Doing Shakespeare in a park comes naturally for actor Hamish Linklater. He has appeared in Cymbeline, The Merchant of Venice, The Comedy of Errors and Much Ado About Nothing. But those were all done for the Public Theatre’s Shakespeare in the Park series in New York. With his performance as Hal in Henry IV at The Shakespeare Center of LA it marks the first time he’s tackling the Bard’s work here in one of our parks. And he sounds happy to be doing so.
“I find the audience is so intelligent and so with the play here,” he said by phone recently. “From the beginning they have been teaching us as a cast how to hear the play. They hear things in the language that we haven’t heard. It’s been a really refreshing surprise.”
Comparing his Central Park experience with the Japanese Garden on the VA Grounds in West Los Angeles, Linklater discovered a real difference between the two and was surprised at the result.
“In New York the tickets are free. So people pay with their time waiting in line instead of with their money. As a result people are really grateful for being there. I was frankly nervous coming into here. They are actually paying, they are going to sit back and say ‘prove it, show it to me.’ The audiences have been so wonderful and eager and I know that’s in large part because we have one of the great American actors of cinema and stage in our cast. [Tom Hanks as Falstaff.] We haven’t had a single night where we’re going to have to liven it up. Whether the mist is heavy or it is incredibly cold or muggy, to a person we have been buoyed by the response.”
Linklater, best known for his television roles (Legion, The Crazy Ones with Robin Williams and The New Adventures of Old Christine) has worked with director Daniel Sullivan on other productions of Shakespeare’s work. It was Sullivan who asked the actor to join Henry IV.
“I said, ‘yes please.’ I’m way too old for the part that I’m playing, so I chalked it up as one of the canon roles I would never get a shot at before I was dead. He was like, ‘No, I think you can do it if you get the right haircut and eat the right food for a couple months.’ I’m so thrilled it worked out.”
The role he thought he was too old to play is that of Hal, the son of Henry IV (Joe Morton.) He’s a young man who finds more joy in harassing Falstaff (Hanks) than in being truly serious about anything. Sullivan has combined Part 1 and Part 2 (two separate plays) into one combined play for this production which allows for equal parts humor and drama.
“A lot of people argue that the tragedies are the funny plays and the comedies are full of more pathos. Twelfth Night will make me cry. He’s a master of doing both things at once. But this one he made this character, Falstaff, who ran away with the play. Part 1 is a perfectly built play as far as Shakespeare goes. Then Part 2 he’s just sort of handed the keys to the sports car over to Falstaff. Then he goes into mortality in a really surprising way. These two massive succession plays, history plays, and it ends with his best friend saying they can’t be friends anymore. Why would that sum up English history? It’s a beautiful coming of age story in terms of just where the prodigal son is at the beginning and where he ends up and what sort of bad character traits turn into invaluable ones as a leader of a country.”
That Falstaff character, or rather that Tom Hanks is playing him, marks at least the second time Linklater has found himself doing Shakespeare with a major movie star (Al Pacino was Shylock in Merchant of Venice.) Does he sense a moment when the audience stops seeing the celebrities and gets into the rhythm of the production at hand?
“I think a lot of times movie stars are really great performers,” he says. “There a high ratio of that being the case. With both Al and Tom, [the audience] may be coming for the celebrity, but the celebrity is coming for them as well. They put on their big boy pants, particularly in Tom’s case they are very big boy pants. And they put on a really great show. Usually it’s pretty quick. Dan’s clever at getting Tom out there at the very top. Who’s that guy? That’s him? He’s got this fantastic fat suit and wig, but it’s a real transformation. They are going to get their cake and eat it, too.”
Linklater has a goal of ultimately making his way through the canon, including the next of the history plays, Henry V (best known for multiple film versions including those with Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh.) Since he is so well-versed in Shakespeare’s works, I concluded our conversation by asking how Shakespeare would write about our country today.
“I think he probably wrote about the state of America in a lot of those plays and it’s our responsibility to brings those aspects forward. I mean…” with that he laughs before continuing. “I have to say that actually makes me a little emotional thinking about it. We need more voices. We need more voices definitely. It’s pretty intense. At his time he was writing about kings from 400 years ago. He would probably say, ‘Lin-Manuel covered it.’ He wrote about the current situation with Obama. By writing about political figures from 200 years ago and shining a light on that moment. Lin’s got it covered and with better music.”
Photo by Craig Schwartz