SOPHIE STOLL wallows in a fine live recording of old blues-infused folk songs immersed in American blue-collar culture
In this gung-ho moment, GORDON PARSONS has doubts about the ambiguity of a patchy production of Shakespeare’s paean to warfare
Henry V
The Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
★★☆☆☆
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW felt he could hardly forgive Shakespeare for trying to thrust “such a Jingo hero as his Harry V down our throats.” Despite the Company’s commitment to present all of Shakespeare’s plays, beset as we are by daily Trumpian fanfares, it might be thought a singularly inappropriate moment for the RSC to launch a new production of the Bard’s paean to warfare.
To be fair, modern productions since Olivier’s gung-ho film have striven to leaven the play’s message and, indeed, Shakespeare characteristically injects minor chords into his major theme.
This first production by Tamara Harvey, since becoming one of the company’s artistic co-directors, has been interestingly inventive in a number of ways which make us see the play afresh.
Notably, his contending English and French armies comprised of numerous indistinguishable victims, “supernumeraries” drawn from theatre schools and youth groups, dutifully die at the “breach” at Harfleur or, according to official figures reported to the victorious Henry, among the 10,000 French and 25 English slaughtered at Agincourt.
Harvey also treats the standard version with adventurous freedom, adding to, cutting and juggling the text at will, all theatrically acceptable but liable to leave an audience periodically at sea – “who is fighting whom now?”
Shakespeare’s comedy interludes, never very funny, are sufficiently amusing in the hands of Paul Hunter’s Pistol to hold the audience’s attention.
But the play is essentially Henry. Here, Alfred Enoch follows a course from adolescent excitement at becoming king, heightened by the prospect of a set-to with the French, through a critical moment when, moving disguised through the camp in the play’s great pre-battle, nighttime scene, he learns the cruel reality of war for his troops.
He gathers himself to issue the famous rhetorical booster speech while his exhausted followers drop around him, clearly not attracted to featuring in the “royal fellowship of death.”
The outstanding achievement of a patchy production is Annie-Lunette Deakin-Foster’s choreography. She moves her 30-strong team of supernumeraries in dramatic battle scenes which dissolve in poignant ballets of death.
Give Shakespeare his due. He does remind his audience in an epilogue, delivered by the French princess preparing to become Henry’s queen, that we were soon to lose all those hard-fought French territories. Was it all worth it?
Runs until April 25: Box Office: 01789 331111, rsc.org.uk



