Critics enjoy Donmar's royally radical Henry IV

Maxwell Cooter
WhatsOnStage
★★★

Phyllida Lloyd's latest all-female production is what you get when you cross the women's prison setting for Julius Caesar and the secure unit concept of Ian Rickson's Hamlet… Harriet Walter's King Henry seems to be on a different level to everyone… her verse speaking is in a different league… The Donmar Warehouse is to be applauded for exploring new ground with its all-women trilogy… it should be doubly applauded for shying away from plays that would, at first sight, offer more possibilities to an all-female cast… while it doesn't fully work, it's certainly another insightful take on two of Shakespeare's greatest plays.

Henry Hitchings
Evening Standard
★★★★

… bold, strange and mostly a success… Phyllida Lloyd has crafted a production that is grungy and rebellious… an interpretation that defies taboos and ripples with humour. The casting is fresh and intriguingly unlikely… Ashley McGuire is a superb Falstaff, mixing the predatory swagger of a wheeler-dealing geezer with notes of vulnerability, while Sharon Rooney… makes a memorable stage debut… It is a characteristically detailed and highly charged performance… Purists will find much to revile… But this is an intimate, strikingly physical staging… bracingly inventive.

Dominic Maxwell
The Times
★★★★

… there are all sorts of innovations in Phyllida Lloyd‘s adventuresome, compressed, sometimes messy but sincere and never dull… What’s wonderful is how readily we buy into it all… Some of this is inspired, some is cumbersome… this modern-day framing device enables clear, galvanised, highly physical playing from its cast… Anouka is the least irritating Hotspur I have ever seen: she speaks the lines with relish, looks like she means business… with the equally excellent Cynthia Erivo and Ann Ogbomo… anchored by Walter’s weary but still-commanding king… terrific stage debut from Sharon Rooney… There is, inevitably, some collateral damage in the editing process… this production reminds us of the possibilities that gender-blind casting can bring.

Paul Taylor
Independent
★★★★

Clare Dunne plays a woman who hears right at the start that she is to be released in three weeks. This gives her abrasively sardonic Ulster-accented Hal, the scape-grace heir to the throne, a booster-jab of dubious energy… The rejection of Falstaff is thus likely to release terrible passions in both the inner and outer plays… Lloyd had conjured up witty, tragicomic prison equivalents to the Shakespearean environment. Here Falstaff (superb McGuire – it's as if Bottom is making a fantastic fist of the part) nosedives into a pile of cocaine, which, rather than sack, is the stimulant of choice… Harriet Walter is all hollowed-out fastidious distaste and agony and utterly… Roll on the third instalment.

Dominic Cavendish
Daily Telegraph
★★★★

The whole environment insists that these cosily familiar history plays are being taken out of their comfort-zone… But as so often with theatre’s gender-switching games, fresh insights are shed; so much so that I would have preferred Lloyd to give us more, and take longer about it… This production is about more than just giving the sisters more work, better parts… The amateur setting is a bit of a get-out-of-jail-free card… It also excuses below-par acting (of which there is some). But there's mainly terrific work here. As always, you hang on Dame Harriet’s every word but the lesser-known shine too… The evening, though, belongs to Ashley McGuire‘s corpulent, cockney and comically delightful Falstaff.