[In the following review, Lemon offers a mixed evaluation of Mark Wing-Davey's 2003 Delacorte Theater staging of Henry V in New York's Central Park. Although Lemon praises Liev Schreiber's “passionate” and “balanced” portrayal of Henry V, he notes that the production avoided risks.]

Glossy magazines love to place Liev Schreiber in the trio of great thirtysomething New York stage actors, but unlike his oft-mentioned counterparts, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jeffrey Wright, only Schreiber has the vocal mettle to scale the most heroic parts.

In the title role of Henry V, the Public Theatre's sole Delacorte production this summer, he must also mount the set. Leaping atop designer Mark Wendland's burlap-bagged barricades, to urge his soldiers forward, Schreiber cuts a marvelous figure: at the heart of a Manhattan summer ritual—free theatre in Central Park—he symbolises the city's Sinatra-associated theme song: he's top of the heap.

With his not-quite-handsome face and expressive voice, which is particularly stirring during Henry's late-night rounds to eavesdrop on the soldiers before the play's climactic battle of Agincourt, Schreiber makes a very creditable monarch. He plants himself neither in the line of Olivier, whose filmed Henry V caught the triumphantly resistant mood of Britain under attack, nor of Branagh, whose movie 45 years later emphasised the bloody price of war. He is both more passionate and more balanced.

Though the Park production, directed by Mark Wing-Davey, is contemporary enough in trappings—military uniforms direct from CNN, Pistol as a pompadoured Elvis-like figure, Clash-like guitars underscoring the clash of arms—it does not dive into topicality with particular glee. Even the play's put-downs of the enemy (the French) are not delivered with rib-jabbing obviousness, and the Iraq conflict is suggested but not insisted upon.

By avoiding obviousness, the production also avoids risk and attendant payoff. The supporting players are Public Theatre generic: good for the looking, less good for the listening. The gold concert chairs strewn everywhere may, along with the Chorus, underscore the theatrical nature of the enterprise, but they complicate scene changes.

The evening's most indelible image is that of the actress Nicole Leach taking a shower centre-stage: eliminating the dust of battle before her entrance as the French princess, she emerges as an icon of moral cleansing.