Reviews : HENRY V
* * * *
Modern production of this drama of war and glory have come a lon way from Olivier's morale-boosting movei of sixty-seomthing years agao. Instead of any costume or weapon suggesting the early 15th century, the director Jonathan Munby dresses his English soldiers in battle fatigues, as well as making them wade knee-deep through a water-filled trench that suggests the First World War. His French lords do wear metal breastplates but these continue to be favoured by cavalry regiments today, and like their English adversaries, they run into battle at Agincourt armed with bayonets fixed to rifles.
Munby's production is ..a most persuasive reading of the play, greaced with an intelligent and properly fascinating performance by Elliot Cowan as the King. At his first appearance before hi sunifromed courtiers he is the only man wearing civilian dress. He is cloaked in a coronation flag but his walks cautious, a man feeling his way, and watching him listen to the Archbishop's specious argument for war we sense him trying to work out how to equate desire with legality.
There is always a slight huskiness to his voice, and a seemingly unfeigned break now and then that helps to delineate the sincere belief that his cause is just and God favours him...
Munby cuts the text but not by much, and the presence of scenes not often played restores complexity to a drama that is far more than a young king's journey to greatness. This is the patriotic spin given to history by
the Chorus, here presented witha passionate clarity by Gerard Mruph, but the production does not shrink from showing Henry's readiness to let his soldiers rape and butcher.
Cowan emphasises the character's playfulness where possible, and the production brings in lightenss after Falstaff's death when a mass of ashes pours from the great man's creation urn. Fine vers-speaking from David Collings in several roles helps to make this a production that becomes, despite the bayonets, one to cherish.
The Times
* * * *
Among the canon of Shakespeare's history plays, HENRY V is the heavy artillery, wheeled out whenever Britain has an important war to win (most memorably in the case of Laurence Olivier's 1944 film version). Alternabively, it is the ideal piece to turn ot when the country has emerged from a contentious conflict and urgently needs to examine its conscience.
Jonathan Munby's modern-dress production does not overemphasise the parallels: Henry's hordes do not charge headlong into France on the pretext of finding the Dauphin's pikes of mass destruction. Yet the king's advisers do present their justification for war within a dodgy-looking dossier.
Henry's unswerving belief in god as his principal ally has as much a modern as a medieval ring. In the great scene on the eve of Agincourt, a common soldier states that 'if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make'. Was Colonel Tim Collins of the Royal Irish Regiment even aware that he was paraphrasing Shakepseare when he said: 'As a Christian, I believe we will all be called to account by God for our actions. If Mr Blair lied to us, he'll have a big problem on Judgement Day'?
Yet this is the play that wrote the phrase book for combative English rhetoric - 'once more unto the breach'; 'band of brothers'; 'we happy few' - and Elliot Cowan's charismatic Henry is fundamentallly engaged ina war of words. At the end of the speech that breakds the siege at Harfleur, he collapses like a jelly, as if the power of oration were the only thing holding him up. Cowan reveals that the key to the king's success lies within his ability to speak to everyone in their own language' whether parlaying with the nobles in pentameteter, talking to the troops in plain prose, or stealing the heart of the enemy princess though broken French.
HENRY V is not only a blueprint for battlefield triumph, it also presents a rallying cry for the power of theatre. Designer Mike Britton thrillingly replaces the 'wooden O' of the prologue with a steel hexagon whose hydraulic lifts and coursing brown water suggest that when Shakespeare called for a 'cockpit to hold the vasty fields of France' he might even have had the Royal Exchange in mind.
The Guardian