You can please some of the Henrys some of the time

But, as the actress said to the bishop, you can never please anyone you give 2½ hours if they expect 6 hours

There’s this website, I don’t know if you’ll have heard of it, it’s called YouTube. You can find all sorts of things on YouTube and, if you ever think it might be quite a nice idea to post something on YouTube, you can lay a dime to a dollar it’s already there. I don’t know exactly what all is on YouTube, but my experience is that it is immensely difficult to post something new on YouTube and find that it is actually new.

One way to ensure a following on YouTube is to keep what you post down in length. It doesn’t matter what subject you are covering, whether it is the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, or the double helix structure of a DNA molecule or the social tensions erupting in John Osborne’s play Look Back In Anger, you ideally need to cover it in about 20 minutes. The longer you take in explaining the intricacies of the most intricate of … intricate things, the fewer people will view your contribution and therefore the fewer advertisers will pay to sponsor your contribution. If it be true that time, elsewhere, is money, then, on YouTube, paucity of time is the more money.

You can see me on YouTube in a number of guises. One of them is as the Roman warrior Coriolanus, about whom William Shakespeare wrote a play and which, when I played the title role on behalf of the Brussels Shakespeare Society, managed to find its way up to YouTube. It’s very long and there’s a lot of shouting in it: so much so that, half-way through the performance schedule, I required to go to my doctor’s and obtain steroids for my vocal chords. But it’s there. You can see it here, you common cry of curs.

We cut quite a bit out of it. At one point there’s a scene where two guys meet on a country road and exchange information about Caius Martius Coriolanus, in order to bring the somewhat dimmer members of the audience up to speed on what the heck had been happening in the previous two acts. The director decided to cut that scene out because it basically just repeated everything that the audience had already seen, and he took the view that, if they’d been paying attention and not rustling around at the bottom of their toffee bags, they would already know what had happened in acts one and two, and so didn’t need this superfluous add-on. On the whole, I agreed with him. And it saved us casting another two actors as unnecessary baggage at the cast party.

Before doing Coriolanus, I auditioned for and got the part of the Earl of Warwick in Henry VI. Not just part one but also Henry VI Part Two and Henry VI Part Three and, with Warwick as his own ghost, Richard III. We rehearsed on 183 occasions over six months and put on the entire, duly blessed story of Henry VI and his murderer, Richard III, in staggered form over a week, doing parts one and two on one night and part three and Richard III on the next night and then switching around. Except the weekend, where we did all four plays in a row on both the Saturday and the Sunday. I can tell you, it wasn’t just the plays that were staggering by the end of that little run; most of the cast was as well.

It was a tour de force and it made no money. The most gargantuan, full-technicolour extravaganza telling of the sad rise and demise of Henry VI and his pathetic, hunch-backed, car-park-destined successor, Richard III, was viewed by about 250 people all told. But we did it, and it was very good, and it’s a production I’m very proud to have been associated with. But it was TMS: too much Shakespeare.

After we’d done Coriolanus, there came another history play: not Henry VI but, this time, Henry IV. Nothing like doing things in order. Aficionados of the canon will know that Henry IV was the king who nicked the crown off Richard II and spent his short 15-year reign looking constantly over his shoulder, a feat a damned sight easier for him than it ever was for Richard III. Henry was a paranoid schizophrenic and had several other ailments, including an attack of proverbitis, leading to his, ultimately, very rational fear of someone taking it upon himself to nick the crown from him, too (barely seeing, until the very last moment, that it was indeed his lawful heir and successor, Henry V, who had the beadiest eye on the bling all the time).

It was a somewhat different play when we produced it in 2017. I got the title role this time and the director had the ingenious — we thought — idea of taking the juiciest bits out of Henry IV Part One and Henry IV Part Two and slapping them together, like some sort of horsemeat sandwich. The antithesis of a kingdom, a kingdom, a horse for my kingdom.

Discretion is, Falstaff tells us in that compendium of theatrical mudslinging, complete with Boy’s Own Hotspur, the better part of valour, and it was indeed with great discretion and much valour that goodly portions of both plays were snipped away to leave the onlooker with a complete story that nevertheless missed out a lot of the lugubrious drudgery that had so effectively bogged down our quadruplet production of the Henry VIes Parts One, Two and Three and Richard the tag-along.

Anyway, a vid was made of the production (you can see it here), and it’s really quite a good one because it uses a large variety of camera angles and it’s not like just being plonked in the middle of the stalls and having to watch the whole bloody — I use the term advisedly — thing from one, single camera angle, which is what ultimately ended up being done with Henry VI, the cameraman’s duty in that case being restricted to just making sure the iPhone didn’t run out of batt.

If you decide to go and see our Henry IV on YouTube, you will find that there is a whole ream of commentators who flock with blazing keyboards to the “what did you think of it?” bit at the bottom, who reveal that, if no one else, they had come to YouTube with faith in their hearts, not to watch small five, ten or 15-minute clips but the full Monty or nothing. They feel utterly and absolutely miffed that they sat down to watch what they thought, nay were enticed and misled to believe, would be nigh-on six hours of solid entertainment, only to watch the entire thing through to the finish and see it drop off the end of the time counter at just over two-and-a-half hours.

You’d have thought that a shortened version would be exactly what you would expect on YouTube. You would also have thought that people who sit down to watch six hours of entertainment would first look to see whether there were in fact six hours of entertainment being proffered to them. What was in the can was kind-of on the label to that extent. But that doesn’t stop them voicing outraged indignation at the mere idea that we would have cut so much as a half-syllable out of the entire Henry IV Parts One and Two composite, compendium work. Outraged and surprised, they were.

For some, life’s full of surprises.