War Gains
Sun Herald
Sunday October 17, 1999
Bell Shakespeare's year ends with deserved fanfare, writes Colin Rose.
Henry 5
Playhouse Theater, SOH
GOD bless John Hinde, the genial host of ABC TV's late night movie slot, who recently stole a march on the Bell Shakespeare Company by screening Laurence Olivier's film version of Henry V.
Made in 1944, it remains my favourite Shakespeare on film, not just because of Olivier's performance, or its rich Technicolor, or the beautiful picture-book backdrops, but because, as Hinde pointed out in his introduction, it's the supreme example of highbrow wartime propaganda.
With God on their side, so goes the movie's subtext, the brave English Tommies would plough the Nazis into the fields of France in much the same way as King Henry's army had cut down the French at Agincourt in 1415.
Is Henry 5 (to use Bell Shakespeare's numbering) a jingoistic celebration of a ruthless warrior-king (the "lovely bully") or an ironic depiction of the futility and horror of war? It's possible to read the play either way. My own opinion, for which I can't claim any originality, is that Shakespeare was too great a humanist not to think the latter and too great an entertainer (and too shrewd politically) not to write the former.
John Bell, who directs this production, is firmly in the "war is hell" camp. Between them, he and his Henry (Joel Edgerton) have drained a lot of the bombast from the play. The overall impression is less of a rabble-rousing call to arms than a muted and downbeat depiction of a sombre army slogging its way to inevitable doom.
For example, when Montjoy (Anna Volska) enters to concede the French defeat, Henry's response is to fall in a heap, utterly exhausted and teary-eyed in disbelief.
Bell has set the play during World War I, a clever choice, I think, since the memory of its dreadful slaughter still survives to colour his production. This could possibly get too grim and relentless, but it doesn't because Bell has judged the comedy in Henry 5 superbly well.
An even smarter idea was to place the action on a music hall stage (Michelle Fallon is the designer), which not only makes the comedy (and song) seem easy and unforced, it also underlines the theatricality of a play in which many of its events are narrated by a chorus.
In fact (apart from Edgerton's Henry), it's the comedians who steal the show. Prince Hal's old gang (from Henry IV), particularly Pistol (Darren Gilshenan) and Bardolph (John Turnbull), are very funny as burlesque turns. Even better is Richard Piper's Fluellen, the pugnacious Welsh captain who carries a leek as both a badge of honour and an unusual weapon.
Bell has some fun, too, in less likely places. The Archbishop of Canterbury (Rhys McConnochie), who, with his chalk-and-blackboard explanations comes across like a particularly pedantic schoolteacher, mines some comedy from what can be the play's dullest scene.
Bell has imagined the French noblemen - the Dauphin (Angus King), the Constable (Peter Lamb) and the Dukes of Bourbon (Duncan Wass) and Orleans (Mark Brady) - as a terminally dissolute bunch of cognac-guzzling, Gitane-smoking poseurs. No wonder they took such a pasting. And Paula Arundell is very entertaining and amusing as Henry's prize, the snappish Princess Katherine, although she does less well in her lisping, bum-scratching reading of the Boy.
Finally, there's Henry, a character whom it's much easier to admire as a leader than it is to sympathise with as a man. However, Edgerton's subdued, understated but nonetheless impressive performance does make one feel for him.
In the end, the victory which Edgerton's Henry celebrates is not in beating the French, but the victory over himself, over what he was at the beginning of the play, a young man only dimly aware of his responsibilities.
In my opinion, this hasn't been a great year for Bell Shakespeare, but Henry 5 sees it finish with a bang on the drum and a blast on the trumpet. Well worth seeking out.
* Playing to November 13.
© 1999 Sun Herald
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