There is a kind of conjuring in Gregory Doran’s production of Henry V, which opened in September at Stratford. A whisking up of scenes through words. More than in any other Shakespeare play, the audience is here asked to catch themselves in the act of imagining. “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts,” commands Oliver Ford Davies’s exemplary Chorus as, casually 21st-century with his trailing scarf and wrinkled trews, he summons up battlefields and spins us across oceans. Somewhere between an old-fashioned telly don and a Shakespearean foreign correspondent. His scene painting outstrips Stephen Brimson Lewis’s striking set, which glimmers under Tim Mitchell’s lighting so that ecclesiastical arches seem to grow out of a briar-scored sky.
It is painful to hear some of the graphic war details in this martial play, so often and persuasively bent to contemporary circumstances: on the one hand, Olivier’s patriotic 40s film; on the other, Nicholas Hytner’s bleak response to the Iraq war. Doran’s production is robust and clear and avoids triumphalism while staying clear of any specifically anti-war interpretation. Alex Hassell is a restrained, cautious Henry, not easily given to rhetoric. He throws off his “once more unto the breach” speech when he is already on the hoof, offering it not so much as inspiration as a last-resort military tactic.
This psychological uncertainty is appealing; less so the lack of certainty in his voice, which early on muffles the verse. Hassell comes into his own in his courtship of Jennifer Kirby’s prettily mantling Catherine. On an empty stage he skids on his knees towards her, snatching intimacy and comfort in a world at war.
