Once more into the breach. Shakespeare’s history play works best if you choose the right moment to revive it. Played as a patriotic jingoistic piece Henry V has always been extremely popular in wartime and was regularly revived during the Napoleonic, Crimean and Boer wars. Laurence Olivier’s film was made for propaganda purposes during World War 2 and was released in 1944 to coincide with the D Day landings in France. Since then it has been directed as an ant-war tract by Trevor Nunn for the RSC in 1965. Kenneth Branagh’s1989 film coincided with the Falklands War and was totally non-jingoistic. Nicholas Hytner’s 2003 production for the National Theatre, coinciding with the invasion of Iraq, was staged in modern battle fatigues.
Henry, a great national hero, has been described as “the mirror of all Christian kings,” yet he behaves with shocking, unchristian-like brutality when he orders all the French prisoners to be killed. Henry was 29 when he fought at Agincourt. Jude Law is 40 and he doesn’t look like the medieval king of popular imagination; and he speaks with an accent which Henry may well have adopted in order to be one of the lads when he was a young man and slumming it with Falstaff in Eastcheap.
Michael Grandage’s 5 plays season, with a quarter of tickets at £10, has played to over 92% overall and 30% of those have been theatre newcomers, a remarkable achievement and an inspiration, hopefully, to other producers. His final production, disappointingly, is somewhat below par. Set within a stockade and visually on the dull side, it doesn’t thrill; though it does improve in the second half. The most original touch is to cast a modern black youth, wearing a Union Jack T-shirt, as the Chorus and who also doubles as the Boy in the play. Ashley Zhangazha underplays the rhetoric.