[In the following review, Morse comments favorably on director Jean-Louis Benoit's stylized, comedic, and nonpolitical 2000 French-language staging of Henry V.]

Although the imported films of Welles, Olivier and Branagh have been extremely popular in France, this Henry V is the first French theatrical production. Understandably, perhaps. It was briefly seen last summer at the Avignon festival, in the star position of the great outdoor courtyard, and televised live, to scathing reviews. Transferred now to one of the more intimate theatres at the former arsenal in Vincennes (whose surrounding woods, after the devastating storms at Christmas, are looking too much like a war-torn landscape), its virtues are wholly apparent.

Above all, by taking advantage of the play's calls to its own theatricality, the director, Jean-Louis Benoit, avoids the risk of offending French nationalist sensibilities. The costumes and sets recall Olivier's make-believe Middle Ages, with a painted castle, tricks of perspective out of manuscript illustration, and a pretty landscape constructed of doll's-house-sized villages and rolling hills which turns out to be a huge rug, rolled back to reveal the dead soldiers (and dead horse) of l'après Azincourt. From the beginning, a Chorus in a bright orange wig and twentieth-century gamin costume (Laure Bonnet) emphasizes the use of a wooden wheel lying flat stage centre, a literal “Wooden O” on to which characters step out of the action to address us directly. And there is need to address us, to recruit us into filling out “the swelling scene”, since the cast numbers only fifteen. Not only the Chorus, but the Heralds, are women, cross-dressed. The need to double—and treble—adds to the artifice, and taxes the strength and staying power of the energetic, mainly young, cast, with the inequalities of playing which that implies. Jean-Pol Dubois is outstanding five times: as a pedantic, calculating Archbishop of Canterbury, plotting to finesse the young king into a war order to protect Church revenues; as one of the conspirators; as the Duke of York; as the English soldier, Williams and as a feeble and tottering Charles VI, a mannikin out of Ionesco's Le Roi se meurt.

Using another of the imaginative, risk-taking translations of Jean-Michel Déprats, the story proper opens with a pseudo-Shakespearean scene in the Boar's Head tavern, to introduce the calculating Prince of Wales and his dissolute companions (including “Sir Falstaff”—the name by which plump Jack is known from Falstaff, the French title of Welles's Chimes at Midnight), whose further adventures (or lack of them) Henry V recounts. The playing style is broad, making cartoon characters of the old English enemy. One can hardly take them seriously, let alone hate them. The same can be said of the French, played in the Olivier style of silliness, so that one cannot identify with, let alone love, them.

It is this heavily stylized ensemble against which Philippe Torreton as the English King defines himself. He is in a different play, and remains there through five acts, accompanied only by his brothers. Yet he is alone, and that is the emphasis and interpretation of this production. Torreton is a great actor, capable of changing his style to suit Tartuffe at the Comédie Française or the eponymous Captain Conan of Bertrand Tavernier's recent war film. The trend of the director's cut intensifies Harry's solitude: this Harry sees Falstaff's coffin, sees and suffers the condemnation of Bardolph. Gone, as might have been expected in a French production, is the forging of a nation; the joke about the Irishman, the Scotsman and the Welshman has disappeared, as has, to all intents and purposes, the “little touch of Harry in the night”. Gone is most of the King's interchange with Bates, the common soldier; here, he feels the weight of his responsibility and distance, with none of the redeeming joke about Bates's wager with him after the battle. This monarch is tired, and he is ill. He knows he has to play the king, but sometimes it is too much. Henry's long—some would say excessively long—speech over his betrayal by the traitor, Scrope, gives Torreton the occasion to diagnose his condition. He can trust no friend, because he can have none. Benoit's production is neither a celebration of Britishness nor a study of the costs of war. Against the usual wisdom of the difference between Continental interpretations of Shakespeare and English ones, it is less, rather than more, political.

And it is very funny. The emphatic self-consciousness of the play opens the way to a brilliant solution to the Princess Katherine's English lesson by reversing the languages: the women speak English and call it French; French and call it English. Marie Vialle has a fine gift for comedy, and a ravishing neck. For the improper puns, Déprats offers “gown/con” and “foot/foutre”. His language jokes become wildly more mixed in the wooing scene: Torreton and Vialle move from English to French so quickly that the audience are whirled from one pretence to the other. Which language are they pretending is which? Only here, with his Kate, does Harry seem outmatched. By now, however, with the audience in the palm of his princely hand, the romantic interlude becomes an ironic send-up of romantic interludes (only the Dauphin's disappointment spoils the fun). This kind of theatricality is not just what the theatre does best, it is what only the theatre can do.