. He says ‘’Sblood, I am as melancholy as a gib cat or a lugged bear.’ Where does that come from?

A morning hangover, I guess.

In the first scene we meet Falstaff and Hal, and the robbery is set up. Poins introduces it.

Yes. But there’s obviously a plan, because as soon as Poins comes on I say ‘Now shall we know if Gadshill have set a match.’ Really irritatingly, Shakespeare has named a character Gadshill, and the place where we do the robbery is also called Gad’s Hill, which is just infuriating.

Daft.

But the main thing is that Falstaff obviously wants Hal to come more under his influence, and being in the robbery would be a big step.

Is it the first time they’ve done that together?

Yes. I don’t think they’ve robbed before.

Act 2, Scene 2: the Gad’s Hill robbery. Coming back to the lighting (or lack of it) at the Globe, as it happens at night that’s surely one scene where you’d really want the stage to be pretty murky?

Well, it wouldn’t have been, originally. It’s just something you have to act.

So you pretended you couldn’t see anyone on stage?

Yes. Until they were really close. Or someone had a lamp. But there’s a double thing going on, because although you can’t see other characters on stage, you can see the audience. Falstaff talks to them when he first comes on.

Tell me about your attack on the travellers, followed by Hal and Poins robbing you. How was that staged? Was there much fighting? Later on, Falstaff looks as if he can handle a sword, but he doesn’t seem to put up much resistance in that scene.

Well, that’s to do with the darkness. Because if you can’t see, you don’t know what you’re doing with your sword. But there was a great deal of noise, and frightening people.

Did the staging of that scene make use of other levels?

Hal and Poins concealed their disguises down under the stage, and they went down into the yard when they hid.

So they were amongst the audience?

Yes. I came on for Gad’s Hill through the audience, and went up the steps on to the stage.

This business of acting darkness is an odd concept. Did you grope a lot, bump into things?

Yes. There was some wooden scaffolding which I started fighting against, thinking it was an enemy, and I tried at one point doing a somersault over it. But I didn’t do that for long because I realised my mind was making appointments that my body could no longer keep. There was a lot of not knowing quite what was happening, with Poins and Hal running around making a great racket, so we’d think there were loads of them.

You’ve known Poins for twenty-two years. You say ‘I am bewitched with the rogue’s company.’ But you’re slightly wary of him, I think. You don’t seem totally relaxed with him, as you are with Bardolph. Am I right about that?

There is some disagreement academically over whether Falstaff is talking about Poins, or else some of the lines refer to Hal. Poins is very good at organising robberies, but he’s a curious character.

He’s quite sharp, isn’t he.

Yes. And in a way he’s not unlike Falstaff. Considering who Falstaff was, I thought he obviously has no land, but he’s a knight. So what is he? The younger son of a younger son, perhaps? Somebody who’s gone into the army, done soldiering. And I guess we placed Poins very much in that kind of area, someone who’s come down in the world. But conversely, you could play Poins as someone who’s come up a bit.

He’s definitely several notches above Bardolph, isn’t he.

Oh yes.

Act 2, Scene 4: in the tavern after the robbery. Falstaff gives his own version of what happened. He describes fighting with first two, then four, then seven, then nine, then eleven ‘rogues… in buckram’. It’s absolutely hilarious, transparent nonsense. Does Falstaff expect to be believed? As an actor, how do you play that for truth?

Well, he almost convinces himself that it’s true, and it’s interesting that you mentioned the Blarney Stone. I think Ulysses in Homer’s Odyssey has a bit of the same economy with the truth. It often feels folksy and made up. He seems to be saying: ‘After I escaped from Troy I was lost on the seas for two years; I was lost on the sea for four years and then, after five years lost on the sea, I was on this island and there was a guy who was a giant, he was enormous, he was as tall as a house, as big as a cathedral, and he had one eye in the middle of his forehead – one eye, that’s all he had, in the middle of his forehead…’ So I guess I was imagining someone who, in the telling of a very tall tale, persuades himself that it’s true.

It’s a wonderful piece of theatre, based on pure fantasy.

We all know it’s completely untrue. But not nearly so enjoyable if Falstaff isn’t convinced he’s telling the truth. He believes Hal and Poins ran away – they were cowards and took to their heels. And again, I think the telling of it is like a compression of time. You know how, if one tells and retells an anecdote over a period of twenty years about something that really happened, it can often get more elaborate and funnier.

‘Was it for me to kill the heir-apparent?’ A brilliant improvisation. Falstaff would be a hell of a poker player, wouldn’t he.

I did take a pause before the line ‘By the Lord, I knew ye as well as he that made ye.’ That used to go down rather well. The audience absolutely loved Falstaff for it, because it’s so completely ludicrous. Harold Bloom refers to him as being a bit like an infant, because he’s got no super-ego. If you say to my younger son Thomas, ‘Tom, did you eat some of those sweets?’, ‘No, no,’ he’ll reply. ‘You did, didn’t you?’ – ‘No, no, I didn’t. No.’ – ‘You did, because I left you in the room and there were four sweets, and now there are only two. You’ve eaten two of them, haven’t you?’ – ‘No… Clanky did!’ So at certain times I thought of Falstaff as being incredibly infantile.

Before the play-within-the-play can start, they hear that the rebels are up in arms. Falstaff says ‘But tell me, Hal, art not thou horrible afeard?’ Does that threat from the outside world have serious weight?

Oh yes. I think so.

It doesn’t stop them going on with the play.

I think it is a real threat. The wars are about to take place, but they don’t destroy the evening yet.

The Hostess is in tears of laughter before the play even begins. What’s happening?

I think it’s just the sight of Falstaff with the cushion and the dagger.

What were you doing?

I had the cushion on my head for a crown, and a dagger for my sceptre. Also a change of voice, speaking posh. And she laughs because I’m calling her a queen, and including her in the play-acting. But she goes on laughing, so he tries to make her shut up first by being grand and regal, and then saying ‘Peace, good pint-pot; peace, good tickle-brain’, in a stage whisper. Then ‘Harry, I do not only marvel…’ back to the King. And it goes from one to the other.

The scene moves from a hilarious beginning to quite a harsh ending, with a catalogue of abuse from Hal. He calls Falstaff a ‘bolting-hutch of beastliness’, a ‘swollen parcel

of dropsies’, a ‘huge bombard of sack’ and so on. Depending on how Hal plays it, that can be amusing or hurtful. Does it get to you?

Our thoughts changed on that a bit and, perhaps, never quite settled. We never went for it being completely cold-heartedly cruel on Hal’s part. When it comes to insults, he’s not got a great deal of the variety. He just goes on saying: You’re fat; you’re really fat; God, you’re fat; you’re so fat. Falstaff can deal with that.

When he defends himself, it’s interesting that he denies being a ‘whoremaster’, which Hal has said nothing about. Then he goes on obsessively about banishment which, again, Hal hasn’t mentioned. What puts that into your mind?

Well, Hal, in the role of the King, does the reverse of what Falstaff playing the King has done. Falstaff has said: You’re with this appalling group of people, but there’s one good man among them, called Falstaff. So Hal does the opposite. He says ‘Thou art violently carried away from grace: there is a devil haunts thee in the likeness of an old fat man… that villainous abominable misleader of youth…’ You’re right: he doesn’t actually use the word ‘banish’, but I guess it’s implicit. Because what they’re playing around with is whether or not the King is going to tell Hal to change his ways and become a proper Prince. And that would mean not hanging around with this terrible crew, of which Falstaff is the leader.

Hal’s response to ‘Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world’ is very brief: ‘I do, I will.’ That can be much scarier. I wonder how he said it, and how you received it?

That’s something else that changed slightly, I would say, and became rather more serious as our run developed. He wasn’t being cruel, Hal, but he was saying this is inevitable. Then they’re interrupted by the sheriff at the door. This is a line that I took a while to understand: ‘Never call a true piece of gold a counterfeit; thou art essentially made, without seeming so.’

What do you reckon it means?

I think he’s telling Hal: You don’t seem like a Prince but, in essence, you are one. People aren’t always what they appear to be on the surface. So, by implication, he’s defending himself by using the Prince as an example.

Moving on to Act 3, Scene 3: Falstaff seems demoralised. He says ‘Am I not fallen away vilely since this last action?… Do I not dwindle?’ He laments his own thinness! Is it Hal’s treatment? Or Gad’s Hill?

Well, Gad’s Hill was the last action. They haven’t got the money. Hal has had to go to see the King. The war is about to start. And again, it’s the morning after.

Hmm yes, a slow start to the day.

This is where he shows a kind of Puritan streak: moments of self-flagellating guilt coincide with his hangovers. He needs a few to get himself going.

Bardolph says he’s too fat, and Falstaff then takes it out on Bardolph’s nose. He starts off with ‘I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire’, and he goes on and on and on. On the page it seems quite unpleasant. Is it funny in performance?

I think it’s funny because it goes on and on and on. It’s completely unnecessary. But it’s the thing that wakes him up and gets him going. It’s like going to ballet classes for Falstaff, having a good workout: Ah there we are, that’s better – oh I’ve still got it, you know!

He feels energised after delivering a tirade of abuse. What was Bardolph’s reaction?

He’s the one who’s really drunk, much more than Falstaff. I used to be able to smell Bardolph. He’d sometimes come on behind me and I could smell that he was there.

That’s an interesting relationship. You bought Bardolph in St Paul’s, and have ‘maintained’ him for thirty-two years. He seems to be a mixture of servant and henchman and punchbag.

Yeah.

I’d say he’s the nearest Falstaff has to a wife. If he had a wife, she’d get similar treatment, wouldn’t she.

Yes, in a way, yes. Although of course the Hostess, Quickly (i.e. ‘quick lay’) wants to marry him in Part 2.

‘Enter Hal’, and Falstaff immediately livens up and becomes wittier. Hal says ‘I have procured thee, Jack, a charge of foot.’ Is that good news?

Well, it’s very good news that he’s got a charge. He’s got a job that will bring money, which gives him the power to recruit, and recruiting brings more money. It would be better if it was a charge of horse, because that would be less tiring. But it’s still pretty good, I think.

And war also gives chances to steal, doesn’t it.

Yes. But recruiting is the big thing. People had to bribe their way out of being soldiers, as happens in Part 2.

Act 4, Scene 2: a brief scene on the way to battle. Falstaff tells Bardolph to fill a bottle of sack. Bardolph says ‘This bottle makes an angel’, presumably meaning the sum of

money he is owed by Falstaff, who answers ‘An if it do, take it for thy labour; and if it make twenty, take them all.’ Have you any idea what that means?

We couldn’t make it work at all. After I’d sent him off to get the bottle of sack, I’d pull a full one out of my satchel and start drinking it. And that was when I had my potted meat.

Then you have your soliloquy about the ragamuffin soldiers…

And that’s all about making money from bribery.

It’s pretty callous, isn’t it. On the page, again, it’s not particularly amusing.

No, it isn’t. Although there’s a comic-riff element about how appalling they are: This guy saw them and said I must have got dead people from gibbets. But the reality of course is completely unemotional. He’s deeply unsentimental about war, and about heroism. When the Prince says ‘I did never see such pitiful rascals’, Falstaff’s attitude is ‘Tut, tut, good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder. They’ll fill a pit as well as better. Tush, man, mortal men, mortal men.’ Which is very chilling. But it’s also: Don’t give me any of this bullshit about honour; this is what war is. What are these foot-soldiers going to do? They could be really good men, and they’ll get killed all the same. That, to me, was the voice of someone who’s seen quite a lot of war, and who is basically just intent on surviving it.

So he’s not especially proud, or ashamed. It’s matter-of-fact.

Well, it’s hard-nosed and real. There are certain things Falstaff says, especially in the ‘honour’ speech later on [5.1], but also here, where you think this could be a play by Brecht. He starts inhabiting another type of character: the clown who undermines the hero. The Good Soldier Schweik gives that view of honour and heroism.

You have a non-combative couplet at the end of the scene: ‘Well, / To the latter end of a fray and the beginning of a feast / Fits a dull fighter and a keen guest.’ Presumably Westmoreland has exited by then.