The differences could not have been starker. Before coming to this production, with a brilliant Antony Sher as the old rogue Falstaff, the previous version I saw of Shakespeare's two-parter was the Donmar Warehouse's. Phyllida Lloyd's all-woman production compressed the plays into two uninterrupted hours and set the action in a modern female prison. It was one of those occasions that reveal just how infinitely adaptable Shakespeare is. And whereas this RSC production - directed by Sher's partner Gregory Doran - is cast largely with Shakespeare veterans, that one was crewed by many a Shakespeare first-timer, including Ashley McGuire's streetwise and dangerous Falstaff.
The reason I'm banging on about that convention-busting version is that while travelling home after seeing it I came across the RSC poster for this one. It has Sher's Falstaff -half-Santa, half gnome - grinning jovially and pointing at a mug of sack. This, the image suggests, is exactly the classic Falstaff Shakespeare traditionalists like to look forward to. But it must have made anyone who had just been to the Donmar brace themselves for six hours of impeccable but old-school Shakespeare, with no surprises.
It turns out there are a few, though. Not least when Jasper Britton's sleep-deprived Henry IV gives his "uneasy lies the head that wears the crown" speech. He does so while sitting in Mistress Quickly's dining room which he enters shrouded in a cloak like the figure of death. Quickly snores as he laments how "the happy low" sleep, but not he.
Doran's rich, painterly production deftly switches from the epic to the personal the way the plays always should. But it also brings out the anxieties of age in a way I've never quite seen before. The production gets beneath the translucent skin of its elderly characters as movingly as one of Rembrandt's portraits currently on show at the National Gallery. It's all there -and here: frailty, fear, resignation.
Jim Hooper's Justice Silence and Oliver Ford Davies's Justice Shallow are a right old couple of codgers whose gossip is interrupted by mawkish pauses as they dwell on mortality. And none get closer to the inescapable truths than Sher's superb Falstaff who, with hair and beard looking like a half-exploded dandelion, becomes less and less the buffoon and more and more the philosopher - on life, death but also growing old. Unlike the other oldies in the play, he has little self-delusion about past achievements. And, unlike Shallow, he knows his lies about himself are lies.
But there is plenty of youthful energy to this production, too. Trevor White's peroxide Hotspur is a coiled psychopath; and Alex Hassell's Prince Hal is as much of a hell raiser as today's Prince Harry, only with more charisma. Paola Dionisotti's cockney Mistress Quickly – as tough as she is soft-hearted - is a sheer delight.
My only quibble is that the climactic moment of Falstaff's rejection by the newly crowned Hal is so awkwardly staged it almost misses the emotional point. But in all other respects Doran's production delivers everything lovers of traditional and contemporary Shakespeare could possibly hope for.
