HENRY V
Courtyard
Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Opened 6 November, 2007
***
With this production, RSC artistic director Michael Boyd completes his grand projet of staging
Shakespeare's entire (accidentally accreted) Planagenet history cycle
with the same ensemble of actors. All eight plays in The Histories appear in repertoire
in Stratford until next March, then come to the Roundhouse in London. I
had been awaiting this instalment with interest, less because it is the
final piece of the jigsaw than because, on viewing its predecessors Henry IV parts 1 and 2 in August, I
had wondered how actor Geoffrey Streatfeild might turn his unusually
cold, unsympathetic Prince Hal into a national darling as King Harry.
He nearly pulls it off. This king is clearly conscientious; he takes
his responsibility for the country and its people, and to them, with
utmost seriousness. He is a Good King, but a hard one to love. The
light of human engagement shines only occasionally in his eye; at
crucial moments such as "Once more unto the breach" it is replaced by
the stare of the fanatic. More often than either he seems simply to be
focused elsewhere, as on the eve of Agincourt when the king disguises
himself to mingle with his troops, and falls into conversation and then
dispute with the cynical trooper Michael Williams. Streatfeild's
monarch prefers to muse introspectively on his kingship rather than
turn it into a dialogue; for most of the scene his back is to Lex
Shrapnel's Williams, as he talks about himself to himself.
From such a king, occasional breakthroughs of connection may be all the
sweeter, though not sweet enough to justify the overall
characterisation. The great Crispin's Day speech starts dubiously, with
the king standing above and apart from his army on the steel rampart of
Tom Piper's set, but as he first sits and then climbs down to join his
officers, we feel he is literally taking a stand with them as he
rallies them. His final-act bilingual wooing of the French Lady
Katherine is also a delight, as long as we ignore the fact that his
claims to be more naturally a roisterer who "could win a lady at
leap-frog... or bound my horse for her favours" are entirely
un-backed-up by conduct or temperament. As the princess, Alexia Healy
has only two scenes in which to shine, but shine she does, particularly
in such fine rapport with Hannah Barrie as her maid. Of the English
soldiers, the former hangers-on of Falstaff – Bardolph, Nym, Pistol –
are rendered efficiently rather than strikingly; the account of the fat
knight's own offstage death from old age might almost pass unnoticed.
The most memorable soldier we see is Captain Fluellen, whom Jonathan
Slinger (remarkable in other parts of the cycle as Richard II and
Richard III) turns from a simple Welsh caricature into an individual
who both amuses and occasionally shocks us.
If characterisation is only erratically successful, the visual concept
is patchier still. Piper's all-purpose metallic set comes into its own
in various martial settings: Forbes Masson, delivering the prologue,
changes the famous description of the Shakespearean theatre as "this
wooden O" into "this rusty shed", and also more candidly refers to the
passage of the play as "three and a half hourglasses". However, having
the gaudily clad French nobles fly in and out upon trapezes for their
scenes makes it look as if Henry is waging war against The Flying
Wallendas. Sending white paper streamers over the field of Agincourt
creates an impressionistic sense of post-battle turmoil, but also
suggests that the madcap young Hal has revenged himself upon the French
by TP'ing their country.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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