Five Kings: Adapting Welles Adapting Shakespeare in Québec

Five Kings: L'Histoire de notre chute is an ambitious adaptation in French of Shakespeare's two tetralogies of history plays. As the title suggests, the creators have been influenced by Orson Welles's adaptation of the same name, and in the program notes they express their desire to pick up where Welles left off. We can therefore read Five Kings as an attempt by these four adapters to stake their claim as artistic professionals and redoubtable Shakespeareans. The Five Kings creative team is to be congratulated for managing to stage the entire sequence of Shakespeare's eight history plays in the same five-hour time frame in which Welles staged the second tetralogy. Besting Welles is no mean feat.