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“I know thee not, old man.” Is there a more shattering moment in Shakespeare’s than Prince Hal’s ruthless dismissal of his former drinking buddy and surrogate father Falstaff in Henry IV Part II? Perhaps Lear’s hopeless plea to Cordelia to ‘stay a little’ as he cradles her dead body in the final minutes of King Lear equals it. Yet Lear’s words are about the cruelty of mortality. Falstaff, who in that second of pitiless rejection knows his time is up, however he might helplessly bluster otherwise to Justice Shallow, has instead received the cruellest of blows from a friend he regarded as a son. It’s a moment on which an entire production can rest. If it leaves an audience winded in their very soul, the actor playing Falstaff has done his job.
Or at least, half the job. This week it was announced Ian McKellen, one of our greatest living Shakespeareans, will take on the role of the obese rascally barfly knight in Player Kings, Robert Icke’s new adaptation of the Henry plays, in March next year, after years of saying no. Previously he says he felt he didn’t “understand” the character. Falstaff lives on in the imagination as the glorious embodiment of a very English anti authoritarianism - a boozer and a rogue with the wisdom of Lear’s fool, not above a bit of cheating and deceiving when it suits him and who in one of the great comic scenes pretends absurdly to Hal to not only have felled Hotspur but to have fought with him for an entire hour.
Yet in resisting putting on the fat suit necessary to play this most outsized of characters for so long, McKellen – who has played Lear and Hamlet three times, most recently Hamlet two years at the age of 82 - perhaps recognised the sheer Herculean challenge of doing so. For Falstaff is also the great Shakespearean paradox: the sherry sozzled intoxicating avatar of a vanished merrie England who sends wretched recruits to their deaths with shocking indifference and who speaks truth to power while shamelessly spinning the tallest of tales. He is a liar and a thief, and yet in his unarticulated solitude, his limitless capacity for self delusion and his deep unspoken bond with Prince Hal, he’s also one of Shakespeare’s most poignant, desperate characters. We love him, we are chilled by him and yet, ultimately, we don’t know him at all. He is, as the American director Jack O’Brien has said, a “protean” character who, in a mark of his elusive magnificent contradictions, simply “keeps unfolding”.
The irony is that, until very recently, this shapeshifting tragic-comic Lord of misrule has never been considered a great classical role. “Why is Falstaff not considered one of those which the classical actor measures himself against [like Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet]?” asks Antony Sher in his diary of playing Falstaff in 2014 for the RSC, The Year of Playing the Fat Knight, before going on to list the legends who never sought to add him to their list: Olivier, Derek Jacobi, both of whom turned the role down, Gielgud, Scofield.
Perhaps they considered the gouty waddling sack addled knight beneath them. It’s the Hamlets and the Lears who are considered the pinnacle of an actor’s career - the role we wait for a great actor to take on, the characters considered the most complex and rewarding, who reveal the deepest truths about the human condition. Or perhaps these titans of the theatre resisted because Falstaff is so damned difficult to nail.
“Falstaff is the most difficult role that I have ever played,” said Orson Welles, who took on the challenge in his 1965 film Chimes at Midnight which, like Icke’s forthcoming adaptation, collapsed both the Henry IV plays into one. He felt that, while he had captured Falstaff’s “bread and wine” goodness, in concentrating so hard on the journey towards the rejection scene he had failed, crucially, to make Falstaff funny.
“He’s a deeply duplicitous bastard,” said Michael Gambon, who played Falstaff at the National in 2005. “He is an actor - different in every scene. I don’t know who the real guy is yet. I don’t know if I’ll ever find him.” We don’t know because Falstaff never tells us. Unlike Iago or Macbeth, he has no great soliloquies, indeed he has no discernable inner life at all. “I don’t know how he really feels about Prince Hal,” said Simon Russell Beale, who played Falstaff in the BBC’s adapted mini series The Hollow Crown. ‘He lives the unexamined life.”
Great Falstaffs are few and far between. Ralph Richardson’s incarnation opposite Olivier’s Hotspur in 1945 was for years considered definitive, capturing both the character’s immorality and deep humanity. Sher also won some of the best reviews of his career for his magnetic predatory Falstaff at the RSC.
Falstaff is more than a character, he is an anti heroic life force whom we take to our hearts like no other. Even his creator couldn’t contain him, bumping him off in Henry IV Part II (Mistress Quickly’s description of the moment of his dying is profoundly moving) and then forced to resurrect him at the bequest of Queen Elizabeth I in The Merry Wives of Windsor, somewhat humiliatingly for Falstaff who in that knockabout romcom finds himself cast as a repeatedly gulled suitor.
This knight is ultimately unkillable, impossible to define, possibly almost impossible to play. So let’s raise a glass to him, and to McKellen for bravely attempting to unravel his mysteries
Forget Hamlet, Falstaff is the hardest Shakespearean role to perform
As Ian McKellen announces he is playing the debauched knight, we look at the character Michael Gambon described as a 'duplicitous b-----d'