Gerard Murphy is a comically cowardly Falstaff with a personal hygiene problem; Jamie Bamber an appealing young Prince Hal increasingly sure about where he is going and what his future will be; and Shaun Dingwall a valiant Hotspur, the golden boy doomed to die young, skewered like a piece of lamb ready for the barbecue.
However, despite some good individual performances, Gareth Machin's production never rises above the ordinary. Unless you are ticking off plays in the canon, it certainly doesn't make you want to return for the second part and risk having devoted six hours of your life to something decent but passionless. We need less decency and much more passion in the theatre.
The question for a director (and the audience) is why revive these plays at all? You can't just rely on the fact that it's Shakespeare and received opinion is that if it's Shakespeare it must be good.
These are plays of potentially enormous vigour but you have to roughly elbow them into life, not just give them a little nudge. Edward Hall did it recently with his Henry VI adaptation Rose Rage, bringing the full horror of civil war to the stage; the RSC succeeded in the This England cycle because, as the generic title suggests, the productions put England centre stage and raised questions about identity and nationalism that are as hot today as they were 400 years ago.
But if, like Machin, who appears to take no particular view on the play, you stress neither father and son relationships, political expediency or the moral conundrums at the heart of the drama, it just comes across as a fusty, dusty history play with lots of men clanking about in creaky armour like so many tin men in desperate need of a drop of oil.
One of the problems is that it looks so antique, like a production from the early 1960s. The other is that, although many of the central performances are fine in their own right, there is little sense of the relationships between the characters - particularly in the complex triangle of relationships between the morally suspect Henry IV, his son Hal and the morally repulsive Falstaff. History needs a much more energetic dusting down.
· Until November 30. Box office: 0117-987 7877.
