E-Mail This Article to a Friend Rites of succession (continued)

But the simple, roughhewn production, given a cathedral feel by strategically placed a cappella motets (and the "Laudamus te" from Vivaldi’s Gloria), moves fleetingly, despite the script’s preponderance of reflective poetry over action. Neither does it browbeat its Christian imagery — though, in a bold climax, the deposed king, pierced in the side before his throat is cut, slowly tumbles Christ-like from his upper-level cell into a purgative bath of blood. For all the intercession of political alliance and betrayal, the emphasis here is on Brian McEleney’s preening and peremptory Richard, whose greatest fault may be an absolute belief in the Teflon quality of his divine right. McEleney brings to the part a smug yet beatific presence and a metallic and fluted, slightly mocking delivery that sits well on Richard’s back-and-forth of arrogance and self-dramatizing prostration and especially on the bereft ex-monarch’s contemplation "of graves, of worms and epitaphs" and "sad stories of the death of kings."

Little face is given to the weak "flatterers" who hover behind the throne, but there is sturdy work by William Damkoehler as the Earl of Northumberland, chief advocate for the wronged yet usurping Bolingbroke. Angela Brazil is touching as Richard’s queen, from whom, no homosexual here, he is tenderly parted. There is a tad too much Falstaff-to-come in Fred Sullivan’s allegiance-torn Duke of York. But Timothy Crowe brings a well spoken if too-grizzled virility to Bolingbroke that will stead him well as the world-weary, guilt-ridden, son-vexed political animal of Henry IV.

The noise and energy levels are ratcheted up when Dehnert takes the helm, sailing, as is her modus operandi, adventurously if over the top. There is more clanging of bells and stomping of boots in her raucous, angry Henry IV than in Riverdance mixed into Chimes at Midnight. Dehnert’s conflation devotes two-thirds of its three hours to a neatly streamlined Part 1 and puts Part 2 in a vice that squeezes out all but the essential, duplicitous putdown of a second rebellion, some rowdy shenanigans and intimations of mortality in Eastcheap, and backsliding wastrel-hero-of-Shrewsbury Hal’s restoration to his dying, doubting father and cruel rejection of sack-swilling surrogate paterfamilias Falstaff. Even the insomniac title character’s paean to the burden of kingship is cut to its "uneasy lies the head" chase.

But when it comes to the ever-popular heart of Henry IV, the affectionately boisterous give-and-take between Falstaff and Prince Hal amid the rabble, gray-bearded, fat-suited Sullivan (in a green-quilted vest that makes him look like a Robin Hood balloon) and wiry boy-next-door Stephen Thorne can’t outdo each other enough in comic interplay. The tavern scene in which the pair one-up each other imitating Crowe’s Henry IV cadence in parody of the monarch’s anticipated interrogation of Hal is priceless (as is Hal’s phallic lampoon of the fiery Hotspur, to whom dad routinely and unfavorably compares him). Thorne also anticipates his own reform in wistful, prescient asides. And once he has thrown aside his ripped leather jacket for a long green military coat, he grows to fit it while Sullivan, cannily if ignobly, weighs in on "honor."

Although Mauro Hantman plays Hotspur on one note of unquellable hotheaded valor (perhaps that’s written into the part), the athletic tabletop skirmishes at Shrewsbury culminate in a head-bashing encounter between him and Hal that is as brutal as it is heartbreaking. In general, the fight choreography by Craig Handel is first-rate, and the physical exertions of the ensemble, leaping tables as if they were stepping stools, swinging from the catwalk supports, tumbling like sword fodder off the back of the stage, bespeak as many Wheaties as late nights of line learning and long days of character hopping in their preparations.

By the time Eustis breaks out the suits and briefcases at the top of his crisp 20th-century Henry V, it’s a relief. Here McEleney’s Bible Belt politician of an Archbishop of Canterbury uses flow charts to explain the "clear as is the summer’s sun" convolutions of Salic law that supposedly justify the new king’s proposed invasion of France — a direct response to Henry IV’s deathbed advice "to busy giddy minds/With foreign quarrels, that action, hence borne out,/May waste the memory of the former days." Ghosts of both former monarchs and dead Falstaff come back to guide Thorne’s King Henry V as he battles the condescending French and his own bad-boy image. This helps connect the plays, though Eustis’s production is less rambunctious than Dehnert’s and replaces its vivid if symbolic violence with impassively delivered shots to the head.

Henry V, with its rallying invocation of "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers" and its seemingly providential 1415 victory at Agincourt, is an unabashedly patriotic piece. And Thorne’s brave, boyish Harry is an indisputable hero, albeit a human one who having ordered the pilfering Bardolph (McEleney as a sunny simpleton) executed weeps over the clownish corpse. At the same time, Eustis means to show the horror of businesslike war and raise a modern eyebrow at the invading Harry’s insistence that God is on his side. Although humbler than Richard II in his view of himself as the Deity’s "deputy anointed" and altogether more eloquent than Dubya, Harry is a more troubling figure by today’s light than he was in Shakespeare’s time.

Thorne is an intelligent, appealing actor, even if he lacks the sheer virtuosity to take his Hal from Eastcheap to Shrewsbury to Jerusalem to Agincourt; he’s a mercurial, complex Hal whose earnest transition to Henry V lacks some of that "Muse of fire" invoked by the play’s Chorus. But if this Henry V and its Henry V do not ignite like a recruiting poster, that may be Eustis’s intent. As for Trinity’s ambitious Henriad, it burns steadily, with a director-adjustable flame.