SOURCE: Macaulay, Alastair. “Human Life at Its Richest.” Financial Times (3 July 2000): 13.

In the following review, Macaulay provides a generally favorable assessment of Michael Attenborough's Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) rendering of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, particularly focusing on what he regards as the fine performances of the ensemble cast.

Shakespeare's best? Any theatre-goer's opinion will keep changing on this; but I am one of those whose vote—both while in the theatre and on reflection—goes most often for the two parts of Henry IV. Here his sense of human life is at its richest, and his mastery of multiple plots most telling. High life and low life, fathers and sons, chivalry and villainy, reality and illusion, life and death, tragedy and comedy, wit and seriousness: all the antitheses that underpin Shakespeare's thought here play off each other to superlative effect. And, even though Part One has the richer...