Made on an unusually large budget of £1 million, John Caird's adaptation of Henry IV was the biggest Shakespeare project since the close of the Television Shakespeare (1978-85) a decade earlier, and was considerably more adventurous than any of those productions. Huge cuts were made to the original text (Caird said that he'd removed almost everybody named after an English county), much of the remainder was reshuffled, and additional material was interpolated from Richard II, Henry V, Henry VI Part III and The Merry Wives of Windsor. If it's not as radical a reinvention as the same year's big-screen Richard III (d. Richard Loncraine) - the medieval-cum-Elizabethan setting at least remains true to the original - it certainly rivals it for gripping immediacy and overall clarity. 

Directed by 
John Caird 

Cast 
Ronald Pickup ... King Henry IV 
Jonathan Firth ... Prince Hal 
Daniel Betts ... Prince John 
Jonathan Cullen ... Poins 
John Woodvine ... Earl of Warwick 
Tim McMullan ... Sir Walter Blunt 
Peter Jeffrey ... Lord Chief Justice 
Roger Allam ... King Richard II 
Joseph O'Conor ... Earl of Northumberland 
Rufus Sewell ... Harry Percy (Hotspur)