The week in theatre: Player Kings; Red Pitch; Underdog: The Other Other Brontë – review

Go for the acting. To see a mighty actor at the peak of his power in his 80s, and a younger one beginning to soar. Robert Icke, the neon-intellect, rapid-action director who has scythed his way through Hamlet, Oresteia and 1984, has spliced together the two separate plays of Henry IV to make an epic portrait, Player Kings. The evening is powered by Falstaff.

Ian McKellen has talked eloquently and practically about the difficulties of moving around in huge amounts of padding, and of memorising a role written not in verse but in prose. The lines are so idiosyncratic he thinks Shakespeare must have written for a particular actor. It could have been McKellen.

Not that his performance is predictable. Though very funny, he is very venal: spinning his fantasies with Jeffrey Archer-like bravado. No loyalty, no sympathy, no pathos. Simply a confidence that he is larger than his own petty life. And a new version of being bulky. McKellen certainly heaves around plenty of flesh, but he has also created a sonic layer of lard. His voice carries the sounds of age and over-indulgence: a wheeze, an occasional slur as if a tooth is missing; a gurgle as if he is swilling a mouthful of sack. His words are as crisp as ever, but they seem to have been manufactured in an entirely remade interior.

It is striking that in an unsentimental production the moment when Hal, newly crowned king, renounces his old mucker – “I know you not, old man” – is as devastating as ever. McKellen does not milk the rejection, but turns it into an anecdote before shambling off, so that the episode becomes slightly refocused: the young king is not marching only towards a purer life but towards a crueller one. It is a subtle shift, enhanced by Toheeb Jimoh as Hal. He is a completely radiant presence, as he was when he played Romeo last year: able to absorb terrible excursions (he is startlingly made to knife Samuel Edward-Cook’s non-stop roaring Hotspur in the back) and yet still seem truthful, magnetic. His charisma is as dangerous as Falstaff’s.

Icke has rearranged but not revolutionised the plays. There are additions – the death of Falstaff has been imported from Henry V – and odd omissions: the sad gaggle of conscripts in the Justices scenes has been cut. There are weaknesses: Richard Coyle’s Henry IV is not strong enough to counterbalance McKellen, so the feeling of Hal being tugged between two fathers is missing. It is an intermittent evening (stronger in the first than second half) but brushed with fine touches. On Hildegard Bechtler’s helpful design of brick wall and swishing curtain, scenes bleed into each other, with characters from one looking into the next, as if time – so big a theme in the plays – is evaporating. It didn’t feel like nigh on four hours.

Incandescent episodes from the lives of young black men are brightening up the West End, bringing not only new observation but unexpected intimacy and a fresh stage vocabulary. We have small theatres to thank for this: David Byrne’s New Diorama first produced the dance-infused For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy, now at the Garrick; Lynette Linton’s Bush theatre put on Tyrell Williams’s award-winning Red Pitch (2022), dynamically directed by Daniel Bailey, now at @sohoplace.

On a rundown south London estate, three teenagers, would-be footballers, are on the brink of change. Around them gentrification – or regeneration? – means demolition and construction. The drycleaner is boarded up; the chicken-wing shop has become a Costa; residents are being moved to new flats. Within them are other uncertainties: the anxiety of a demanding dad or ailing grandfather; GCSEs; brushes with girls – one boy wants seven children, “one for every day of the week”. Above all, the urgency of their kickabouts as they await QPR trials.

Francis Lovehall, Emeka Sesay and Kedar Williams-Stirling act with 3D expressiveness. They shrug each other off; flare into confrontation and warmth; pass and score with exactness, precision and fluency. Khalil Madovi’s soundscape rings them round with the clang of hammer on iron and wood. Ali Hunter’s lighting converts Amelia Jane Hankin’s bare design – the vital pitch is circled by a red metal fence – into a stadium and a place of shadowy reflection. In a wonderful stroke a football glows like the sun, radiant with possibility.

Underdog: The Other Other Brontë is part of another new theatrical surge: remaking the idea of what were once considered bonneted authors. Isobel McArthur’s Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of) squinnied at Jane Austen’s heroines from the servants’ point of view; Zoe Cooper recently detected a queer strain in Northanger Abbey.

Sarah Gordon’s new play takes on the Brontë sisters: their lives rather than the works. Thirteen years ago, Northern Broadsides and Blake Morrison put a Chekhovian spin on parsonage life in We Are Three Sisters. Gordon’s emphasis is plainer: the restrictions of the times (which required the authors to publish under male names) are cudgelled home but the sensibility is utterly 21st-century: knowing and no-holds-barred.

Charlotte, legs planted firmly apart in her scarlet dress, commands sister Anne to stop writing “this shit”. Her biographer Elizabeth Gaskell bustles in like a pantomime dame. Sibling rivalry is at full roar with Charlotte nicking Anne’s novel idea. A gaudy lineup of literary figures in whiskers and top hats caper self-importantly. Charlotte climbs into a glass case to be exhibited.

Natalie Ibu’s strenuously comic production gets lively perfs from Rhiannon Clements as Anne, dubbed a mouse but wild with her pen, Adele James as vibrant Emily, and Gemma Whelan as domineering Charlotte (who also gets a kicking in the 2022 film Emily). It’s a relief to be free of wuthering and piety. Yet where in this mechanical modernisation is the imaginative power that makes the sisters worth attending to? These Brontës are not other enough.

Star ratings (out of five)
Player Kings ★★★★
Red Pitch ★★★★
Underdog: The Other Other Brontë ★★

• Player Kings is at the Noël Coward theatre, London, until 22 June then touring to Bristol, Birmingham, Norwich and Newcastle until 27 July

• Red Pitch is at @sohoplace, London, until 4 May

• Underdog: The Other Other Brontë is at the Dorfman, National Theatre, London, until 25 May