Redemption? Disgrace? Honour? Legitimacy? Love? Glory? What sort of world do the young inherit from the old, and what should we fight for? What makes a truly great leader? Henry IV (Part 1) is a play made for our time. Shakespeare looks back at history to imagine his nation’s future and turns an immense and kaleidoscopic national lens on the most simple and human of relationships – the family.

The play is moving, funny and thrillingly chaotic, swaying on a tightrope of irrational thought and behaviour trying to maintain its sanity and balance, tumbling from conniving politics to saturnalian madness as people at every level of English society grasp for power, notoriety, fame and loyalty from those around them