Nick Lake/Photo: Cole Simon
What annoyed me most about City Lit’s “Father Ruffian” is that it is something very old doing all it can to convince you that it is something new. By condensing Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” Parts One and Two, adding in a dollop of “Holinshed’s Chronicles, ” capping it off with a garnish of “Henry V, ” throwing in some iPhones and wrapping the whole thing under a new title, adapter and director Paul Edwards attempts an illusion of newness. Only what he’s done here is not new at all. It is something utterly familiar and woefully disappointing: bad Shakespeare.
For the most part, the show is nothing more than a condensed “Henry IV.” The climactic battle with Hotspur happens midway through Act Two and then we are given a greatest-hits version of Part Two and Falstaff’s death in “Henry V,” all within about thirty to forty-five minutes. It is a production of “Henry IV” that manages to throw in modern touches—iPhones, laptops, the Salvation Army, satellite maps—without ever having any modern observations to go with them. The show has one foot in the past, one in the present, and neither on solid ground.
The set is a black box with platforms that wouldn’t be out of place in a high-school production, and the costumes look like they were pulled from deep, mothballed storage. The sound design occasionally has an odd “kung-fu woodwinds” setting that is simply baffling. Actor Edward Kuffert manages a few moments of charm as Falstaff but the acting in general is unthinking, monotonous and uninspired. Nobody seems to think about what they are saying to one another. As Hotspur, Nick Bonges needs to find his Caps Lock key and make sure it’s off.
There is a moment in Act Two when Falstaff does heroin. He then proceeds to have a lively fifteen-minute conversation with friends and adversaries alike which would be really hard to do if he had actually just shot up. Like everything else in “Father Ruffian” it is an empty gesture, made and then instantly forgotten. (Alex Huntsberger)
City Lit Theater Company, 1020 West Bryn Mawr, citylit.org, (773)293-3682, $25-$29. Through February 15.
Related Stories
Giveth and Taketh: A Review of J.B. at City Lit Theater Company This Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play is reimagined with a cast made up exclusively of women over the age of fifty-five.- A Will for the People: A Review of Fuente Ovejuna at City Lit Theater Written more than four hundred years ago, this play about collective resolve against singular authority remains urgently contemporary.
- Assured Indeed: A Review of London Assurance at City Lit Theater Company RECOMMENDED City Lit’s production of “London Assurance” offers a traditional yet satisfying Victorian comedy. Originally written in 1841, the giant cast of characters and the “asides” used gratuitously to reveal characters’ inner thoughts are uncommon in modern theater, to say the very least. And yet, director Terry McCabe’s team makes two hours and thirty minutes engaging and enjoyable. London dandy…
- War and Love: A Review of Arms and the Man at City Lit Theater City Lit's production of this early work by George Bernard Shaw remains brilliantly funny in our time of appalling displays of vanity and greed.
- Clerking for the Weekend: A Review of Two Days In Court at City Lit Theater A delightful pairing of Stephen Vincent Benet’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster” and the Gilbert & Sullivan one-act operetta “Trial By Jury.”
- Full Irish: A Review of Deirdre of the Sorrows at City Lit Theater John Synge's mythic epic receives its first Chicago production in over a century.
