You are only given a few chances in a life-time for this sort of theatrical experience and what an extraordinary, enlightening one it is. The Royal Shakespeare Company, under Michael Boyd’s creative direction, is playing the complete cycle of the history plays in London and testing minds and body-parts in the process.

I emerged from this 12 1/2 hour marathon — which is just the first of two parts — feeling as if I had not only touched hands with history but been intensely pleasured by it too. All the best pleasure, though, as masochists will tell you, comes with a little suffering. So it proved.

We began, at 7pm, with the queenly progress of Jonathan Slinger’s orange-wigged, red-lipped, finger-nail-painted Richard II. We suffered the civil war stresses of Henry IV for most of the next day, from which the wintry melancholia of David Warner’s delectable dainty Falstaff, pulling fast ones with Mistress Quickly and Geoffrey Fresh-water’s ingratiating Justice Shallow diverted us.We ended up at 11pm, when Geoffrey Streatfeild’s cold, weedy Henry V had invaded France, conquered it and taken a French Princess as his wife.

The value of watching this thrust-stage marathon has to do with the illumination achieved in the cumulative process. You come to realise just how possessed by civil war England was from 1415 to 1585 when Richard III lost his horse and life. Time, represented by sand pouring down over Slinger’s Richard II and Clive Wood’s vehemently nervous Henry IV, seems to repeat itself in cycles of revolt. Uneasy heads wear crowns in danger of being snatched, with ambitious nobles forever aiming to make fatal cuts in the royal family tree. Boyd brilliantly drama-tises this sense of national unease by vividly haunting the plays with royal ghosts . They rise from coffins. They are discovered in a royal procession. They appear as reproachful spectres in the gallery of the rust- coloured, cylindrical spiral of stairs that forms the centrepiece of Tom Piper’s grim, foreboding set. I find Boyd’s expressionistic and ritualised staging thrillingly inventive. It liberates these Histories from the boredom of conventional stage warfare, thanks to high-wire visuals that swing soldiers in horizontal and vertical motion. Battles are thrillingly represented with swinging trapezes — the high-flying French soldiers in Henry V, led by John Mackay’s ridiculously fancy-dress Dauphin come down upon the British erupting from fox-holes. The French defeat is mirrored in spectacle, as they hang in contorted shapes on trapezes, while a piano and pianist suspended in the air plays a resigned lament.

I am not, though, persuaded by Boyd’s reading of his protagonists’ psychological make-up. Slinger’s haughty Richard, still striking high-camp in dress, manner and voice, though he has toned down his lurid excesses, succumbs to hollow, mechanical protestations of grief and alienation once he has lost wig and crown. He achieves no more pathos than a clown who has mis-laid his role. Relations between Warner’s unusual, stately Falstaff, a bulky, wild-haired schemer who scarcely smiles yet encourages us to do so, and Streatfeild’s dull, semi-detached Hal seem far too perfunctory. The physically undynamic Streatfield, whose thin voice sounds far from regal, makes Henry V neither a calloused war-machine man nor an insecure military commander. Instead this Henry V rouses the men to war with the fervour of a desiccated calculating machine.

Lex Shrapnel, a superlative Hotspur but a natural-born Hal if ever there was one, electrifies the stage with his impetuous temper, tantrums and eloquence. There’s already a bit of starry dazzle about him.