Embattled Amateurs at Montford Park

Abstract

as Falstaffs interim companion or as Hotspur's better. The treat was Pedro Silva's Falstaff. Silva, a charter member of the core company, had before this summer rarely given textured depth to his various-albeit minor-Shakespearean roles. But his Falstaff lived, not as a raucously overexaggerated clown, but as a good-humored, often serious knave whose thievery and cowardice were based upon principles that worked in thoughtful counterpoint to Hal's and Hotspur's visions of glory and honor. Falstaff did not, however, carry the production as he has so often and too easily. He received his share of laughter but not at the expense of sacrificing the play's politics. Indeed, what was sobering and moving about the performance was its delicate balance of intimate comedy and civil strife. Falstaff, Hal, and Hotspur alternately drew a measure of sympathy and understanding by addressing the audience while sitting or standing far downstage. In his catechism on honor, for example, Falstaff began upstage and concluded downstage, all the while propositioning the audience with rhetorical questions. Hal's soliloquies and Hotspur's rationale for the rightness of his cause were also directed squarely at an audience that found itself withholding political and moral judgment because of this balancing of persuasion. Consistent perhaps with the temper of the play, but somewhat disappointing, was the loss of the Hal-Francis episode and, in Hal's rehearsal scene, Falstaffs cushion and chair. Other cuts and