SOURCE: Steyn, Mark. “Henry Goes to Baghdad.” New Criterion 22, no. 1 (September 2003): 40-4.

[In the following review, Steyn discusses both the 2003 National Theatre staging of Henry V directed by Nicholas Hytner and Mark Wing-Davey's 2003 Delacorte Theater staging of Henry V in New York's Central Park. Steyn criticizes both productions, noting that “Nicholas Hytner may be anti-war, but Mark Wing-Davey is anti-Shakespeare.”]

Two recent productions of Henry V neatly illustrate the difference between British and American theater. The first, at the Royal National Theatre, has been a hot ticket in London all summer. Staged by the National's new director, Nicholas Hytner, it's played on the company's Olivier stage, named for the most famous Henry of all, whose gallant screen version rallied the home front during the Second World War. Henry V is a play that never drops out of sight but real war always gives it an extra kick. Forty years after Olivier stirred the blood, Michael Bogdanov co-opted Shakespeare for a savage indictment of Thatcher's Falklands War. Savage indictments of Thatcher's Falklands War were ten a penny in the mid-Eighties, but at least hijacking Shakespeare ensured you got some classier lines.

Two decades on, this latest production also has a real war as its warm-up act, and, just in case it never occurred to you to link art and life, Hytner helpfully explained beforehand that, as he sees it, this play is “about a charismatic young British leader who commits his troops to a dangerous foreign invasion for which he has to struggle to find justification in international law.” The first scene is set not in any old draughty castle but in a detailed recreation of the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. The King (Adrian Lester) enters in a double-breasted gray suit of the kind favored by a certain Mr T. Blair and is greeted by the Olivier audience with the sort of knowing laughter that congratulates itself on being sophisticated enough to appreciate such a subtle joke. As the National's posters tease, “The risks are huge, the cause debatable, and bloodshed certain.”

So this is Henry Goes to Baghdad.

And that would make King Charles VI of France Saddam Hussein?

Ah, well, Hytner would probably advise us not to take the parallels too literally. And his production certainly works hard to provide enough alternative diversions. In the battle for France, there are real jeeps careering back and forth across the stage accompanied by gunfire. Don't ask me why. It's part of Hytner and his designer Tim Hatley's cheery vagueness about the specifics of warfare. I didn't see a lot of jeeps when I was in Iraq, unless you count the gleaming white Cherokees the UN and NGO bigshots swank around in. Hytner is best known for landing a helicopter in the middle of Miss Saigon. Would it have killed him to get a real daisycutter?

But for the rest of the time he has a surer sense of what he's doing. The play isn't so much about Henry anymore as about perceptions of Henry. The King himself is isolated and introverted, and this too has topical resonances: despite Tony Blair's protestations to be “basically a pretty normal guy,” it's routine in Britain now to present him as some weird, lonely fantasist. So much of Hytner's production is concerned with the gulf between the private and public man and less to do with the speeches than with how they're received: The Chorus is one woman—a fine actress, Penny Downie—decked out in a smart cardigan and with the air of a snotty BBC interviewer; the big speeches are “broadcast” on huge TV screens above the stage—with cable-news stings, split screens, and subtitles for the French—in a manner presumably meant to emphasize their detachment from reality. Off-camera, Henry is petulant, morose, riddled with self-doubt, etc. Only on TV is he kingly.

In large part, Hytner's Henry V is an evening of reaction shots. “Now all the youth of England are on fire,” declares Miss Downie. Reaction: the lights go up on Mistress Quickly's pub in Eastcheap, where a bored Corporal Nym flicks from the warmongering to the snooker channel.

Burgundy is describing the devastation of the French countryside. Reaction: An impatient Exeter glances at his watch.

“Once more unto the breach,” cries Henry. Reaction: his army groans en masse. There he goes again.

Nor are the textual interpolations limited to mere sound effects. The soldiers react to a roll call of French losses by sneering “Yeah, yeah.” When Charles VI's vainglorious emissary arrives, he's greeted by the lads with “Fuck you!” Hytner disdains the evasive politician's traditional distinction between opposing the war and “of course” supporting our troops. He has a low opinion of both. Victory is celebrated in a propagandist documentary with a faux-rap soundtrack thanking God for choosing the right army.

I've never much cared for stage productions overly reliant on TV monitors, but where once they were there simply as mere decoration—the proscenium's nod to modernity—now they're generally used not just to acknowledge the pervasiveness of electronic reality but also to mock its shallowness. The plausibility of this condescension depends on the production's ability to plumb great depths of truth in the nonelectronic portions, and that's a bit more problematic. The notion that the King's muscular leadership is simply a performance is in itself somewhat trite, and you can't help noticing that Hytner's tricks soon settles into a familiar and inviolable rhythm: An actor speaks the words; the words are undercut either by an effect, or a visual gag, or a surly grunt. Granted that Shakespeare's text is open to differing interpretations of his intentions, it still seems unlikely that he intended quite so much of it to be interpreted as spin-doctored bullshit.

In some respects, the determined CNN-ishness of Hytner's version actually obscures the real parallels between Henry's time and ours. For example, in Henry V, the Archbishop of Canterbury, mostly for cynical reasons, bolsters the King's case against France. On the surface, that rings a little strange when everyone's dressed like a bunch of New Labour cronies. Today's Archbishop depends as much as his predecessor on the state's favor: he is appointed by the Queen and sits in the House of Lords. But he's anti-war, and he thinks Bush and Rumsfeld are simpletons, as all bishops do. Even the non-gay ones. Even the Pope, who was opposed to the liberation of Iraq, and on the outbreak of hostilities received Tariq Aziz at the Vatican.

So, when you see Henry and Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely indulging in a pure olde worlde power play, it may not be the “relevance” of the scene that strikes you. But think of the Archbishop as a Colin Powell or Jack Straw. After all, Canterbury obliged Henry by finding convoluted legalistic justifications for the invasion of France, and, in a sense, that's what Powell and Straw did at the UN. Those of us who were pro-war weren't pro-war because of anything Powell and Straw said to the Syrian and German Foreign Ministers: We'd already made up our minds, and we recognized the justification-shopping going on in the Security Council as a kind of necessary charade, a bit of political cover. That's one way to understand Henry's bishops. The only difference is that, in those days, Henry was obliged to take into account the church as an alternative power source; in our time, the new religion that must be deferred to is the cult of progressive multilateralism as vested in the UN.

Shakespeare's understanding of power and the way it operates is as shrewd as ever. The difficulty at the National is that, long before you get to the specifics, Hytner's view of the play has to ignore some of the basics. Most obviously, war is for Shakespeare's Henry a means to unite a fractious, divided nation behind their leader. As the then Prince Hal is advised at the end of Henry IV, Part 2: “Be it thy course to busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels.”

That's hardly Tony Blair, is it? He went to war in defiance of public opinion. If he'd wanted to busy giddy minds, he would have announced some hospital initiative or that he was taking personal charge of Britain's decayed public transit system. These days, the giddy minds resent the instrusion of foreign quarrels into their endless whine about the crummy trains, lousy health care, wretched schools, exploding crime rates. Indeed, it might have been more interesting to explore the differences between Henry's and Tony's Englands, not least the question of what it means to be a nation. One reason why Henry V could busy himself with foreign quarrels is that he wasn't being held responsible by his subjects for the long waiting lists for hip-replacement surgery. Across the channel, most Continental societies are threatened not by external invasion but by the crippling costs of their welfare states and their declining birthrates.

To take another example: the moment on the eve of Agincourt, when the disguised King goes among his men as a common footsoldier is what Hytner calls a “genre scene” dating back to the Emperor Germanicus in Tacitus. Unfortunately for Henry, unlike Germanicus, he finds he's somewhat out of touch with the troops. Your poor bloody infantryman, contemplating death in battle, isn't quite onside about “his cause being just and his quarrel honourable.” As the bolshie Williams tells his undercover Sovereign, “But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads chopped-off in a battle shall join together at the latter day and cry all, ‘We died at such a place’—some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it.”

This certainly rang a bell for me, not because it's how the average Royal Marine is feeling in Basra but because it's what everyone from the BBC to the Poet Laureate was promising in the weeks before war. Harold Pinter especially relishes all those chopped off legs and arms and heads, not to mention, as he likes to, hundreds of thousands of bleeding anuses (something to do with depleted uranium). Young Prince Tony failed to close the deal not with his troops but with the reflexively hostile alternative centers of elite power who come between him and his people. If you're going to “re-examine” the play for its contemporary “relevance,” you have to do a lot more than just paste-by-numbers updating.

Hytner himself belongs to one of these alternative elites, the holder of a state-funded job at a state-funded theatre and one which ex officio commands a knighthood from his Sovereign. It also ex officio requires a kind of doctrinaire counter-tribalism that Shakespeare would have found incredibly tedious. I would wager that, since Olivier's film, the number of “anti-war” Henry V's has outweighed the number of stirring, patriotic Henry's by a hundred to one. Outside the theatre, the wars may change—Vietnam, Northern Ireland, the Falklands, Iraq—but inside, the general line is reassuringly consistent. If Hytner—more of a showman controversialist than an ideological believer—had really wanted to stage a “controversial” Henry V, he'd have done a shamelessly patriotic one rejoicing in the King's victory, and would have endured the slings, arrows, and general denunciations of London's theatrical establishment. But, if that's not within the realm of possibility, he could have given us a leader confronted by the moral dilemma of war, aware that its best-laid plans are never cleanly executed, but understanding that there are times when it's the right thing to do. In other words, something not dissimilar to Shakespeare's play.

Still, one understands Hytner. For him, the heart of the play is the order Henry gives his men at the height of battle: “Let every soldier kill his prisoners!” Both Laurence Olivier in the Forties and Kenneth Branagh in the Eighties found the line too raw, too complicating to include—as, in this production, do the “embedded” TV reporters accompanying the English invaders. A sly dig by the director at Olivier and Branagh? Maybe. But, however he deploys it, Hytner is right to insist the line belongs. It's too bold to be an optional extra. It changes the nature of the man—and, to our ears, would put him on a one-way ticket to the Hague. According to Professor Theodor Meron, author of Henry's Wars and Shakespeare's Laws and Bloody Constraint—War and Chivalry in Shakespeare, Henry's speech before the surrender of Harfleur “reads like an indictment in the ICTY”—the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Professor Meron should know—he's the president of that tribunal. I'd never heard of these books until after I saw the play and I've only had a chance to skim his thesis, but it seems to be this: Shakespeare wasn't pro-war or anti-war, but prochivalry in war, and opposed to breaches of that code. That argument finds support in the play. In Shakespeare's time as throughout human history, war was a fact of life. What matters is how you conduct it. The Bard would have been all for enforcing the Geneva Convention, but not for marching through the street bellowing “No blood for oil.”

In Hytner's hands, and ruthless obsessions, the nuances of the play simply disappear. As good an actor as Adrian Lester is, his Henry can't get out from under the production. He's a TV photo-op or an empty suit, but, either way, you get little sense of the humanity with which Shakespeare abundantly endowed him. Who cares? Hytner and the National can live with that kind of criticism. They've made a grand entertainment of Henry V, precisely targeted at their niche demographic—the smug Guardian-reading Bush-despising NGO-adoring middle-class metropolitan theatergoer. Nothing wrong with pandering to them, any more than it was in the old days when Broadway impresarios offered leg shows aimed at the tired businessman. Both function in the same way, going to great lengths to ensure there's nothing that will startle or disturb the customer. Whatever its deficiencies as art, Hytner's take on the play is a shrewd business decision.

Lester, by the way, is black. You note the fact when he appears and never think of it again, because Hytner's vision of the play is so determined it subsumes all within it. By contrast, at Mark Wing-Davey's Henry V everything sticks out—it's a collection of sore thumbs in search of a directorial hand. This production is part of the Public Theater's sad annual ordeal of Shakespeare in the Park, and, seeing it after Hytner's, I take back every grouse and gripe I ever made about the National. For good or ill, Hytner at least has a take on the play, and better an efficient propagandist than a witless poseur. This Henry V is quite the most stupid I've ever seen, including an all-girls boarding school production I went along to when I was fifteen because I fancied the bird who was playing Bardolph.

Hytner is an opportunist: he thinks to himself, “There seems to be a lot of right-wing warmongering going on right now, we could clean up at the box-office.” You can at least disagree with a chap like that. Wing-Davey, though, seems to have no idea that the play is about anything at all. Or, if he has, he thinks it's about chairs. That's the first thing you notice about the production—dozens and dozens of gilt chairs, row upon row, like the banqueting suite at a suburban Marriott the morning after the big sales presentation. They look like Tommy Tune's chairs from Grand Hotel. But at least in Grand Hotel, you know it's a Tommy Tune musical and that therefore at some point the gentlemen of the chorus will come prancing out from the wings and move them somewhere else or at any rate twirl daintily around them. In Henry V, the chairs just sit there, some of them piled haphazardly, some of them artistically balanced. What is their meaning? “Three chairs for Harry, England, and St George”? Is it meant to suggest that when it comes to decisions of war and peace most of us don't have a seat at the table? Are they there because chairs, like soldiers, can be arranged in rows? Or is the very portability of the chairs the point? Is it underlying the fact that the great thing about a chair-based production is that it's one of those all-purpose concepts you can just pick up and move from one play to another? “We've got four dozen chairs left over from My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” “No problem, pal, take 'em over there, we'll use 'em for Henry V.”

That's how this production chugs along: it's a show of disconnected gimmicks none of which suggest the director has any point of view on the play. A character speaks appreciatively of his horse, and pronounces “Nay” as a great big whinnying “Neigh!” Funny. The French princess, Katherine (Nicole Leach), recapitulates her French lesson in the style of Marilyn Monroe. Très droll. In London, Hytner uses CNN-style jingles to reinforce his interpretation, but in what way does introducing Marilyn impersonations illuminate Katherine's situation? As for Pistol, he has a Noo Yawk accent and a rock‘n’roll pompadour and sits on the can, pants round his ankles, reading a porno mag. Why? So Wing-Davey can set up a cheap sight gag in which the undercover Henry decides against shaking Pistol's hand.

Speaking of horses, when the French soldiers ride into battle, their mounts are young men—bare-chested, jockey-shorted, and snorting. This would seem tired as a Chippendales routine, which gives you some indication of the scale of the problem at the Public these days: even the homoerotic interpolations are generic. The TV screens at the Royal National Theatre are an adroit stage director's artful accommodation of pop culture; the cheap sitcom and movie references at Shakespeare in the Park are the pathetic floundering of a lazy parasite with nothing to say.

Whatever it was intended to do, the hodgepodge of gimmickry has a disastrous effect on the actors, whom Wing-Davey reduces to props of little more account than his chairs. As Henry, Liev Schreiber, one of the best young Shakespeareans on the American stage, finds himself at war not with the French but with his own director. At every critical moment, this production recoils from the great questions the author poses and takes refuge in tired trivia. Anyone who wonders why New York's theater, unlike London's, is largely irrelevant to the national discourse need only spend twenty minutes with this Henry V. Nicholas Hytner may be anti-war, but Mark Wing-Davey is anti-Shakespeare.