It’s hard to tell which was reverberating more strongly as we watched Robert Hastie’s revival in Regent’s Park: the fact that it featured extensive cross-casting including an actress as King Henry (NOT “a female Henry”), or that this play about, er, England’s engagement in Europe was opening the evening before the British EU referendum. Well, theatrically at any rate the X belongs firmly in the “Remain” box.

It’s no longer any kind of news that Michelle Terry is a wonderful actor. Her Henry begins diffidently, crowned to her apparent shock by Charlotte Cornwell’s (first-rate) Chorus after inspecting all the men in the company onstage. The King rapidly grows more assured, at least in public, but continues to share with us private moments of insecurity. These do not always work 100%: the “Upon the king” soliloquy, as Henry wanders through the English camp the night before the battle of Agincourt, is a little too fraught, especially in close proximity to the stirringly delivered “Crispin’s day” speech a few minutes later. But this is a devout and conscientious king without being at all a softy.

Hastie takes pains to show both the nobility and the brutality in even so partisan an account as Shakespeare’s. I cannot recall another production explicitly showing us the execution of prisoners and even of Bardolph, one of the younger Prince Hal’s companions with Falstaff in the Henry IV plays. (Hastie also cuts the script oddly, retaining for instance the tedious argument between Welsh and Irish captains Fluellen and Macmorris but cutting the famous account of Falstaff’s offstage decease.) The French herald, normally portrayed as the most honourable of his countrymen, is here by turns sneering and craven. In a smart touch, with several military captains played by women, the French princess Katherine is also cross-cast, so that when Henry concludes his wooing, it is Terry who must rise on tiptoe to kiss Ben Wiggins as Kate.

Anna Fleischle’s spare design begins with the cast more or less in mufti, gradually increasing the levels of formal (though modern) costuming so that by the military campaign all are in full fatigues.  The production likewise draws us gradually but compellingly in.

Written for the Financial Times.