Noël Coward; @sohoplace; Dorfman; London
Ian McKellen reigns supreme in Robert Icke’s Henry IV mashup; Tyrell Williams’s coming-of-age football drama is bang on target; and the Brontë sisters are let loose – up to a point – at the National
Go for the acting. To see a mighty actor at the peak of his power in his 80s, and a younger one beginning to soar. Robert Icke, the neon-intellect, rapid-action director who has scythed his way through Hamlet, Oresteia and 1984, has spliced together the two separate plays of Henry IV to make an epic portrait, Player Kings. The evening is powered by Falstaff.
Ian McKellen has talked eloquently and practically about the difficulties of moving around in huge amounts of padding, and of memorising a role written not in verse but in prose. The lines are so idiosyncratic he thinks Shakespeare must have written for a particular actor. It could have been McKellen.
