I begin with the desire to see Michael Gambon play Falstaff – a desire initiated by memories of his past performances and fueled by Michael Cordner's description of a South Bank Show's fly-on-the-wall recording of rehearsing 1 Henry IV's great tavern scene:

Dancing the role, inflecting Falstaff with movements borrowed from Asian warrior figures in recent award-winning films, writing Jet Li, Lucy Liu, or Uma Thurman over “Shakespeare,” adapting the part, one might say, to contemporary understanding or popular taste. (Gambon: “I try to move like a dancer. If I had been born again . . . I would be a ballet dancer.”) Whether or not these moves travel from rehearsal to performance, I anticipate a Falstaff so light on his feet that he makes me want to dance with him, a Falstaff performed by the actor Ralph Richardson dubbed “The Great Gambon” and whom Deborah Warner called “heavenly, super great.” A star, yes, but is Gambon a Shakespearean star? He has played Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and Antony, but he probably is better known - in the sense of being “popular” - for The Singing Detective's Philip Marlow (1986), Inspector Maigret (1993-94), Lyndon Johnson in Path to War (2002), Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), or even the voice of the washing machine in a Wisk television commercial. Does the starring role “make” the Shakespearean star actor?