Three London Shows Put a New Spin on Old Classics

Harry’s father, Henry IV (Richard Coyle, snapping like a cornered fox), has come to rather hate his wayward heir. He not so secretly prefers the rebel Hotspur (Samuel Edward-Cook), who is, at least, applying himself. But is Harry really so debauched, or is he playing some deep public-relations game? Icke excels at textual archeology—his “Hamlet,” from 2017, incorporated a scene from a corrupted pre-first-folio edition known, thrillingly, as the “bad quarto”—and here he has cleverly compressed Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” dyad, splicing together Elizabethan variants, making subtle adjustments, and interpolating lines from “Henry V.” He has also shaped the evening around McKellen’s coward-knight, slowing the action when unease flickers around the old man’s mouth, as Harry’s pranks reveal his cruel nature, then speeding the civil-war plot along to reveal the self-interested Falstaff bustling about in the historical margins.