Abstract
What follows here is an experiment in collaborative reviewing. Unlike the more usual technique of the reviewers combining and condensing their accounts, this is a review by Smith (who saw the production early) followed separately by Peterson’s account which adds to and converses with Smith’s.
Graham Holderness has declared the history play to be a masculine genre: ‘Elizabethan history plays were drawn from historical writings which did not particularly emphasise the presence or agency of women in history: history was largely thought of as an account of the actions of men’ (‘“A Woman’s War”: A Feminist Reading of Richard II’, in Shakespeare Left and Right, edited by Ivo Kamps (1991), 167–83, 171). Almost three decades later, Elizabeth Freestone has significantly challenged this assumption. With female actors in the male roles of Exeter (Alice Barclay), Montjoy (Amy Rockson), Gower (Melody Brown), Bardolph/Williams/Macmorris (Rosie Armstrong) as well as Joanne Howarth’s doubling of Burgundy and the Chorus, together with a female director and designer (Lily Arnold), this Henry V confronted the play’s masculine inertia. But this was neither a gimmick nor an empty gesture nor did the production aim merely to install female actors into patriarchal positions of power; rather it sought to demonstrate that the world of high politics was as natural and frustrating a place for female as for male agency.
Striking was the weakness or moral corruption of the production’s males. Alan Coveney doubled a Machiavellian Canterbury and a feeble and compliant King of France. David Osmond’s Cambridge was tainted by rebellion (in the Southampton scene) and his Fluellen was prolix and stubbornly nationalistic. Corey Montague-Sholay’s Boy was easily slaughtered and served to embody the sadistic destruction of battle. Chris Donnelly’s Pistol was a thuggish, short-tempered and half-cut hoodlum whose self-centredness was his defining feature. But it was in its modification of the play’s titular hero that Freestone’s undermining of masculine authority was at its most intense: Ben Hall played Henry as a king on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In the opening sequence, we saw him as a guest at the wedding of Pistol and Quickly. But he lacked the bonhomie of Eastcheap’s Prince Hal and separated himself from the throng, swigging from a bottle of whisky and loosening his tie as though preparing to throw up, then passing out. Ely and Canterbury’s account of his ‘reformation’ (1.1.34) was delivered over his dishevelled and snoring figure with contemptuous irony. Henry remained, as far as they were concerned, ‘a chartered libertine’ (49) and their only job now was to head off the bill that threatened imminently their own wealth. Mired in booze, vomit, corruption and self-interest, this was no heroic or romanticised view of the English court.
Even Henry’s attempt at a moral stance was compromised. As he refused Bardolph’s appeal (sentenced to execution for stealing from a church), he trembled and shook as Fluellen strangled a kneeling Bardolph from behind with a piece of electric flex. It was an ugly and protracted test of Henry’s resolve. As Bardolph expired so Nym lunged at the King and his revenge attack was only prevented by his being brained with a handy brick. There was nothing heroic about this army.
In the light of this violence ‘Once more unto the breach…’ (3.1.1f) and the Crispin Day (4.3.40f) speeches sounded hollow and desperate rather than galvanising or inspirational. Indeed, the most pathetically authentic of Henry’s pronouncements was his exhausted admission to Montjoy, ‘We would not seek a battle as we are, / Nor as we are we say we will not shun it’ (3.6.164–5). As Henry threatened the governor of Harfleur with unspeakable war crimes, a wireless operator waited for a response. Henry threatened rape and plunder: the radio operator shook her head. The threats increased in the intensity of their graphic description, much to the increasing revulsion of Henry’s soldiers – ‘flames’ (3.3.99), ‘waste’, ‘desolation’ (100)…still silence. Henry threatened the slaughter of the elderly and ‘Your naked infants spitted upon pikes’ (121). Usually in production, this attempt to out-Herod Herod is a piece of rhetoric designed to frighten Harfleur into submission. In this production, as the radio maintained a gaping silence, Henry’s patience cracked and he rounded up his henchmen and made to exit: this was no idle threat. In the nick of time the radio crackled a message of surrender and Henry relented. But the point of this sequence was that Henry would have been as good (or as obscenely bad) as his word.
Lily Arnold’s design comprised some dirty mirrored floor-tiles on top of which an ash-coloured gravel was piled. On top of this, and configured in various ways, were half a dozen steel meshed cages. They functioned as ramparts and trenches during the battle scenes; as a dais for the ceremonial scenes and even, in the aftermath of Agincourt, a memorial draped with French tricolour and cross of St George. Costumes were modern military for the most part with soldiers donning waistcoats with fleur-de-lis to signify a transformation between allied and enemy forces but, as this sudden metamorphosis suggested, there was very little to choose between common soldiers on either side.
Perhaps the most interesting decision was to augment the role of Katharine. In the play we see the princess only twice – the most notable appearance being in 5.2 during which Henry attempts to woo her in his schoolboy French. Prior to this, she has been introduced receiving an English lesson about bodily parts, tutored by Alice, her gentlewoman (3.4). In Shakespeare’s play, it is her brother who is regularly showing off about his horse, insulting the English King with the gift of tennis balls and generally boasting of his courtly sophistication and martial prowess. Freestone combined the roles so that the Princess, rather than a foreign royal traded as part of a political settlement, became as loud and as mouthy as the Dauphin – less a blushing bride who turns swords into wedding bells in the play’s sentimental final scene, than a raging termagant with more than a dash of Joan La Pucelle about her. Dressed in gothic black with huge buckled boots, studded gloves and a shaven head, Heledd Gwynn’s Katharine was a gutsy and rebellious presence. Her meek father unable to control her, she personified a feminism impatient with the subjugation forced upon her by the prevailing patriarchy. She would ride into battle in defiance of her father’s command.
Lacking any kind of aristocratic modesty, she openly kissed Orleans full on the lips. Zachary Powell doubled Orleans with Monsieur le Fer, the French prisoner of war whom Pistol hopes to ransom. Of course when Henry’s order comes to kill all prisoners, Pistol reluctantly slits Fer’s throat and his body is left onstage. As Katherine entered and saw it, so it became that of Orleans and, weeping furious tears, she cradled it, pietà-like in her arms. As she took instruction from Montjoy (Alice was cut) on the English words for various bodily parts, she used the corpse to illustrate her vocabulary. What, in Shakespeare’s script, is a playful and usually charming catalogue of physical features became here a blazon of death, illustrated with a blooded corpse, manipulated by its lover. Sobs of rage and grief punctuated the English lesson while those about her looked on in a mixture of shock, as she manoeuvred Orleans’s hands and arms like a grotesque ventriloquist dummy, and sympathy as she howled for his loss.
In the wake of this anguish, Henry’s obdurate demand that she be given to him as a token of French capitulation was all the more crass, his wooing all the more clumsy and charmless. At one point, he held her close as she battered his torso and his attempts to ‘shhhh’ her were at once comforting and vanquishing. This was an alliance of political necessity and, his wooing seemed to suggest, he had as little power to change it as she did. Finally then, there was a sense of disquiet about the play’s resolution and there remained a sense that she was merely, after all, a female pawn in a clash of two kings. In her opening speech, Howarth’s Chorus, gesturing towards the sleeping Henry, asked us to ‘Admit me Chorus to this his story’ (the play has ‘this history’, 32). For all its desire to escape the kind of sexism Holderness has attributed to the genre of the history play, Freeston’s compelling feminist reworking may have finally to concede defeat.
*
By early October, Freestone’s production has softened its hard-edged Henry, for heavier is the head that wears his crown. Initially more Hal than Henry, the king is unable to summon up an address to the audience before a waiting microphone, soon drowned out by his band of drunken tavern friends raucously celebrating Pistol and Mistress Quickly’s louche wedding party, singing ‘Boys Will Be Boys’. The Chorus delivers her speech stepping over Henry’s prone body, giving inflection to her recognition that the Tobacco Factory stage is not a wooden ‘Oh!’ If her task indeed is to tell ‘his-story’, then Henry’s reformation comes fast on the heels of Canterbury’s helping him into a new dress suit and tying his tie, along with an extra cup of black coffee. As he perused an iPad while the others read up on Salic Law from spiral-bound manuals, Henry’s query about the legitimacy of his French claim is sincere, as is his anger upon receiving the Princess Katherine’s insulting Paris balls – pink tennis balls, no less.
Henry takes no pleasure in entrapping Richard, Earl of Cambridge, the sole traitor in the production’s Southampton scene, their exchange attenuated and notable for Cambridge’s sneering contempt when Exeter attaches him for treason and demands he give up his mobile, no penitent here, only pure aggressor against Henry. At Harfleur, Henry delivers the speech on a portable microphone out to the audience: it is a ploy, the king clearly hoping that his threatening speech will urge us, the French, to capitulate without a further clash. A pause in the radio transmission monitored by Gower heightens our tension and then signals Henry’s relief that he has saved his ragtag army from a real fight. Moments later, Henry is tending to one of his soldier’s care himself with Jamy’s first aid kit. In contrast, the bombastic and flippant French, dressed in stylish business casual with fleur-de-lis that contrasts with the more ordinary suits or military fatigues of the English, examine social media on their phones for reports that they have lost the favour of their French mistresses. Later, smoking cigarettes with her peers and wearing a gold necklace that spells out ‘Fuck Me’, Katherine praises the virtues of her horse to an unimpressed Constable.
Certainly, Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 film of the play suggested that the reaction Henry has to the report of Bardolph’s pillage and sentencing to death should convey much about the king’s inner character, liberally adding an interpolated scene where Henry watches Bardolph’s execution rather than merely hear report of it. Freestone’s adaptation of this scene in the play seems to draw heavily on Branagh’s teary-eyed rendition of Henry’s nostalgia for Bardolph, not only replicating this scene but amplifying it, apparently to provoke audience sympathy for Henry’s need to render justice as Bardolph pleads softly, ‘It was just a plate, Hal’. Watching Bardolph’s execution, Henry is visibly traumatised, aggravated by the summary clubbing to death of Nym seconds later, another interpolated scene, this time for the stage.
Walking around his dozing camp and playing a gentle prank on a snoring Exeter, Ben Hall also brings a lighter touch to Harry in the night – he punctuates the Chorus’s lines with a solicitous tap on his soldiers’ limbs – by this later date of the production’s run. Freestone makes considered, interesting choices in doubling her actors’ roles, evident when Bardolph (Armstrong) returns as Williams. Henry’s potentially highly tense standoff with Williams and Bates, however, is minimised by Williams’s lack of antagonism and muted protest at discovering Henry’s true identity and, moreover, the production’s cutting altogether the scene of Henry’s baiting Williams (and also Fluellen) further with the exchange of gloves. Without the scene that most explicitly highlights Henry’s manipulations of others for the sake of personal vanity or to wield his power unjustly, Hall expands on Henry’s appeal to the audience, showing his order to kill the French prisoners of war as the sincere reaction of a king who truly believes his enemies are rearming and visibly distraught over the reading out of the list of English killed in action.
As Smith writes above, Katherine’s role undergoes a powerful metamorphosis in the transmuted English language scene with Alice, instead performed over and with the lifeless body of her lover Orleans, the ‘Fuck Me’ necklace taking on new significance in a scene notable for its erotic blazoning. Oddly, Henry is a witness to this scene, complicating the audience’s understanding of his futile struggle to woo Katherine. He attempts to supplicate her by shedding his formal jacket and tie to woo her like a soldier – he has been wearing a t-shirt with a large androgyne or mixed-gender symbol design, sometimes under his suit, suggesting he wears a personal liberal perspective on gender relations close to his heart – on bended knee, to no avail: Katherine pushes him over onto the floor and beats him with rolled up diplomatic accords. Declaring that their proposed marriage ‘sall [sic] also content me’ (5.2.249), Katherine remains unyielding, the play ending with the pair standing apart at either end of a table draped with two large flags, one of England and one of France, a powerful visual statement about the power of political necessity to shape their destiny against their will.