When Henry V is played in conjunction with Henry IV we can trace the development, the education of Henry from wayward child to determined monarch. When performed on its own the actor has to reconcile the emotional, psychological, and moral turmoil brought about by conflicting personal and public interests--between the man and his role as king.
Alan Howard, who tackled all three plays in 1975, saw no
discrepancy between Hal and Henry V, between Prince and King. It is an extraordinary progression straight through. At the beginning of Henry V he has still not established himself as a person or a King ... Almost immediately he begins questioning his position ... His self-questioning is extraordinary right through the play. He questions what his responsibilities are and, indeed, what the place of the King should be.82
Theater historian Ralph Berry thought that
On the one hand, Howard demonstrated the traditional qualities that the part calls for--a commanding stage presence, good looks, a voice that has to deliver the battlefield goods ... on the other hand, he displayed a moral awareness of the drama, a continually surprising inventiveness, and an intelligence directed always towards exploring the self-doubt and pain in the role.83
The critic Irving Wardle detailed some of these moments:
Howard grapples on the floor with the treacherous Scroop, as a father who has let him down. He practically vomits after hurling the barbarous threats at Harfleur; and again half way through reading the roll call of the French dead. His stainless adventure is haunted by the Eastcheap ghosts; and when Bardolph is caught robbing the church Howard has to stand and give the execution order with Pistol looking him straight in the eye; an ordeal that shakes his nerve with the French herald. Then, in a wonderful transition, he begins a halting speech, hits by accident on a joke and a smile of surprised delight steals across his face at his own powers of recovery, and his capacity to keep on acting.84
4. Alan Howard reading the list of the dead in Terry Hands' 1975 production.
Another thought that "Ghosts haunt his queasy mind, principal among them his own father, usurper of Richard II's throne--witness the hoarse panic of Mr Howard's prayer that this crime should be remembered: 'Not today, O Lord, O, not today' [4.1.279-80]."85
The agonizing self-doubt of Howard's performance gave Henry an emotional depth which most of the actors following have also made much of. William Houston, in 2000, however, played a far more enigmatic character, more ambitious, calculating, and controlled than most Henrys--a portrayal that carried through from his rather cold-hearted performance as Hal:
You can also see ... what makes him such an effective ruler and leader of men. Houston is cold, watchful, efficiently insincere, adept at presenting his actions in a generous light, buoyed up by an enormous belief in himself. He keeps his feelings under tight control when he has to, but an almost feral quality peeps through. He is not particularly impressive physically, but he has acquired charisma through sheer force of will.86
The coldness and the cruelty [demonstrated as Hal] continue here, the feeling that Henry has a pocket calculator where his heart ought to be. But Houston finds a touching vulnerability on the eve of Agincourt which suddenly persuades you that this is a character worth caring about, and his sense of kinship with his fellow soldiers is genuinely moving.87
In 1997 Ron Daniels picked Michael Sheen to play Henry "for his youth, his gentleness, his mixture of innocence and maturity."88 Coming to terms with his role as king, Sheen demonstrated an almost psychotic instability prompted by a lack of confidence:
Confronting the friend who had plotted to assassinate him, this Henry reacts with an embarrassing neurotic intensity, first putting a pistol in the man's hand and daring him to shoot, then snatching it back and holding it to the ex-friend's temples in a frenzied, near-murderous scuffle.89
"The gruesome threats directed at Harfleur become genuinely terrifying, a near-psychotic outburst rather than a simple piece of strategy."90 To counterbalance his volatile king, Daniels
equips Henry with a tearful, conscience stricken colleague in the shape of the young Earl of Warwick. This expanded figure is so appalled by the King's speech threatening the besieged town of Harfleur with hair-raising horrors--a speech made all the more unpleasant here by the squeezed sound of the loudspeakers through which it is relayed--that he tries to snatch the mike from the crazed monarch's hand.91
Michael Sheen's laddish portrayal lessens none of the growth of the character; powerfully it never lets us forget the importance of the lessons he has learnt about the real world from his time with Falstaff and his retinue. In the moments of indecision, of his changes of heart, you can see the tension between what he would have done (maybe what, in part, he would still like to do), and his growing knowledge of what he must actually do for the general good--for the sake of his nation. These moments are real and genuinely touching.92
Henry's declaration of astonishment after the Battle of Agincourt is often the first moment when we get a real sense of Henry as a religious man. In 1994 actor Iain Glen played Henry as deeply religious from the start. As critic Benedict Nightingale asked:
Is there a character in Shakespeare who invokes God so often? For Bernard Shaw, this was evidence of an enthusiastic frog-basher's hypocrisy and cynicism. For Warchus, it is an integral part of a production much concerned with the topic that is as timely as ever, the ethics of slaughter.93
Others may talk of the reformation of the wild Prince Harry but this King Henry was born-again in a rather modern sense. Canterbury's assessment in the first scene, "Never was such a sudden scholar made, Never came reformation in a flood, With such a heady currance, scouring faults" [1.1.33-5], was entirely accurate ... he knelt to the Archbishop and kept with him throughout the rest of the play the crucifix his spiritual father had given him. The scenes the night before the battle did not here show Henry "Walking from watch to watch, from tent to tent" [4.0.30] but instead a man who desperately wanted to find a quiet place to pray and kept being interrupted ... not the usual pretext to allow a little surreptitious wandering around in disguise. The scenes built towards the prayer itself and, later, the deeply felt tones of the culmination of this sequence, the last line before the battle, "And how thou pleasest, God, dispose the day" [4.3.135].
Serious-minded, sincerely religious, this Henry, often seen shouldering a huge pack like his troops, took his share of the work of war. He was part of a band of brothers and was respected for it.94
In 1984 Kenneth Branagh's Henry highlighted Adrian Noble's theme of "the painful cost of war to the individual ... an angry Harry driven to personal violence by the degradation of a war he has been told is just":95
The ... programme contains two parallel essays on "Hero-King" and "Scourge of God," both of which relate to Kenneth Branagh's performance. At his first appearance ... a quiet, cold figure watching and listening while giving nothing away, and generally avoiding the centre of the stage. He first shows his hand in the tennis ball scene, beginning with a mild answer to the French insult, and then exploding into paroxysms of psychotic rage ... The effect is characteristic of this actor, and it is well matched to Henry's habit of playing the sympathetic private man and then arising into violent public action ... there is no clear cut division between the two ... Not content with sentencing the English conspirators to death, he hurls himself on Stephen Simms's Scroop for an act of personal betrayal. And after the massacre of the boys, he similarly assaults the French herald. The performance throughout presents a poised, confident mask through which panic and savagery periodically break out. This can take the form of physical courage, as in the vertiginous fall from a ladder into the arms of his followers. More often he comes over as a haunted man pursued simultaneously by personal and dynastic history. His prayer before Agincourt is a gabbled, terrified act of bribery, fully in the spirit of his guilty father. Likewise, memories of Eastcheap come home to roost at his last encounter with Bardolph ... who kneels fixing the king with a mute, terrifying stare as he is slowly garrotted b
y Brian Blessed's hulking Exeter. This is by far the most painful moment of the evening and the one passage where Mr Branagh comes closest to public collapse.96
5. Kenneth Branagh leads his men into the breach at Harfleur in Adrian Noble's 1984 production, which was to be reprised cinematically (with live horse in place of ladder) five years later.
Alan Howard thought Shakespeare was trying show us that at the end of Henry's initiation through war there could emerge a king who understands human frailty as well as commanding the respect of others,
who could be strong without being authoritarian ... What is so sad is that whatever tremendous journey both Hamlet and Hal have made into themselves, they both die so young that whatever potential is there, whatever they find out about themselves will never be realized. That ... makes Henry's end as sad, as tragic, as Hamlet's.97
Henry V as a play of "doubt" and "uncertainty"* often evokes conflicting responses in modern audiences. Shakespeare encourages us to support a man who, regardless of his scruples, enters into a trumped-up war, which sustains terrible casualties, in order to maintain his kingdom. The great challenge for the modern director is "to square anti-militarist scruples with a full-blooded treatment of the great national folk tale."98
THE DIRECTOR'S CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH KENNETH BRANAGH, EDWARD HALL, NICHOLAS HYTNER, AND MICHAEL BOYD
Kenneth Branagh was born in Belfast in 1960 but moved with his family to England at the age of nine. A year after graduating from RADA, where he won the prestigious Bancroft Gold Medal, he was awarded the Laurence Olivier Most Promising Newcomer Award in 1983 for his performance in Julian Mitchell's Another Country. He joined the RSC later that year, becoming the youngest-ever actor to play Shakespeare's Henry V, in Adrian Noble's production at Stratford. In 1987 he set up the Renaissance Theatre Company with David Parfitt, creating a company of like-minded actors and writers; their productions included Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear, A Midsummer Night's Dream, as well as John Osborne's Look Back in Anger and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. In 1988 Branagh was awarded the London Critics' Circle Theatre Award. He returned to the RSC to play Hamlet in 1992. He played Richard III at the Sheffield Crucible in 2002, and in 2004 won the Evening Standard Best Actor Award for his performance in Edmond at the Royal National Theatre. In 1989 Branagh directed a much-acclaimed, Oscar-nominated film of Henry V, drawing on his RSC experience of playing Henry. He went on to make more Shakespeare films including Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Hamlet (1996), Love's Labour's Lost (2000), and As You Like It (2006). He also played Iago in Oliver Parker's film of Othello (1995); his numerous other film roles include Professor Gilderoy Lockhart in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002). Television roles include Guy Pringle in the BBC mini-series Fortunes of War (1987), and he adapted and directed, as well as played the lead in, the BBC crime thriller Wallander (2008), which won the BAFTA for Best Drama Series. He talks here about both his film and the RSC stage production by Adrian Noble, out of which it grew.*
Edward Hall was born in 1967, the son of Sir Peter Hall, founder of the RSC. Educated at Leeds University and Mountview Theatre School, he began his professional career as a theater director at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury in the early 1990s, where he directed a number of Shakespeare plays, including Henry V and The Comedy of Errors. He came to national prominence as a Shakespearean director with a highly successful touring adaptation of the three parts of Henry VI entitled Rose Rage. His all-male Shakespeare company, Propeller, has gone on to stage acclaimed versions of several of the comedies. He talks here about the modern-dress production of Henry V he directed for the RSC as part of its This England sequence of history plays in 2000.
Nicholas Hytner was appointed director of the National Theatre in 2003. He was born in Manchester in 1956 and, after attending Manchester Grammar School, read English at Cambridge. He was associate drector of Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre from 1985 to 1989 and at the National from 1989 to 1997. He was a visiting professor of contemporary theater at Oxford University in 2000-01, and is an honorary fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He is credited with revolutionizing the National Theatre artistically and with attracting large new audiences by producing bold, original work. He has directed many plays from the classical repertoire including King Lear and The Tempest at the RSC and The Winter's Tale, the two parts of Henry IV (with Michael Gambon as Falstaff), The Alchemist, and Phedre at the National. His long-standing collaboration with the playwright Alan Bennett includes The Madness of George III, The History Boys, and The Habit of Art at the National. His films include The Madness of King George, The Crucible, and The History Boys. He talks here about the 2003 production of Henry V, his debut upon becoming artistic director of the National.
Michael Boyd was born in Belfast in 1955, educated in London and Edinburgh, and completed his MA in English literature at Edinburgh University. He trained as a director at the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre in Moscow. He then went on to work at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, joining the Sheffield Crucible as associate director in 1982. In 1985 Boyd became founding artistic director of the Tron theater in Glasgow, becoming equally acclaimed for staging new writing and innovative productions of the classics. He was drama director of the New Beginnings Festival of Soviet Arts in Glasgow in 1999. He joined the RSC as an associate director in 1996 and has since directed numerous productions of Shakespeare's plays. He won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Director for his version of the Henry VI plays in the RSC's This England: The Histories in 2001. He took over as artistic director of the RSC in 2003 and oversaw the extraordinarily successful Complete Works Festival in 2006-07. His own contribution to this was a cycle of all eight history plays, from Richard II through to Richard III, with the same company of actors. This transferred to London's Roundhouse Theatre in 2008 and won multiple awards. He talks here about his production of Henry V in that cycle.
Some productions explicitly signal later wars, such as the Falklands or the first Iraq war. Did yours? What are the gains and losses of doing so?
Branagh: Although I was aware of bringing a particular set of postwar sensibilities to bear on my reading, I sensed that a 1980s film version of such a piece would make for a profoundly different experience from that of Olivier's wartime version. People spoke of the film in connection with the Falklands war, but I'm glad we didn't consciously go with that contemporary emphasis.
Hall: It was a contemporary setting so I did want people to think about contemporary conflicts. I don't think you lose anything by that. I think we gained lots by just aesthetically jogging people into the present.
Hytner: Full disclosure: I chose during the summer of 2002 to schedule Henry V to open in April 2003. The country had just fought the beginnings of a war in Afghanistan, and it seemed likely that we would soon be fighting another in Iraq. The play has often been a barometer of public opinion during times of war. Olivier's 1944 film found in it an unforced heroic patriotism; Kenneth Branagh's film (and Adrian Noble's RSC production) reflected ambivalence about the consequences of armed conflict in the Falklands.
As it turned out, the Iraq war started during rehearsals, and it would have been perverse not to play Henry V as a contemporary text. The enthusiasm for historical reconstruction is a recent development in theatrical history, and would have made no sense to Shakespeare's own company. None of his history plays were given period productions at the Globe: the entire cycle feels like a dialogue between fifteenth-century English history and the Elizabethan present. A three-way dialogue that includes our own present is nowadays inevitable, however the plays are presented.
This doesn't mean that the National Theatre production was about the Iraq war. It remained a play about Henry V, the victor of Agincourt; but in performance, it seemed constantly to throw light on current preoccupations. A striking example from the very start of the play: Henry needs rock-solid justification in law for the invasion of France--an action recommended by his dying father "to busy gid
dy minds / With foreign quarrels." The Archbishop obliges him, before the Council, at extraordinary length. In our production, he handed copies of an elaborately produced dossier round the cabinet table, and he referred to it repeatedly as he explained England's right under Salic law to take military action.
The scene made concrete a sense of historical continuity: war leaders have always gone to great trouble to massage the case for war. Maybe the same point could have been made had the scene been staged as an Elizabethan or medieval council of war, but the big gain was in immediacy and clarity. The audience, force-fed by news media on UN resolutions and dodgy dossiers, caught on instantly and were riveted by the sinuous substance of the archbishop's argument. The questions begged by its bizarre contortions seemed both rooted in history and utterly of the moment. Is this true? Is this relevant? Is this right?
A large portion of the play turned out to be about presentation: the king's rhetoric always in the service of spinning first the buildup to the war, then the initially perilous progress of the campaign, then its aftermath. We gained a vivid impression that Shakespeare was writing for us, now. We lost, of course, its corollary: the indisputable truth that Shakespeare was writing for his own audience, then--a truth that has animated much of the most interesting Shakespeare criticism in the last decade. A serious loss, but not a permanent one--there's always next time.
In retrospect, I think there was a more interesting loss. Such was the widespread mistrust of our own war leader's rhetoric, and even of his motives, that Henry was tainted by his association with Tony Blair. The resemblance between the two is only superficial. There is a characteristically Shakespearean ambiguity about Henry: ruthless and out for himself he may be, but he's also the heroic embodiment of the kind of nation-builder that has only recently fallen from public favor. It would have been an achievement in 2003 to give a theatrical presence to his heroism, and Adrian Lester came close partly through raw charisma, partly through a wonderfully persuasive aura of sincerity. But the audience may have wanted too badly to discuss the kind of leader it thought Blair was, and I suppose the production encouraged them. History may be kinder to Blair, at least with regard to his purity of motive, than we were in 2003. But at the National, although Henry was brave, resolute, and inspiring, nobody in the audience trusted him an inch.