Set in a frightful literary multiverse encompassing all the individual worlds of Shakespeare’s theatrical canon, Abigail Thorn’s The Prince takes a decisive stab at the play-within-a-play genre to deliver a disarmingly original narrative sequence. Loosely anchored in the events of Henry IV Part One, Shakespeare’s dramatized history of the rebellion that saw a wayward Prince Hal’s moral reconciliation with his father King Henry IV, The Prince unfolds into a branching pursuit of love, identity and purpose across a fantastical continuum connecting the stories of a cast of timeless characters at their most pivotal moments.
The play’s live audience follows a modern-day heroine, a young girl named Jen from a small English town who finds herself trapped in an alternate version of reality consisting of an endless succession of Shakespeare plays. This world is populated by a strange cast of actors who, at first, don’t seem to notice her twenty-first century attire or her inability to speak in verse. The dizzying odyssey that becomes her quest to find a way back to the outside world comes alive in an inventive text brimming with unmistakable wit and intensity. Coloured with the absurdist humour that contemporary playwrights seem to find irresistible and yet carefully maintaining its hold on the illusory curtain between spectacle and reason, Thorn’s writing negotiates an understanding with the viewer that the world of The Prince is capable of shifting with the switch of a stage light as quickly as the story derives new and poignant meaning from the pages of its original materials.
We’ll hear a play
The first time Jen (played by Mary Malone) delivers a line is minutes into the play, after watching the opening scene of Henry IV Part One unfold before her in full. To the audience, Jen’s sudden
materialization into the foreground is a dramatic departure from the events we expected to follow the King’s discussion with his counsel. This shift in focus forces an addendum to any narrative framework that may already have formed in the viewer’s mind, making it necessary to regain our bearings – it’s clear from Jen’s dialogue that she’d had very little to do with Shakespeare in her former life and, by zoning in on her character, the play hints for us to calibrate our experience to her perspective. Regardless of how familiar one might have been with Act 1, Scene 1 of Henry IV, we get an idea of Jen’s point of view from her bewilderment at the idea of speaking in metre and the incredulity with which she digests the idea of using thee and thou.
True to its form as the dramaturgical equivalent of a frame narrative, The Prince has no shortage of opportunities to suggest these changes in perspective. Jen is cautioned to follow the social conventions of the “characters” in Henry IV, who are described as “antibodies” with unalterable responses and pre-determined actions. She tries to comply, but her disorganized attempts at passing for an attendant in the presence of “Hotspur” Percy (played by Abigail Thorn) — a young noble leading the rebellion against King Henry — end up drawing attention to herself and leading to an off-script interaction in which the two actually trade free remarks about their differences in diction. Sympathy builds between them until Hotspur manages to utter a free line completely in modern prose. This conversation compels both Jen and the audience to once again question our understanding of the narrative setting: if it was possible for the cast of Henry IV to speak out of turn and out of verse, should they not be considered “actors” instead? As the events of the play continue to progress, the viewer is suspended in a perceptive social limbo: we, along with Jen, find ourselves trying to make a judgment on the humanity of these characters in order to assign them their due identities.
What’s in a name?
Thorn’s discerning treatment of the inherited characters — largely the dramatis personae of Henry IV Part One — speaks to a deliberate conscientiousness regarding their original circumstances. This manifests itself in an adroit sensitivity towards the themes and progressions associated with each role. One by one, through their proximity to the disturbance caused by Jen’s unsanctioned verbal investigations and often as a direct response to her sympathy for the hardships Shakespeare assigned them, the borrowed characters are given a chance to speak their minds in prose. Without necessarily creating new identities for them, the play takes this opportunity to recontextualize each character’s “role” in relation to the others and reimagine their conflicts with one another in the light of Jen’s (and our) modern world. The rambunctious Prince Hal (played by Corey Montague-Sholay) is given a new reason to be at odds with his father’s traditional values — the suggestions of queerness half- hidden in the subtext of his original characterization as a flippant tavern-hopper are drawn into focus, escalating tensions between father and son to an all-out row. The comedic proportions of their argument, including the various insults hurled by the King, struck me as suitably cathartic. At the same time Lady Kate Percy (played by Tianna Arnold,) trussed in a restless marriage with the impulsive Hotspur, received a gratuitous helping of emotional restitution and wasted no time making clear that, by all reason, she had just as much right to her freedom as Hotspur did to ride off to war on a moment’s whim. While these adaptations realized certain characters more idyllically and perhaps less practically than others, it’s evident that they were transliterated with the utmost tenderness and honesty. The excess of care afforded to Kate in particular is, I would argue, a measure of the collective sympathy accrued toward her character by the centuries of readership since Shakespeare first published his characterization of her.
As recurring tensions between the same characters steer them inevitably toward the same conflicts, so do their roles in relation to each other — as Hal, Henry, and Kate, but also equally as father, son, or wife – reinforce their captivity within the overarching narrative they share. More and more of the Henry IV cast begin to break form and lapse into prose, lending a growing sense of unrest to the environment of their “play.” It becomes evident that Hotspur, at least, has realized their predicament, but no sooner does so than quickly demonstrates a refusal to give up the associated role. Hotspur is aware of injuring Kate by failing to reassure her of their eventual reconciliation, but spurns her attempts at making amends: a choice which, in conjunction with a sudden reticence to acknowledge any previous interactions with Jen and the worldview she brings, points to a deliberate and discomforting repression. The players’ dual identities are sustained by the level on which they choose to engage with their own narratives: with the presumed identity afforded by their roles comes presumed purpose, which all the “cast” are hesitant to abandon.
The Prince killeth Percy
Portrayed by the playwright herself, Hotspur represents the play’s way of addressing identity and individual potential. As the insular “play” begins to unravel within the larger world of The Prince’s
constructed reality, Hotspur also becomes the first to step off the stage. Before the ambiguity around the identity of the “actors” is dispelled, Hotspur’s character was already hinting at a certain measure of dissonance between the parts they played and their underlying truth. Even though Lady Kate calls Hotspur her “lord,” and Hal and Douglas consistently use the language expected toward their male adversary, Jen, the true outsider to the ecosystem of the “play,” refers to the same with “she” and “her.” This discrepancy is never addressed until Hotspur is finally confronted about the truth of the “play’s” reality, and Thorn’s dialogue betrays her as answering for someone who, once separated from the assumed identity of Hotspur, would never have been called a “son” by the Earl of Northumberland. With her admission, the viewer is released from suspending the uncertainty in their minds, and instead is faced with the understanding that Hotspur’s choices were never anything but perfectly human. The world of Henry IV is indeed a stage, but its actors are no less than men and women.
While Henry IV derailed from its original script, the overarching narrative of The Prince was also on a turbulent course of collision with the world outside. Hotspur’s abandonment of the “stage” is facilitated gradually through an unspoken dalliance with the elements of the real stage — the one being filmed and surrounded by a live audience. As the characters within Henry IV lose conviction in the insulation of their theatrical reality, the actors’ costumes start shedding their literal lustre from scene to scene. Hotspur’s armour is progressively removed and replaced with a tousled mix of modern and medieval garments, while Kate’s regalia is slowly reduced to an underskirt and tube top. The production delights in using its most direct modes of information to affect the other dimensions of its narrative, in a way that could only suit its chosen subjects. Thorn’s first appearance had Hotspur locked in a duel with the Earl of Douglas, clad in full plate armour and wielding a longsword, only for more unlikely weapons to take its place once the character’s facade begins to fold — in a devastating sequence towards the end of the play, she attempts to reenact the fight armed with only her bare hands, while at another point she finds herself holding an empty glass bottle given to her by Jen clearly labelled as Diet Coke. The cleverness of The Prince also informs an acerbic sense of humour: the play is wholly unafraid to move at breakneck speeds between probing its existential themes and delivering the incursion of Diet Coke into its world as a jarring gag. Its best comedic moments hinge on the irony created by the characters of Henry IV grappling with the real world in the form of dialogue with Jen or, rarely, through a chip in the proverbial fourth wall — the same modes of narration from which it derives its strongest development. In this way, it manages to remind us not to take it too seriously without the writing feeling flippant.
Since its release on the video streaming platform Nebula this summer, The Prince has had no difficulty reaching a wide audience of virtual theatregoers. Between the boldness of its premise, the thoughtful execution, the approach to queer commentary, and the effusive adoration it has for Shakespeare’s oeuvre, its draw is obvious to those who can identify with its transformative direction. Although not without its flaws, it awards a novel outlook to anyone who is willing to engage with the multitudes within its narrative. The play’s the thing, wherein the play’s the thing — wherein, as long as one catches the conscience that is one’s own, one might always have a part to play.