AFTER weeks of being bombarded by enervating arguments about our sceptred isle’s future, it should have been a relief to see the two Shakespeare plays that deal most lucidly with that subject. And, yes, Michael Gambon, Matthew Macfadyen and David Bradley were better company than the party leaders on the telly. But I must admit that they didn’t always light my mental and emotional fires.

Which father or father figure will end up controlling that impressionable leader-in-waiting, Macfadyen’s Hal? Bradley’s king, who matches Stafford Cripps for austerity, or Gambon’s Falstaff, who is more like Fungus the Bogeyman? Britain’s national health, by which I don’t just mean the state of our hospitals, depends on his choice. Indeed, the nation’s soul is at stake. Nicholas Hytner’s revival doesn’t quite leave us feeling that.

For the two Henries to work, we must feel that Falstaff is a temptation, a lure, a danger. But from the moment he waddles painfully on stage, an askew belt on the grubby vest that precariously packages his vast belly, Gambon isn’t even a refreshing change from Henry’s wintry court. He lacks charm, fun and, surprisingly, charisma. All Hal is doing is slumming with a rheumy oldster who might be the ancestor of one of Gambon’s recent successes, the cadging tramp in Pinter’s Caretaker, or Humpty Dumpty years after he’s fallen off his wall.

I’m all for desentimentalising someone who can become Santa Claus minus the reindeer, but Gambon goes too far, sacrifices too much. The odd moment of youthful reawakening — antique kung-fu kicks as he prepares for the robbery at Gadshill, a gormless twirl over the stage when he’s asked to fight the rebels — fails to correct the overall impression. This Falstaff is morally so ill that he robs corpses on the battlefield and physically so sickly his decline in Part Two scarcely registers.

Gambon’s slovenliness extends to his diction, which is often bleary and blurry. And that complaint must also be directed at Macfadyen, though his tendency is to scramble his words and jab at his syllables. As for his Hal, he’s a cool young man who neither enjoys his japes very much nor seems to be using Eastcheap as a human lab that, as he says in a speech that should be twice as chilling, is meant to serve his own career. Indeed, he’s pretty bored with the place well before a rejection scene that leaves Gambon’s Falstaff doubled up with shock but Hal finds far too easy.

Still, Bradley is as fiercely driven as he should be, conscientiously reducing himself more to a withered mummy than an exhausted king, and there are fine supporting performances in David Harewood’s boisterous Hotspur and John Wood’s Shallow, sappily drooling with nostalgia for old times that never were. And if the widows who begin and end Part One by keening over corpses beside stunted trees don’t have the impact they might, Hytner’s revival moves at a bold, impressive pace, packing the timber floor below the back wall’s period projections with absorbing effect. More than we can say about our election campaign, eh?

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