Bell Shakespeare brings vitality and cracking pace to Henry 5
- Written by The Conversation
Shakespeare’s Henry V (stylised by Bell Shakespeare as Henry 5) is famous for many things. Henry’s rousing speeches. Its chorus directly addressing the audience. Its critical treatment of war. Its comic characters like Fluellen. And the comic exchanges between the French Princess and her maid Alice, trying to speak English.
For theatre directors, these each serve as different tracks in a mixing deck that can be dialled up or down to temper the treatment of the play.
Director Marion Potts is a master of this art, bringing vitality and a cracking pace to a big play delivered in less than two hours.
A world at war
The play extends the life of Prince Hal from the Henry IV plays. He has forsaken the Boar’s Head Tavern and rejected his friendship with Falstaff, emerging as a politically astute King Henry V: a valiant monarch who will ultimately lead his depleted army to victory over the French at Azincourt.
This play begins with Henry (JK Kazzi) seeking rightful justifications for his plans to invade France from the Archbishop of Canterbury (Jo Turner). This involves a lengthy speech by Canterbury about detailed legalities; Turner transforms this into a comic tour de force.
The archbishop could justify just about anything. This brings early and unexpected laughter, but allows the spirit of Shakespeare to shine too, who seems to be showing us the absurdities of war: how quickly politics can be moulded to subjective aims.
Our world, and the world of our children, continues to be at war. Shakespeare’s canon offers cathartic ways of reflecting on troubled times within the safety of the theatre.
Thankfully, no specific war is directly paralleled – although the pluck of Volodymyr Zelensky might be echoed in Henry’s costume (t-shirts, sports jacket, cargo pants). Zelensky’s ethos seems to share some of the youth and people’s touch possessed by King Henry. And Zelensky was recently required to defend his dress code as a leader who remains at war, stating: “I will wear [a] costume after this war will finish”.
Costumes by Anna Tregloan distribute similar tones across the English and French soldiers, refreshingly devoid of khaki garb. These emphasise the youth of the armies, dressed in streetwear with guerilla flair, sporting boxing boots.
The prominence of body training throughout serves as an expression of youth and a perpetual readying for conflict.
Potts states in the program:
the world of our production carries the vestiges of wars past and the seeds of those to come. A world either in perpetual ‘training’ for wars or delivering on its brutal promise.
Exposing vulnerabilities
Nothing is lost in the clarity of the performances, which bring a vocal muscle to Shakespeare’s lines.
Kazzi is charismatic as the leading man, using fervency and understatement. His first set-piece, urging his troops with “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!” stays low, to use a term from cricket, and could be pitched higher in its emphatic urgings, but Kazzi finds excellent range thereafter.
The neat set ploy of using a chair and microphone at which various characters sit to deliver the chorus sections works very well with Jethro Woodward’s sound design.
Perhaps emulating a battleground tribunal, the microphone connected us intimately with individual characters. Westmoreland (Alex Kirwan), the King’s dutiful mate, opens the show with “O for a muse of fire!”, quite articulately from a soldier unaccustomed to public speaking.
Exeter (Ella Prince) is a warrior amused by all the fuss. English soldiers (Rishab Kern and Harrison Mills) show sensitivity and convey the vulnerabilities of war. And the duo of French Princess Katherine (Ava Madon) and her warm and vibrant attendant, Alice (Odile Le Clezio), hit perfect moments of comic relief as two French women rehearsing the English language.
Political rhetoric
The play is otherwise stripped of several comic characters (you won’t see the Welshman Fluellen, or Bardolph, or Pistol on stage), permitting its speedy run with a relentless focus on the war. This breach is filled by the comic subplot of Alice and Princess Katherine, preparing for the outcome of the conflict.
The movable scaffold of the main set (Tregloan) proves surprisingly versatile, especially with atmospheric lighting and blackouts (Verity Hampson).
Potts’ use of a screen for subtitles allows her to daringly translate Shakespeare’s lines, so French characters speak mostly French. The musicality of the French language adds ardour and humour, while emphasising the cultural divide of the two warring nations.
Henry V is a play renowned for showing King Henry as a shrewd leader who must achieve great victories for his country, even by committing war crimes.
Henry V shows King Henry as a shrewd leader who must achieve great victories, even by committing war crimes.
Brett Boardman/Bell Shakespeare
While Henry’s threats of the worst kinds of violence against women and children can be framed as political rhetoric (using harsh words to bring about peaceful ends), he strategically commands the slaying of prisoners when outnumbered by the French.
While war crimes were beginning to be codified in Shakespeare’s day, he seems to suggest true war heroes are rare, while innocent victims are common.
Potts’ re-construal of the final scene, often a clumsy betrothal between Henry and Katherine, is made more uncomfortable as Henry flippantly repeats his relentless design to marry her, despite her protestations. While royal weddings were often political instruments at the time, it all seems to be a hollow victory for Henry, who seems suddenly too shell-shocked to care anymore for the rich realm he fought to posses.
Henry 5, from Bell Shakespeare, is at the Sydney Opera House until April 5, then touring to Wollongong, Canberra and Melbourne.
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