With the RSC's main theatre being rebuilt, it is hard for Stratford regulars to walk past the nearly demolished old auditorium without reflecting on great past productions. The 'Henrys' figure highly among my own favourites: Alan Howard unforgettable as Henry V, Helen Mirren's lethally sexy Queen Margaret and the late Robert Stephens's Falstaff.

Yet after seeing both parts of Henry IV, one of the highlights in the RSC's epic staging of Shakespeare history plays, I find it tempting to believe that the company's time in the Courtyard Theatre will one day be looked upon as a golden era too.

Early days for sure, but with Ian McKellen's King Lear being followed by The Histories, it is difficult to think of a sustained run of ensemble excellence to match what is now being served up. While the project to present the Complete Works a year or two ago took boldness to the extreme, it did not have the unity of purpose of these plays, charting over a century of turbulent English history from Bolingbrook to Bosworth Field. With the return of the Henry VI and Richard III the entire cycle of eight history plays is running at Stratford until the middle of March, before storming on to London.

The taverns and brothels of Eastcheap are the battlefields where David Warner's Falstaff and Geoffrey Streatfeild's Prince Hal (pictured) excel. The well padded Warner offers us a surprisingly restrained fat knight: lecherous and cowardly for sure, but with a calculating eye and the hint of cruelty that makes him as far from the Merry Wives of Windsor glutton as you are ever going to get. This Falstaff is as much a match for the Lord Chief Justice as the excellent Mistress Quickly, given a fiery Scottishness by the excellent Maureen Beattie.

From the beginning he is all too well aware of his young friend's status and his prospects from benefiting from it. Hal, by contrast, verges on the manic, in Part I at least, before the slaughter at Shrewsbury cools his blood. But it is there he has to overcome Lex Shrapnel's Hotspur, magnetic as he, too, brings together the warrior's greatness and bluster, the volcanic temper and political naivety.

Hal's relationship with his father remains the emotional centre of the plays. Clive Wood's Henry IV is not just melancholy but clearly a desperately ill man. The two great reconciliation scenes are memorable, with Streatfeild's Hal rising to the dignity of the verse as the decay and shadows draw in during Part II, which sees Richard Twyman taking over as director from Michael Boyd, the main driving force behind The Histories.

The plays have won deserved praise for their battle scenes. Part I's showdown between Hal and Hotspur is superb, imaginatively staged and worthy of the combatants.

Henry IV Parts I and II will run until March 14 at Stratford as part of The Histories. They will open at London's Roundhouse in April.