At 10.30am Clive Wood’s Henry IV, whom we’d left at the end of Richard II surrounded by sacks containing his foes’ heads, was wanly facing the most dangerous rebellion of his difficult reign. At 4pm he was once again admitting that troubles at home would prevent him going on a crusade to Jerusalem.

At 9.30pm his son, Geoffrey Streatfeild’s Henry V, was disbelievingly reading the ultra-short list of the English dead at Agincourt. And at 10.55pm the Chorus was confiding that their setbacks and successes were for nothing, given the impending disasters of Henry VI’s reign.

Thus ended the long, long day in which Michael Boyd and Richard Twyman staged the second section of the RSC’s trawl through Shakespeare’s histories, leaving me feeling even better rewarded than I had been by a parallel marathon last year in Stratford.

Wood remains the impressively curt, tough king whose face seems to get more creased, his shoulders more slumped, as the burdens of office erode and destroy him. But both David Warner’s Falstaff and Streatfeild’s Henry fils are much improved. There wasn’t much fun in either at Stratford, and so no clear reason for their bond. That has now changed.

Warner’s Falstaff is still wry, ironic, very much the watchful, canny survivor who lives off his wits; but his sense of humour has increased with the size of his stomach. He becomes a bit melancholy in Part Two, as he should, but even there you sense the playful youth he once was and see the ebullient adult he became. And Streatfeild’s Hal, so chillingly disdainful last year, is now vastly entertained by Falstaff’s japes and follies.

But Hal must eventually reject Falstaff, which means that Streatfeild must have his serious moments. And so he does, notably in the scene in the Eastcheap pub where he acts the role of his aggrieved father. While Warner offers an hilariously sheepish imitation of Hal, Hal himself abruptly emits a promise of rejection so blunt that the drinkers are stunned into silence.

Thus are we readied for the bold, conscientious, sensitive but hardened king who will direct anguished prayers at God while ordering the murder of his prisoners.

With the grimy English emerging through traps in the stage to fight their ferocious battles, while the exquisitely clothed French smugly hover on trapezes above, Henry V is finely staged; but then so is the whole of a sequence that also brings us a fierce, restless Hotspur from Lex Shrapnel and much else. Next month come Boyd’s Henry VI and Richard III. Can’t wait.

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