Henry V Donmar

Next Thursday matinee cancelled due to "the impact of Covid on the production schedule". Wonder who's planning to get it next week?

Saw this last night. Started about 15 minutes late. The director came on stage to let the audience know that several cast members had food poisoning and as a result 3 understudies would be sharing 6 parts. One of the understudies had the script in hand.

Overall, this was disappointing. Harington was just ok, at times not totally convincing. Hopefully he'll get better during previews. Physically he's changed a lot. He's much thinner and even his voice sounds very different from when he did Faustus or even True West.

The production itself is long, dull and boring. It's a least 20 minutes too long. Some scenes are really disjointed and the whole thing doesn't flow. There was a stupid scene with a man chewing and spitting leek which was totally pointless and unnecessary.

Just 2 stars from me. There's a lot of room from improvement -cutting 20 or 30 minutes would be a start-. Maybe by opening night it will be a bit better

Saw it this afternoon. Not bad at all - though it does extend the running time unnecessarily in places and I was not keen on Chorus.



Some of the gender-swapping was a bit inconsistent, and the extended French sequences dragged.

I though Kit Harrington was quite good. Not as good as others I have seen, admittedly - maybe he’ll grow into it - but the big speeches work well.

It’s no wonder the lengthy French scenes dragged - they’re mainly in English in the original!

I’m not sure why they decided to translate them.

Yes I'd agree with that. I thought Harington was good but he's totally cast adrift in a mediocre production. It seemed to me like a fringe production, even a drama school one at some points, and I expect more than that from a theatre with the resources and ticket prices of the Donmar. To stage a "big" play like that in a small space you need a really inventive director with a strong overall vision and Max Webster clearly isn't that - for example repeatedly staging big battles scenes by having the cast run on the spot just looks ridiculous and doesn't cut it. That leek scene looks superfluous (comments above) only because the comic scenes establishing those characters were botched previously. His music choices are hackneyed - best not to remind us of what a genius director Peter Greenaway is because we'll start making comparisons ? 

The acting is very variable, I'm afraid the Chorus is very weak, no engagement with the audience at all, just chanting the lines. The Dauphin is good. I liked the Salic Law explainer scene, and the wooing scene which is somewhat unconventional. That's about it. 

For the Shakespeare specialists: I'm unconvinced of the need to include a 10-minute long scene at the start cobbled together from lines from Henry IV to somehow try to explain the Henry/Falstaff backstory. For a start other than a stray mention Falstaff doesn't appear in Henry V at all. In those Henry IV plays you get 6 hrs of character development which explains who Falstaff and Hal are and what their relationship is and why it founders and why we should care about that. It is absurd to try to accomplish all that in 10 minutes and why bother ? Henry V has got more than enough in it as a stand-alone play without adding to it. 
 
2*

Chorus is a good role and normally attracts a senior actor - I remember Ian McDiarmid in the Kenneth Branagh production, John Woodvine in the ESC one, Norman Rodway for Michael Sheen, Pennie Downie for Adrian Lester.  

There were several minor irritations. I was OK with the translation of the French scenes into French but the projected English surtitles weren't actually the Shakespeare English text but an "improved" version by (I assume) the director. 

Forbes Masson in the Michael Boyd cycle ? He's great at that type of role. 

Oh and BTW 3:00 is a short running time for this play especially as 10 minutes of that are from a different play. The full text running time can be around 3:40 so there are loads of cuts here which make some scenes perfunctory. In the circumstances I’m not complaining about the shorter run time though.

Derek Jacobi in the Branagh film was my first thought. I saw one production of it, I forget which, where it was an actual chorus in the Greek manner, shared between the actors. There are a few things you can do with the part with some imagination - I suppose this time we at least got some of it delivered in what ? Mandarin ? Japanese ? No surtitles for that. Plus the director had rewritten the closing lines of the play spoken by the Chorus - must have quite a high opinion of himself.

I'm going to have to wait for the NT Live screening, but everyone I know who has seen this has been very positive.

I think it's interesting that some people are confused or frustrated by the use of French by French characters, whilst others have loved it, thinking of it as a clever way of showing the French as their own people, which his particularly valid if your production embraces the idea that it was a dodgy war. I suppose it depends whether the person knows French, had a good view of the translation and/or brought their glasses. Modern tv and film drama tends to favour using subtitles, and I always pick subtitles over dubbing given the option, but I know it's not for everyone.

I don't know if it's still available, but there was an interview on Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago and they talk about how you can play Henry as a glorious leader or as a manipulator. This production is going for the latter, and there was a particular discussion of whether or not pitching the wooing scene as coercive and aggressive was a different take. Webster rightly pointed out that we don't actually know how it was originally performed, and the more recent takes we're used to could be the ones that changed the tone and they are doing it as intended. I'd say the text supports their take, but I can see that it might jar with some.

I've heard a lot of people say they think it's timely, raving about Shakespeare's ability to stay relevant, but a friend who went the other day felt it was a bit on the nose.

More reviews are out now. The production sounds uneven, but notices for Harington are pretty good across the board, which honestly I didn't quite expect.

I've never had faith in critics. As a teenage girl I quickly learned that their tastes and my tastes were different, which isn't all that surprising, except the old men that seemed to do the reviewing didn't just have different taste, but seemed to actively hate things that might be popular with teenage girls, and then I quickly learned that something being popular with women was itself a criticism. 

I don't need reviewers to have the same tastes as me, and so long as they don't sneer and give a decent enough description of what they like, don't like and why, then I can read between the lines whether or not I'll like it more or less than them. For example, I'm not at all concerned by a review that complains that it's a modern version with no swords, or about the use of French and subtitles. On the other hand I would take it more seriously if they say the subtitles were poorly managed. 

I don't claim to be a Shakespeare expert, but we all have opinions on what he may or may not have intended in his scripts, and that's half the fun of new interpretations. But women getting married off for political alliances, or as the spoils of war has always been exploitative. The fact it's only become the mainstream interpretation in recent years doesn't change that, and it's more than reasonable to present the scene that way. Unfortunately it's fair to say many men then, and too many now, think sexually manipulative behaviour is heroic.

That said, modern sensibilities see an invasion of France as an invasion of a sovereign country. Not that those on the receiving end of invasions thought it was heroic. A version that ignores our current understanding will have an audience, but a different one. 

Safe to say this version would be another thing for the Laurence Fox types to get angry about, but hopefully they can find something that suits them better.

I don’t think it’s at all the case that women getting married off for political alliances is only seen as exploitative in modern times. I think Shakespeare quite deliberately writes the Henry-Katherine scenes like something out of Much Ado specifically because he is painting Henry as a hero and he needs to soften the perception of the real event in order to support that portrayal.

That’s why we have the English lesson scene - it’s saying to the audience ‘it’s ok, she really wanted to marry him all along - look she is deliberately learning English and making sexual wordplay in the process’.

Playing it as unromantic and uncomedic plays against the obvious intent. It’s compelling and it works - I found it a very effective scene. But not all of the changes that played against intent did work.

The Mandarin didn't have surtitles.