High expectation is always dangerous in theatre, especially with Shakespeare. But, even if Michael Gambon doesn't quite turn out to be the Falstaff of one's dreams, Nicholas Hytner's production of our great national epic is as socially detailed and emotionally moving as one had hoped: after six hours you come out feeling that you have traversed late medieval England.
If Hytner seizes on a running theme through the two plays it is the contest between order and anarchy. You see this right from the start when David Bradley's Henry IV is not glimpsed in some Westminster council chamber: instead he is seen on a smoke-filled public highway alongside which the survivors of "trenching war" are bewailing its victims.
And, if his whole reign is beset by riot and civil war, order is emphatically restored with the accession of Henry V. But Shakespeare, with superb even-handedness, shows that the price you pay for social control is repression and expulsion.
The great thing about these plays, however, is that abstract ideas are explored through character; and the strength of Hytner's production is its investigation of the central father-son relationship. Bradley's astonishing Henry IV is not some sickly moaner but a headmasterly figure who subjects his truant son to withering irony.
At one point, he even intemperately hurls a prayer-book at Hal's feet before seizing him warmly by the throat. But the real clue to their relationship comes before the battle of Shrewsbury when Bradley, rejecting Hal's offer of single combat with Hotspur, kicks his son's gage aside with visible contempt.
Sometimes these plays can seem the equivalent of a German bildungsroman: a story of the education of a prince. But in Hytner's hands they become a study of a son desperate to engage his father's love. And Matthew Macfadyen plays Hal very intelligently, as a brooding solitary who hangs out in taverns as a way of gaining his father's attention. And when the death-bed reconciliation between father and son finally comes it is deeply moving; although even here you notice how the expiring king passes on Machiavellian counsel about the need "to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels". I feel we've heard that somewhere before.
But the very intensity of the father-son relationship means that Falstaff is slightly marginalised; and, if anything is clear from Hytner's production, it is that the love between Falstaff and Hal is all one way. Gambon's fat knight, in velvet toque and trousers, is clearly a Hal groupie who in the mock father-son scene in Eastcheap raises a genuinely imploring hand on "Banish not him thy Harry's company". And even after Hal has warned Falstaff of his eventual expulsion, Gambon follows him around the tavern with the watery eyes of a desperate spaniel.
Gambon's Falstaff is full of good things. In Part Two, especially, there is a growing sense of age, decrepitude and melancholy: at one point Gambon even buries his head in Hal's chest as if begging for affection. Gambon also brings out the predatory cruelty of Falstaff, who threatens to devour Justice Shallow like some old pike. But Gambon has a bad habit of swallowing his words when he raises the volume, and what I missed in his performance, which I got from Robert Stephens, was a genuine yearning for a lost world of aristocratic values. It's a decent enough Falstaff, but it's only one part of the fabric of the play.
What Hytner does especially well, however, is contrast the hectic, propulsive, action-filled Part One with the elegiac, death-haunted and autumnal Part Two. A potent symbol of the first play is David Harewood's energetic Hotspur, who cries "We must have bloody noses and cracked crowns" as if civil war were a kind of sport.
And the mood of the second play is perfectly caught in the scenes in Shallow's Gloucestershire orchard, which hit a note of comic realism only matched in world drama by Chekhov.
Luxury casting gives us John Wood as a sublimely self-deluded Shallow who greets a tottering and visibly exhausted Falstaff with a cheery cry of "You look well"; and Wood is excellently partnered by Adrian Scarborough as a Silence, who, keeps breaking into drunkenly inconsequential catches.
If I dwell on the Gloucestershire scenes, it is not only because they are a high point of the evening. They express that sense of deep England that runs through both these plays. And the virtue of Hytner's production, elegantly designed by Mark Thompson, is that it never lets us forget these plays are explorations of our national psyche and landscape that belong very fittingly in the the National Theatre.
