Falstaff: “Banish not him thy Harry’s company, banish plump Jack and banish all the world.”

Prince Hal: “I do. I will.”

After a sell out season, Sport for Jove returns with Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1. Played in an extraordinary medieval globe like setting, it is an unmissable experience.

Redemption? Disgrace? Honour? Legitimacy? Love? Glory? What sort of world do the young inherit from the old, and what should we fight for? What makes a truly great leader? Henry IV is a play made for our time. Shakespeare looks back at history to imagine his nation’s future and turns an immense and kaleidoscopic national lens on that most simple and human of relationships – the family.

The play is moving, funny and thrillingly chaotic, swaying on a tightrope of irrational thought and behaviour, trying to maintain its sanity and balance, tumbling from conniving politics to saturnalian madness as people at every level of English society grasp for power, notoriety, fame and loyalty from those around them.

It is Shakespeare having an absolute ball with what this thing called theatre can be, and is one of the world’s greatest studies in courage, crime, the nature of rebellion and the challenge of living up to our responsibilities. Sport for Jove’s
brand-new production of Henry IV is another example of the exceptional clarity and accessibility which our company has become renowned.


A must-have experience for young people studying the play.


The production includes a detailed 30-minute lecture on the play by director Damien Ryan and Q&A with the students to deepen their relationship to the work.