[In the following review, Goodland praises the 2003 Jean Cocteau Repertory staging of Henry V, directed by David Fuller. Goodland examines the production's focus on the moral issue of war crimes—particularly the scene in which Henry orders his soldiers to kill their prisoners—and notes that “Fuller admirably refuses to simplify this moment.”]

Perfectly paced and punctuated throughout by Bob Dylan songs, David Fuller's production of Henry V begets a layered dialogue between Shakespeare's study of kingship and carnage and America's most troubling military intervention. As the play opens, we feel abruptly immersed in the chaos of combat. The theatre goes black as the distinctive popping sound of M16 rifles grows deafening in the intimate 140-seat space. Boots thud down the center aisle to the stage. The lights come up on a skirmish between actors clad like NVA (North Vietnamese communist regulars in khakis and pith helmets), Viet Cong (in black pajamas and conical straw hats), and U.S. soldiers (in army fatigues and steel pots). The prologue's entrance after this potent opening vignette offers a pause rather than a prelude. For when the Chorus bids us to “let [these], ciphers to this great account, / On [our] imaginary forces work” (18-19), we realize, from the pounding of our hearts, that we are already absorbed in the world of the play. Fuller has skillfully tricked us into the imaginative leap of faith for which the chorus pleads.

Giles Hogya's set and lighting design artfully mingles somber emblems of East and West to evoke a surreal base camp in Vietnam. Opened parachutes spread from the comers of the stage, upheld by bamboo posts. These seemingly inanimate artifacts are integrated into the life of the play, becoming choric in their semiotic function. Through skillful light projection, the parachutes change color, signaling changes in mood, from white, to brown, and then blood-red during the play's darkest moments. Bamboo pikes bundled into tepees frame the stage on either side. During the parley outside the gates of Harfleur, these posts, with their sharpened points, hungrily punctuate Henry's threat that, if the town refuses to surrender, its “naked infants [will be] spitted upon pikes” (3.3.38). Finally, a Torii, the distinctive cinnabar-red gate that marks the entrance to Shinto shrines, stands at stage right. Like the parachutes and bamboo posts, the Torii's ironic symbolism haunts our collective consciousness as we watch the performance; in Shintoism, the gate marks the liminal space between the world of the living and the world of spirits, the hero's gateway to purification and honor.

After Laurence Olivier's patriotic production of 1944, Branagh's 1988 Henry V was much touted for its more complex, dark portrait of medieval kingship. Yet by omitting the text's most morally disturbing moment—Henry's order, “then every soldier kill his prisoners / send the word through” (4.6.38-9)—even Branagh shied away from a candid exploration of the thin but bright line that separates courage from cowardice, honor from evil.

At a time when the international community is grappling with the problem of war crimes and questions continue to surface about the actions of American soldiers in Vietnam (Bob Kerrey's recent trial-by-media comes to mind), Fuller's production tackles this moral conundrum head on, rearranging the textual sequence to give it greater emphasis. The dauphin is captured when he infiltrates the camp and slits the boy's throat. Henry himself singlehandedly kills the dauphin and then gives the infamous order to kill the prisoners of war. The staging of this moment presents a poignant examination of the history of battlefield ethics. The two men wrestle with one another. Henry gains the upper hand and, as he stabs the dauphin with a thrust that is both violent and erotic, they embrace and fall together to the ground. The iconography evokes heroic agon: two men of equal physical stature, equally armed, struggle to the death. Visually, the moment suggests the ideal of medieval chivalry: Henry enjoys a hero's victory, and the dauphin dies a hero's death. Morally, however, the act is contemptible, for the dauphin is Henry's prisoner—as are the other prisoners whom Henry orders to be slain. There is no ambiguity surrounding the order. Releasing himself from the embrace of his dead foe, Jason Crowl's powerful Henry faces his soldiers squarely and, with chilling certainty, commands, “let every man kill his prisoners—send the word through.”

In Shakespeare's day, the law of war concerned ransom money rather than human rights. When Henry orders his soldiers to kill their prisoners, he deprives his nobles of their ransom money—one of the means by which they are paid. Yet even Holinshed was repelled by King Henry's action and decried the order as “lamentable.” Whatever the abstract dictates of law, the human community has always understood the moral repugnancy of murdering those who have no means of defending themselves—soldiers or not. Fuller admirably refuses to simplify this moment. Henry's order is an act of revenge for the murdered Boy; it is an act of blood-lust fed by the desire to win at all costs; and it is also an act of valor. Crowl's moving performance portrays the plight of a leader in battle who is driven by the shifting currents of these complex motives. There is nobility in Henry's willingness to lead by example, to perform the basest deeds he demands of his men. Yet, at the same time, it is impossible to condone his choice. King Henry seems somehow above the act, even as we watch him commit it.

Crowl's Henry V journeys from kingship to manhood in the course of the play. He begins as a man of policy and ends, simply, as a man. The gritty American general we saw giving orders on the battlefield stands halting and awkward before a Princess Katherine fashioned to suggest a young Jackie Kennedy. The evocation of Camelot, however, is food for irony rather than nostalgia. Fuller counterbalances Henry's earnest wooing with the staging, which shows how little choice Katherine has in the matter. As the marriage treaty is settled, the princess stands stiffly against a pointed bamboo pole, a captive to the two men who stand on either side of her and control her fate—her conquered father and her conquering king and husband-to-be. This image completes the visual thread that runs throughout the production, which emphasizes the gendered imagery of violence inherent in the text.

Fuller casts women in roles that italicize the text's bald acknowledgment of military conquest as rape—of the helpless, of the land, of human dignity. Amanda Jones doubles as the Governor of Harfleur and the boy whose throat is cut. Jolie Garrett plays Montjoy, Scroop, and MacMarris. Rebecca Robinson plays both Sir Thomas Grey and Princess Katherine. Women are also soldiers, most noticeably on the French/NVA side—in their black pajamas, their long hair hanging beneath their conical straw hats. These acute casting choices conjured, for me, the most haunting and horrific image of the Vietnam War: Nick Ut's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of “the Napalm Girl”—nine-year old Kim Phuc, her naked body aflame as she runs from her village, howling in anguish, her arms raised to the heavens.

Shrouded in images and sounds that evoke the trauma of Vietnam, Fuller's Henry V awakens our anxieties as well as our ghosts. This sophisticated and brave production is a stirring reminder that, however hollow, political rhetoric is also delicate and dangerous.