Bardolph, hanged for stealing from a church, slowly rocks in his noose as the lights come up for intermission. This image haunts me, summing up as it does Holly Race Roughan’s brutal take on Henry V.
And what’s more exciting than to see a familiar play in an entirely new way? Roughan’s production at Shakespeare’s Globe takes a familiar text and makes it utterly unfamiliar and unsettling.
Laurence Olivier left out Bardolph’s hanging and other morally compromising scenes from his famous World War II version of the play, but recent directors have been more willing to confront the disturbing aspects of this canonical British text.
Still, I’m not aware of other major productions that have made Henry into quite such a Macbeth-like figure. Judicious cuts and occasional transpositions emphasize the often horrifying actions of this king.
We begin, not with the Chorus’s invocation of the “Muse of fire,” but with the cry of a dying man in the dark. It’s Henry IV and we’re in the death scene from his play. You know the one: Prince Hal has tried on the crown before his father has even died. Right from the start, we see that the new king is quite as capable of seizing a crown not rightfully his as was his father, who deposed Richard II.
This stolen crown sets the stage for a violently insecure Henry, one who seems never entirely certain that the kingship is his by right. Rather than the formerly dissolute Prince Hal growing into a noble leader, we see a damaged young man who alternates between self-lacerating insecurity and violent manipulation of friend and enemy alike.
I had not remembered Henry IV’s dying advice to his son to “busy giddy minds/With foreign quarrels.” Moving as we do from this scene to Henry seeking advice on his right to the French crown, we are more primed than usual to understand the discussion of the Salic Law as a mere cover story for going to war.
This always incomprehensible explication of the Salic Law is played here for laughs. No solemn pronouncement from the Archbishop of Canterbury, its essence is distributed among Henry’s advisors, who step over each others’ lines, becoming increasingly hectic in their eagerness to reassure the king that he is fully justified in invading France.
Henry doesn’t follow it any more than we do. He seeks only a pretext for war.
The conspirators are similarly reduced in number. Do we really need three of them? Here, there is only Scroop, and the confrontation between Henry and his old friend is all the more intense for it. Did I really need to see Henry strangle Scroop in a fit of rage rather than send him off to be executed? No, of course not, but it felt of a piece with Oliver Johnstone’s gripping performance of this unhinged king.
There is no nobility in Henry’s appeal “Once more unto the breach” before the gates of Harfleur. Nor is there even an audience of soldiers for this rousing speech. It’s presented as a soliloquy, Henry crouched in a fetal position as he girds himself for war, confronting his own reflection in the mirrored brass of the backdrop.
And his threats to the governor of Harfleur are all the more sinister for being presented in a quiet conference. No battlements here, no grand posturing before the gates, just a finger tapping on a knee and a quiet reminder that the women of Harfleur will be raped and their babies impaled on spears if the city does not surrender.
Henry is no less brutal in his courtship of Katharine at the end of the play. These closing scenes usually feel like a respite from the war, a “blessed marriage” that will bring peace between the two countries. We know from history, of course, that Henry’s marriage to Katharine will bring no peace. And the terrified Katharine, falling into the arms of her distraught mother, shows us that the marriage is no respite from war, just another form of war, one where the daughter of the French king becomes the culminating prize of battle.
The one misstep of the production is an entirely invented final scene in which an immigration official, clipboard in hand, gives Katharine a citizenship test upon entering England. This banal epilogue underlines what the play has already shown us in far more interesting ways.
Hmmm…No Chorus to literally “set the stage.” No evocation of those vasty French fields. Seems a rum thing to me.
I think Branaugh showed the hanging in his film version.
Fun fact: Renee Asherson, a lovely English stage and film actor who portrayed Katherine in Olivier’s version, later portrayed the first victim in the first episode of the seemingly eternal Brit series Midsomer Murders.