Once more, unto the breach, dear friends…

It’s beginning to feel like that as, a quick snack and a quick change later, I’m back in my seat, and listening to Chorus (Forbes Masson, continuing from Rumour) welcoming us to ‘this rusty shed’, the clerics explaining the Salic law, and tennis balls are falling on everyone’s heads.

I’ve been looking forward to Henry V, as it’s the one I’ve studied most recently, for my OU course. I’ve seen some excellent Henry V’s over the years, my yardstick being Branagh’s performance, which, even now, remains very vivid in my memory, so Geoffrey Streatfeild has a lot to live up to.

It’s an excellent production, visually stunning, but this doesn’t overwhelm the performances. Four plays in, and it’s exciting to see the range of this company, as they play so many parts, from nobles to low life. I can’t see a weak link anywhere. Jonathan Slinger is excellent as Fleuellen, and Lex Shrapnel again stands out as Williams, the soldier who challenges the king.

This really is ‘3-D theatre’ as Michael Boyd describes it later. The French court descend from above on trapezes (John Mackay is excellent as a foppish Dauphin, all arrogance and flowing blond curls), and the English army burst from beneath the stage before Harfleur (though I’m not sure we feel the full horror of Henry’s threats to the town).

In the ‘St Crispin’s Day’ speech, the house lights come up, and Henry addresses us as the English army. When he says ‘he which hath no stomach to this fight, let him depart’, someone later says he actually wanted to go. I want to stay. I’m with him, and the ‘band of brothers’. For a moment you can feel Henry’s desperation to instil some mettle into his men and it really does feel as though we’re a part of it all. It strikes me that you could have never achieved this effect in the old RST.

At then end, despite the platform for the peace negotiations being built upon the coffins of the dead, you feel that there is hope for the future in these two young people – but Chorus is swiftly there to remind us of the failures of Henry VI’s reign – which of course, we’ll see the following day.