[In the following review, Jackson details the somber wartime setting and cynical mood of Edward Hall's 2000 production of Henry V at Stratford-upon-Avon.]

Edward Hall's production of Henry V, with designs by Michael Pavelka, was a story told in a time of war by modern soldiers. When the audience entered the theater, men and women in gray fatigues and tee shirts, all wearing metal identity tags, were sitting or wandering around the stage in a state of half-busy, half-idle expectancy. Some were checking equipment, others writing letters home. At the back of the stage, in front of a sheer brick wall, was a gantry resembling a dockside crane. A clutter of gray ammunition and equipment boxes occupied the downstage area, which was covered with a gray silk cloth, a red cross at its center. A mobile phone rang just as the houselights were dimming, causing some amusement and annoyance until it turned out to be in the backpack of one of the soldiers. He found it, switched it off, and turned to ask the audience to make sure all their pagers and mobiles were also turned off. (A rhyming prologue to the Comedy of Errors had ended with the same request, usually made from front of house.) The Chorus's first speech, each sentence taken by a different cast member, ended with the cloth being pulled up and shaken, scattering what had become a shower of poppies onto the floor. This was now revealed as a war memorial inscribed with the names of those who had fallen at Agincourt, with three larger inscriptions “To The Glory of God,” “I Have Fought a Good Fight,” and “I Have Finished My Course.” The gray boxes were cleared back to form an altar, and two actors then enrobed as bishops—and the play began.

The use of an unspecified twentieth- (or twenty-first-) century conflict, the adaptation of the choruses as part of a Brechtian story-telling technique, and the onstage evocation of a war memorial are devices familiar from recent productions of the play. This particular combination of them displaced the heroism of the campaign and the monarch onto the achievement (against the odds) of telling the story, making palatable an otherwise unflinchingly patriotic tale by conjuring up the cynicism of the “poor bloody infantry.” This attitude, famously compatible with the desire to “do one's bit,” is voiced during the otherwise-unconvincing attempts of the disguised king to argue his case on the eve of Agincourt: now it was as though the likes of Bates and Williams were presenting the whole play. The production did not suggest specific recent conflicts as analogies for Henry's opportunistic and aggressive campaign but proposed that the state of being at war produces contradictions and stresses that the Elizabethan play can speak to. No production of Henry V will ever be as acute about the particular politics and horrors of modern warfare as Das Boot, Platoon, or Saving Private Ryan. However, the play's celebratory dimensions (real enough for Olivier's film to be “faithful” to its original) are notoriously offset by the space it allows for doubt and cynicism. Cutting removed one layer of metahistorical ambiguity, however: Fluellen's discussion with Gower of the comparison between Henry and Alexander was excised, together with its notable failure on the part of the play's amateur historian to recall Falstaff's name.

Within this framework, the story of Henry's arrival at responsibility was developed in a way at once chilling and satisfying. He could handle being a king. He showed his athleticism and energy as well as rhetorical prowess at Harfleur, both before and after the siege. (The gantry moved downstage like a terrifying war machine, lights flashing and siren blaring, and scaling ladders were raised against the front of the dress circle.) Forced to witness the execution of Bardolph, Henry showed none of the signs of pity and self-reproach evident in Kenneth Branagh's Henry (at Stratford in 1984 and in his 1989 film). He was simply left contemplating the hanging figure while the troops formed up and marched off through the audience, singing of their desire to fight for the king. (The only one not singing was Pistol, who turned to look at Henry and Bardolph.) Unlike David Troughton's Henry IV, the fifth monarch of that name had little trouble in putting the crown on his head: he treated it as a symbol of office and responsibility, rather than a mystical and desired extension of his personality. He donned it to meet the Dauphin's messenger but wore appropriate military headgear (uniform cap or helmet) as necessary. To deal with the traitors, Henry wore “undress” uniform and even put on spectacles to read dispatches. This was a scene set up as a council of war which turned into an informal court martial—at the end of which the guilty men were taken to the back and shot against a brick wall. Exeter, bespectacled and punctilious, was a career officer. Henry's coolness was manifested in the matter of the tennis balls: the gift consisted of a pair of balls rotating in a music-box casket, and Henry's reply was to have the stage showered with tennis balls from above. When the last one had bounced to rest, and only then, he uttered his mirthless “Ha, ha.”

The king's adoption of battle fatigues and weaponry was not a sudden transformation of accomplished courtier into G. I. Joe but a “natural” extension of Henry's versatility and effectiveness in this brutal conflict. This sense of an unglamorous, warlike existence was aided by the general absence from the production of the other usual signs of royal pageantry or symbolic assertion. There were no robes of state, no orbs or scepters. The French court was well dressed but not foppish. There was some mockery in their treatment by the story-telling soldiers—the second part of the play began with Katherine reading a large French-English dictionary while a band played “Thank heaven for little Girls.” Alice walked in through the audience, and the princess gave a game rendition of “La Vie en Rose.” The fleur-de-lis was seen only on a parachute-silk backdrop (rather tattered by the end of the campaign), and the French king wore a képi rather than a royal crown. In the final scene Henry hung his crown on the back of a chair to conduct his wooing, picking it up hastily at “Here comes your father” (as usual now, a laugh line.) When he asked the French king for his daughter's hand, Henry held the crown in his own. He allowed himself (what actor would not at the end of a long and noisy evening?) the geniality of the comic wooing, but the opposition of Katherine was formidable and the ultimate result uncomfortable. At the very end of the play, as Henry and Katherine faced each other, the Union Jack that had been unfurled behind the tableau fell to the ground. Burgundy's frank mirth was cut from the scene, as was the character of Queen Isabel. Burgundy was played as a sober diplomat, and much of his emotive speech about the condition of France was also cut. After the joining of their hands, Katherine lifted the crown from Henry's head and he simply walked down to the front of the stage and out through the audience.