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 The TheatreguideLondon Reviews

For the archive, we have filed reviews of several past productions of Shakespeare's Henry V on this page. Scroll down for the one you want, or just browse.

Henry V
Barbican Theatre Spring 2001

The Royal Shakespeare Company's dynamic and exciting new production (part of its complete Histories cycle) is proof that theatrical vitality is far more important than literary interpretation.

An explanation: there are essentially two basic readings of this play about the soldier-king's conquest of France. The older interpretation saw a simple patriotic pageant with a one-dimensional hero who makes some great speeches; the best example of this is the Olivier film. More recent productions find the human drama of an uncertain or unproved young king who grows into heroic stature in the course of the play; see, for example, the Branagh film.

Director Edward Hall manages to combine the two, offering a gritty, anti-heroic vision of the war and its soldiers, but with a fully-confident, fully-formed heroic Henry at its centre. It shouldn't work, but it does; and even at well over three hours, it's fast-moving and engrossing from start to finish.

To some extent William Houston was stuck with his characterisation of Henry, having played the young prince in the Henry IV plays as more mature and fully developed than ususal. As in the earlier plays, his Henry is a man who knows with absolute confidence how good he is, even if others don't. While this takes away from all three plays any opportunity for the character's dramatic growth, it does make for a very attractive figure, and Houston plays Henry for all his charismatic power.

There's no shining armour or oratorical flourish to this production. The vaguely modern dress has everyone, including Henry, in battle fatigues through most of the action, and the common soldiers are little more than football yobs. War means smoke, blood and casual brutality, and the king's set pieces - "Once more unto the breech," the warning to Harfleur, the Crispin's Day speech - are all spoken in the heat and blood-lust of battle.

And yet it isn't static or stagy. Houston's Henry comes across as exactly the kind of general a modern war needs - expert, confident and authoritative. No obstacle the play throws at him, from his best friend's treachery, through the need to execute his old pal Bardolph, to the moral questions raised by the soldier Williams, can seriously shake him. Even the final wooing scene, usually played for the joke that the war hero is inept with a girl, becomes a delighted celebration of his success in this new arena. The message of the play is that England is - or was - in good hands.

In the supporting cast, Adrian Schiller is a valiant Fluellen considerably less comic than most, while Richard Bremmer's scarecrow Pistol is the embodiment of slimy cowardice and Joshua Reynolds is a sturdy, admirable Williams.

With four plays of the eight-play cycle under their belt so far, the RSC is riding high, with this one and Richard II both innovative and theatrically exciting new interpretations.

Gerald Berkowitz

henry 5
Shaw Theatre Spring 2001

At long last, a company that does Shakespeare - and indeed theatre - the way it should be done. The brainchild of director Miles Gregory, this is drama at its most human that talks to the gods and mercilessly plunders popular culture - particularly that golden period of seventies to early eighties British TV - with a relish that would make Berkoff sick with envy.

British Touring Shakespeare takes on the ritual of medieval society and its complex interrelationships with little more than an array of boiler suits, donkey jackets and a bare stage with a pair of clothes hangers. The Chorus, in the matey form of Mike Rogers, invites the audience into a world where Tom Mallaburn's Henry is an ex-public schoolboy anxious to be seen doing the right thing.

His values learnt on the playing fields of privilege survive battered yet intact ­ like cricket, the taking part in the carnage of Agincourt seems more important than the winning. Indeed, Mallaburn's roll call of the fallen is a spine-tingling moment where, after all this testosterone-fuelled political jockeying, the enormity of the human cost sinks in.

Tom Walwyn goes wonderfully over the top as the Dauphin, contrasting with Clive Fryde's doddery but eagle-eyed King of France. Tobias Beer goes for an insanely believable Fluellen in the style of Windsor Davies, upstaged only by David Barnaby's Uncle Albert of a Pistol.

Laden with irony the dialogue is dotted with improvisatory grace notes, while Barbara Capocci's sparse design and Kevin James' subtle lighting prove how less is best, ensuring the audience is privy to each huddle of intrigue or part of each charge. In unashamedly placing patriotism above nationalism, this production satisfyingly gives no quarter.

Nick Awde

Henry V
Olivier Theatre Spring 2003

Nicholas Hytner's first production as Artistic Director of the National Theatre is clean, clever and nice to look at, with an attractive hero at its centre. If it lacks a clear interpretation or much that is new to those familiar with the play, it is still worth a visit.

There are essentially two basic readings of Shakespeare's portrait of the hero of Agincourt. One sees it as a simple patriotic epic with a golden boy hero, while the other doesn't start from the assumption that Henry is great, but lets the untested young man of the beginning grow into his full stature. (Compare the Olivier and Branagh films, excellent examples of the two approaches.)

Hytner has chosen to take the first route, with a Henry who enters as a confident, no-nonsense business executive and marches straight through to a confident wooing of the French princess, with only a very brief moment of uncertainty before the big battle.

In doing so, the production automatically sacrifices most possibilities for depth or character development, and the director's few attempts to flesh out the rather one-dimensional hero - flashbacks to his youth with Falstaff, having him execute Bardolph himself - don't amount to much.

There are occasional gestures toward an anti-war reading, as in that rather brutal onstage execution and a brief rebellion among the soldiers against Henry's order to kill their prisoners, and transparent attempts to evoke contemporary parallels, in the modern battle dress and use of television, but they really don't add anything. It takes more than a couple of onstage jeeps and some mock TV newscasts to make the play comment on the present, and an anti-war interpretation (which has also been tried before, notably by the RSC in the Vietnam years) has to fight the words on the page too hard to work.

What we are left with, then, are a number of attractive performances, led by Adrian Lester's confident and authoritative king, a born leader with a charm and charisma unclouded by any irony, even when some of his more political speeches are presented as TV soundbites. And by casting a black actor without any internal comment or political statement, just because he's good in the role, the National Theatre advances itself to the level the New York Shakespeare Festival was at fifty years ago.

Penny Downie adds a nice warmth to the play as the Chorus, a modern bluestocking academic with an infectious love for her subject. Robert Blythe's Fluellen (spelled Llewellyn in the programme) starts a bit low-keyed, but becomes noticeably more exuberant and more Welsh as the play progresses. Adam Levy is a hot-headed Dauphin (and surely it is an error to kill him onstage in the battle, making nonsense of the later moment when Henry's peace terms force the French king to disown him), while Jude Akuwudike's Pistol is victim of some textual cutting that leaves him little chance to make an impression. Felicite du Jeu hints at a spikier, more independent Catherine than one normally sees. Cameos are provided by the voice of John Normington at Harfleur and a videotaped Desmond Barrit as Falstaff.

Gerald Berkowitz

Henry V
Roundhouse Spring 2008

With Henry V, director Michael Boyd completes the first half of the Shakespeare's eight-play history cycle, in a production I personally find more gimmicky than illuminating, but which I concede is theatrically exciting and as good an introduction to the play as any Shakespearean novice could want.

A reminder - after the unpromising youth seen in the Henry IV plays, Hal has become the golden king of British legend as he sets off to conquer France, a campaign culminating in the near-miraculous victory at Agincourt and his marriage to the French princess.

Now, I personally prefer interpretations of this play, like the Terry Hands-Alan Howard RSC production of thirty years ago or the Kenneth Branagh film, that don't start from the assumption that Henry is a hero, but let us (and him) discover in the course of the play that he is up to the challenges of both war and peace.

But I recognise that an actor and director who have followed the character through the Henry IV plays will inevitably find much of the arc of his growth before this play begins.

And so I accept that Geoffrey Streatfeild's Henry is almost completely there as this play opens - mature, confident and inspiring confidence in others.

The final steps in his development come beautifully in the night before Agincourt, as he adds humility, sincere piety and a full awareness of the burdens of kingship to his character.

The Agincourt Eve sequence does play beautifully, as the emotional centre of the play, and so does the post-battle discovery and reaction to the extraordinary victory. And, with Henry as fully matured and confident as he's going to get, the wooing scene of the last act can be played and enjoyed as simple happy romantic comedy.

On the other hand, I found Henry's set pieces - 'Once more unto the breach' and the St. Crispin's Day speech - impressive oratory but emotionally disappointing.

Henry pretty well dominates this play, leaving little room for others to make an impression. Nicholas Asbury's Pistol is more subdued than most, hardly living up to his fiery name. Jonathan Slinger is an attractive Fluellen, eccentric without being ridiculous. And Forbes Masson's enthusiastic Chorus sets the Great Adventure tone of the production.

After the relatively straight-forward Henry IV plays director Michael Boyd and designer Tom Piper lapse back into some of the silliness of Richard II.

With the English soldiers spending much of their time popping their heads out of foxhole-like trapdoors, the French court are all on trapezes, and even that piano gets lowered from the flies again, for no clear reason except perhaps to get the RSC's money's worth from the effect.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - Henry V - RSC Barbican 2001
Review - Henry V - Shaw 2002
Review - Henry V - National 2003
Review - Henry V - RSC Roundhouse 2008