Henry V

by William Shakespeare

  6. Adrian Lester as King Harry on the hood of an army vehicle in Nicholas Hytner's Iraq war production of 2003.

  Boyd: We were rooted in the early Renaissance, which helped us retain Shakespeare's moral ambiguity over the war with France, but the Chorus on Henry's return post-Agincourt, to London, openly speculated with the audience on the reception "our generals" would receive on returning from war, without mentioning Iraq or Afghanistan by name.

  Why does the Chorus so explicitly make us aware that we're an audience watching a play in a theater? What decisions did you make regarding your Chorus?

  Branagh: At Stratford Ian McDiarmid was playing both the Chorus in Henry V and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. He remained onstage throughout as a sort of modern commentator on the action of the play and a reminder to the audience of the play's theatricality. This created a dissonance between the Chorus' reports and the reality of what they saw.

  In the opening speech, the Chorus refers to Shakespeare's theater. I wanted to place our Chorus in a disused theater, and have the character deliver the speech while walking through an empty auditorium, eventually throwing open scenery doors to allow the camera to travel outside and into the "real" world of our film. Early script discussions suggested the idea of starting in an empty film studio, and since much of the opening scene can be interpreted as alluding to the mystery and imagination employed in the medium of film, it seemed the proper and honest way to start. After that, much of the Chorus's contribution was broken up, with some speeches in voice-over, to aid clarity and to maximize the eerie effect of his presence.

  Hall: I split the Chorus amongst the company of actors. I split it so it became a sort of mythological storytelling experience about a hero. The way I did it was to have the Chorus cast as soldiers in an imaginary battalion, telling the story (in the past tense) of their great leader. They came onstage at the beginning of the evening and started to tell the audience the story of a great hero, who they knew and fought with, who is now dead.

  I think the Chorus is written and constructed in the way it is in order to say to the audience that these events are so extraordinary and enormous we can't possibly pay them justice on the stage, so you're going to have to imagine things that we can't possibly show you. That does two things: firstly, it invites the audiences' imagination to be engaged with the play beyond the stage, which is something you're always trying to do in theater; and secondly, it instantly adds a mythological mystique to the whole tale. I love that. The play has several moments like that, for example the moment when Henry, talking about Saint Crispin's day, says people will talk about us on this day ... "From this day to the ending of the world, / But we in it shall be remembered." The fact that it has been written in a play and that you are listening to it being performed at that moment is living proof. It gives a wonderful tingle up the back of your spine each time you hear it.

  Hytner: Others have written more persuasively than I can about Shakespeare's career-long preoccupation with the purpose of playing and the relationship between theater and truth. I suspect with the Chorus he was as much as anything turning the absurdities of the old chronicle plays on their heads and using his theatrical get-out-of-jail-free card: it's only a play, get over it.

  One of the most striking things about the Chorus is how often the action we are promised fails to materialize. It's as if we're given first the approved, spin-doctored version of history, and then the messy reality. A little touch of Harry in the night? Not, in the event, a remotely inspirational touch: he skulks round the camp in disguise, and gets right up his soldiers' noses.

  Penny Downie played the Chorus at the National Theatre as a passionate chronicler of the present, committed to her version of history. Act by act, she became more and more aware of the limitations of her vision, because the play itself was in argument with her. In a play that's so concerned with presentation, she--like Henry, like the French leadership, like Fluellen--struggled to impose her version of the truth. At the end, foreseeing the disaster to come, you felt she'd lost faith in her whole story.

  Boyd: The Chorus is there to excite our imaginations, and to sharpen our wits in equal measure. To conspire with us in conjuring illusions while subtly inviting us to note how illusions may be achieved at our expense, through manipulative rhetoric.

  The first speech is also an implied apology in a long line of charming self-deprecations on the Elizabethan stage designed to manage the expectations of the crowd, and calm the paranoia of the censors: "We're merely players, you can't possibly have anything to fear from us."

  Forbes Masson, our Chorus, had an edge to him. Much of the audience were already familiar with him as Rumour from Henry IV Part II, who warned us not to believe a word that he or anyone said.

  The Chorus is there partly because the Shakespearean theater cannot accommodate a real battlefield, cavalry charges, and thousands of arrows swishing through the air. But nowadays most Shakespeare lovers have seen Olivier and/or Branagh do Harfleur and Agincourt in full cinematic glory: do you just ignore that? How did you stage the war?

  Branagh: For a modern audience, the abiding image of Henry V is provided by Laurence Olivier's famous film version, but the powerful Elizabethan pageantry and chivalric splendor of that extraordinary movie did not accord with the impression I received as I read the text afresh. To me, the play seemed darker, harsher, and the language more bloody and muscular than I remembered. I was very influenced by the military historian John Keegan's book The Face of Battle, in which he tried to describe Agincourt from the point of view of the soldier on the ground. Olivier's panoramic view looked at the battle from above and beyond, but if you were actually there on the ground you would have no idea what was going on except in the few yards around you. That was the sense we tried to convey, with the close-ups, the mud, the chaos, the uncertainty as to who was winning.

  Hall: The cinema and stage are very different places. The cinema fills in the dots in a very different way, so, no, the films didn't concern me at all. On stage you are doing something completely different. I had the Chorus use lids of ammo boxes held up in front of them to become the front ramp of a landing craft, so that they were all behind this ramp delivering one of the choral speeches while they were going through the sea about to land on the beaches. That, I think, is as evocative an experience to watch as seeing the actual landing craft in the sea coming through the waves, because the imagination is a very powerful tool. I used bits and pieces of modern army paraphernalia for the Chorus to create the mise en scene for each part of the evening. And then occasionally one would lift beyond that and go into complete make-believe; I had a huge metal gunner's tower--a sort of post-industrialist construction--upstage, which the army would pull downstage like a siege tower when they attacked Harfleur. My memory of that is that it was quite a big moment: it always threatened to go off the end of the stage and land in the front row.

  Hytner: Is full cinematic glory necessarily so real? Over the last hundred years, film has pulled a magnificent confidence trick, and persuaded us that a set of conventions (montage, moving camera, sound, music) every bit as artful as theater conventions nevertheless approximate to reality. Strip Walton's music from Olivier's Agincourt, and you'd be left with something closer to what you're really watching: a lot of overdressed Irish extras struggling with prop broadswords in the fields of County Wicklow.

  There's a much bigger problem in the staging of war than the apparent poverty of the stage. How many of us involved now in making or watching theater or film have personal, or even secondhand, experience of battle? For many centuries, drama about war has been made by and for those who have lived through war. Shakespeare must have spoken to hundreds of soldiers, even if he wasn't himself involved in military action (as he might have been during the 1580s). Everyone in his audience must have known someone who had been to war, and the Chorus explicitly evokes the expected victorious return from Ireland of Essex's army (cut at the National, I'm afraid). Olivier was himself a member of the F
leet Air Arm, and he made his film for a country at war: as he was shooting Henry V's invasion of France, British troops were invading Nazi-occupied Normandy. We who know nothing are much better advised to find suggestive metaphors for conflict than to pretend we can involve an audience in full-scale reproduction. To me, the most convincing of recent war films was Waltz with Bashir, made by an Israeli director who had actually fought in the 1982 Lebanon war, but who nevertheless chose animation as his cinematic language. He decided that the reality of the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, which he had experienced, was beyond literal representation. The limitations of the theater are therefore a release.

  So how did we stage the war scenes? I'm now uneasy about reporting that we pillaged television news reports of the current conflict to create theatrical imagery that suggested battle. Television is, after all, the one form of access to the battlefield available to us that wasn't there for our battle-hardened forebears.

  It was to our advantage (though not to the advantage of those who suffer the "collateral damage") that recent wars have not been fought by huge armies, clashing on the battlefield. Small detachments of men, often no larger than a company of actors, fight it out on street corners. Cameramen crouch in nearby foxholes. So Agincourt was evoked by small groups of actors crawling on their bellies in murky pools of light on the vast empty stage of the (aptly named) Olivier Theatre. Officers sometimes play to the camera: as we were rehearsing, Colonel Tim Collins explicitly evoked the Saint Crispin's day speech in an address to his men in Iraq. Our Henry made his threats to the townspeople of Harfleur to the cameras; in the following scene, Katherine and Alice watched it on TV--a good reason to start learning English.

  Video was a major tool in our armory, though never as a substitute for stage action. Verbal rhetoric is Henry's weapon of choice in his propaganda campaign. In our linguistically impoverished age, spin is more often the province of the filmmaker (at least it was until the advent of Barack Obama). Adrian Lester's Henry was often on television. He broadcast his declaration of war to the nation at the end of Act 1 Scene 2: "We'll chide this dauphin at his father's door." Bardolph watched him briefly on the pub TV before switching over to the snooker.

  7. The dauphin (John Mackay) descends in Michael Boyd's 2007 production.

  Boyd: Our French court were proud, exotic birds suspended in the air, and at Agincourt they descended on the entrenched and earth-bound English like golden eagles or the American air force.

  We decided we would recognize the decisive role played by archers and our eagles became enmeshed in airborne tracers of white paper to the sound of volleys of arrows. These tracers then left a trail of destruction throughout the auditorium until the end of the play. Fragments of torn silk, black and gold, floated seven meters from the grid to the stage as the French dead hung in the air and the dauphin descended upside down like Satan or Icarus. We few were happy to be free of the literalism that guides most TV and cinema.

  What do you think Henry thinks about the Archbishop's argument at the start of the play?

  Branagh: In rehearsal we'd played this scene in a very political way like a modern-day cabinet meeting. Brian Blessed, who played Exeter [in the RSC production and on film], let out a loud belly laugh at the archbishop's "bee metaphor" which underlined the difference between Henry and his "war cabinet." I wanted the first speech to Canterbury to put this man of God very explicitly on the spot with an injunction directed at the wily archbishops [see 1.2.11-34]. I wanted to produce a moral gravitas that would arrest the clerics and the court with its weight. When my Henry used words like "sin" and "baptism" and "conscience," I wanted the audience to feel that these were real and practical concepts which were deeply felt. It seemed the only way to make the audience care, and thus to make them genuinely question this man's actions. It also created dramatic conflict: the archbishops are faced not with a warlord who simply wishes a plan for invasion to be given the Church's approval, but with someone who is asking real questions and underlining their own sense of responsibility.

  Hall: I think Henry knows exactly what Canterbury's up to. Hal's not stupid. It's a fantastic example of politicking: "we need an excuse to go to war, give it to me." There is a part of Henry that wants to be seen to be doing the right thing, and a part of him that actually wants to do the right thing, but he knows that Canterbury is talking everybody in circles. When Canterbury says "as clear as is the summer's sun," after he's just reeled off the most extraordinarily complicated family tree, which nobody understands or is meant to understand, he's partly throwing down a smokescreen to show how clever he is--he's almost learned it like a party piece--and it's partly Shakespeare's sense of irony: he's taking a little stand at politics. All of them in the room know exactly what Canterbury's up to, but they need to be seen to be doing it for the right reasons--and that's what matters most.

  I've been, right from the word go, vehemently against the war in Iraq, and felt so clearly in the months leading up to it that we were being utterly bamboozled and lied to. It was so clear that it was terrifying for me. There was a lot of big business and a lot of money, and America wanted to go and Blair wanted to take us with them, so he said "find me the reason." I'm not suggesting, because it's not clearly in the text, that Henry has said that, but I certainly think that he wants it, he wants it to be true.

  Hytner: I think he has briefed the archbishop to find him an excuse to do what his father told him to do. And I don't think you need to have seen Henry IV Part II to suspect this. He seems to me to be in icy control of the whole scene, determined to hear the Archbishop give him the right answer to the question that matters: "May I with right and conscience make this claim?" I think he is gratified that the archbishop gives him the required advice, in much the same way that Tony Blair was gratified that the attorney general delivered to him the notorious justification in international law for the invasion of Iraq. I think the scene is far more interested in the ways our war leaders use to take us to war than it is in the rights or wrongs of the cause (that comes later, on the eve of Agincourt). The scene seems to me to be neutral on the subject of the Salic law itself, though a dramatist as clever as Shakespeare must have meant something by writing for the archbishop a speech so preposterously long and hard to follow.

  Plays, particularly Shakespeare's plays, change all the time. When Olivier made his film, who was interested in the justification of the cause? The cause spoke for itself, so Olivier cut the archbishop to the bone, and sent up what was left. And he was right to do so.

  Boyd: The first scene makes it clear that Henry is already considering war and has been discussing deals with the Church to secure their support, before the ambassador gets near him. That's why Shakespeare is free to allow the speech to sound absurd. What really concerns Henry is the Church committing itself to public support for his actions. Shakespeare cleverly manages to destroy the French legal objections to an English succession at the same time as comically questioning the sincerity and morality of the Archbishop's show-stopping speech.

  Is it necessary to have an understanding of Hal's background in the previous plays to fully appreciate what kind of a king he is in Henry V?

  Branagh: It was important for an audience that might have no previous knowledge of the Henry IV plays to have an idea of the background to Henry V, and I wanted to achieve the greatest possible impact from Mistress Quickly's speech reporting the death of Falstaff, a character that the audience would not otherwise have encountered. I constructed this brief flashback from three separate scenes in the Henry IV plays. My intention was to give, in miniature, a sense of Falstaff's place among the surviving members of the Boar's Head crew, and to make clear his former relationship and estrangement from the young monarch. Both this scene and the flashback during Bardolph's on-screen execution help to illustrate the young king's intense isolation and his difficulty in rejecting his former tavern life.

  Hall: No. That's one of the brilliant things about the play: it's a sequel or a prequel that can be seen
out-of-joint without any problems whatsoever. I've done the play without Henry IVs and also as part of the Histories cycle. I think if you've seen Henry IV you get a lovely extra rich layer to it. The audience really enjoy the through-lines and the characters from Henry IV, the Pistols, the Nims, the Bardolphs, and seeing how Hal changes--and Shakespeare so successfully changes him that you're essentially watching a new person in Henry V. But if you see Henry V on its own you don't sit there thinking "It feels like there are bits missing." Because you don't know: in itself it's a really good piece.

  Hytner: No. It's a great experience to see Henry V as the concluding play of a tetralogy that starts with Richard II, and if you played Prince Hal last night, your performance of King Henry is going to be very different from the one you'd give if you didn't. But Henry V is a standalone play, and there's clear evidence it isn't the play Shakespeare thought he was going to write when he finished Henry IV Part II. We're promised more of Falstaff in the Epilogue to Part II, but he's killed off before he gets a chance to appear. Maybe Shakespeare thought that a brokenhearted Falstaff would have been an unwanted downer; more likely, he realized that he was dealing with a completely different Henry, involved in a completely new narrative, and that Falstaff would have been theatrically irrelevant.

  I directed the two Henry IV plays at the National a couple of years after we did Henry V. I'm glad we did them that way round: I didn't think there was much in the Henry IV plays that would benefit from the kind of production we gave Henry V. Different plays, different agenda, different Henry. I'd go so far as to put the question the other way round: you need to know what Hal became to appreciate fully what he's up to in Henry IV, and Shakespeare lets you know exactly that in his first soliloquy.