Recalling Ralph Richardson's famed performance as Sir John Falstaff in a 1945 production at the Old Vic, Kenneth Tynan wrote that it had been "too rich and many-sided to be crammed into a single word". I felt the same about Ian McKellen's Falstaff in this slick, modern-dress adaptation of Henry IV Parts I & II, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian.
Donning a fatsuit to play Shakespeare's antihero for the first time, aged 84, McKellen gives us a Falstaff who is "tragic almost from the start": a "pub drunk, and in soiled shirt and braces"; a "wheeler-dealer, wheezing and snorting, adenoidal and dyspeptic". Rather than a "carnivalesque" figure, this Falstaff is a "carnival grotesque": it's a "radically moving" and "richly complex" performance that deserves to be seen.
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Noël Coward Theatre, London WC2 (0344-482 5151). Until 22 June, then touring.
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