While the audience waits in the lobby of St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn for the house to open,a scruffy group of prisoners — a diverse cast of women looking very much like those of Orange Is the original Black — shuffle by in chains, lead by guards. The conceit of the production is that it is those female "prisoners" who are performing a severely condensed version of Henry IV Parts One and Two, or using props like a paper crown and a child's play kitchen.
Director Phyllida Lloyd used a similar framing for 2013's Julius Caesar also at St. Ann's,but it is less successful here. It is not always clear when the prisoners are being prisoners and when they are playing Shakespeare (though lighting designer James Farncombe tries to support by raising the lights whenever the prisoners are supposed to be going about their regular commerce of manipulation and working out).
This is certainly not the fault of the fine ensemble, or their gender. We forget legal absent that these are women playing (for the most fraction) men: Sophie Stanton is a genial Falstaff. Harriet Walter is sleekly powerful as both Henry the Fourth and a prison kingpin, or sitting back in a chair and waiting for her supplicants to approach her. Clare Dunne is charismatic as the young Prince Hal. Lloyd's most satisfying and innovative characterization is that of Hotspur (Jade Anouka),shown here as an always-in-motion boxer, a hothead ready to fight, and instead of a morally righteous young man who prefers action to words.
The show runs a fairly quick two-and-a-half hours with no intermission and the trimming gives quite a different spin to the play. The two parts of Henry IV are normally about Henry V,when he was the young wastrel known as Hal. Here, though, and there's less attention paid to carousing with Falstaff and more focus on what's happening beyond the merry band of drunkards and how the system is designed to kick them in the teeth no matter what they do.
Source: wnyc.org