Shakespeare's two greatest plays have always been a defining experience for RSC directors. Gregory Doran now puts his decisive seal on the company by offering a production that, like last year's Richard II, combines richness of texture with psychological insight. It also contains a major performance from Antony Sher as Falstaff.
Like Robert Stephens in 1991, Sher reminds us that Falstaff is one of nature's predators. Sher plays down the fatness to emphasise the knight's upper-class origins. That has a double advantage in that it gives weight to his laugh-lines in the Eastcheap tavern scenes and provides a plausible explanation for his ruthless exploitativeness.
If there is a perfect fusion of production and performance, it comes, appropriately, in the scene in Warwickshire where we see Falstaff's ragged recruits shuffling across the stage en route to certain death. When Falstaff dismisses them as "food for powder, they'll fill a pit as well as better", Alex Hassell's Hal looks at his old friend with an aghast horror that makes the knight's eventual rejection inevitable.
Sher balances Falstaff's cruelty with sufficient charm to justify his role as magnetic pub entertainer. But, just as you start to warm to this Falstaff, you are reminded of his rapacity. He treats Paola Dionisotti's doting Mistress Quickly with misogynist contempt and even when, in the sublime Gloucestershire scenes in Part II, he meets up with Justice Shallow, his instinctive reaction is to treat him as financial prey: you see Sher's eyes light up with disbelief as the naive rural JP offers him bulging moneybags in the hope of court promotion.
The one false note in a magnificent performance is Sher's tearful breakdown at parting from his doxy, Doll Tearsheet: nothing has prepared us for this unexpected display of genuine emotion. But, although Sher's is the dominant performance, everything in Doran's production bespeaks long-range planning. Jasper Britton's fine Henry IV is a tormented usurper, first seen prostrate in self-abasing prayer, capable of volcanic violence: his brutal treatment of Trevor White's bolshie Hotspur in the opening scenes explains the ensuing rebellion.
There's a typically shrewd directorial touch in Part II when the dying Henry urges Hal, as the future king, "to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels": at that exact moment Henry's cold-blooded younger son, John, creeps in as if to remind us of the family's Machiavellian gene. Hassell's Hal also develops subtly as the plays go on. Starting as an impulsive hothead, sharing a bed with two women and enjoying a faintly erotic relationship with his mate Poins, he grows into a figure guiltily appalled by his own hedonism. And, even if Part I is inescapably more seductive than Part II, the second play comes into its own in the Chekhovian Gloucestershire scenes.
That is partly due to the inspired casting of Oliver Ford Davies as the rustic Justice: when Jim Hooper's Silence reminds him that in his wild youth he was dubbed "lusty Shallow", Ford Davies's mouth mournfully turns down in a way that is both hilarious and painfully poignant. It may seem a small moment but it confirms that one reason we love these plays is because of their ability to embrace the whole range of human experience.
Until 6 September and then on tour. Box office: 0844 800 1110
What are your favourite versions of Henry IV Parts I and II?
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