Henry V
Stratford Festival
The National Post

The best parts of Des McAnuff 's production of Henry V, his last Shakespeare as Stratford's artistic director, are the beginning and the end.

The play's customary one person chorus has been eliminated and the lines distributed among the entire cast. This turns out to have its disadvantages, but it's undeniably stirring to see the company distributing themselves around the stage in their civvies and to hear them, to mounting drumroll accompaniment, sharing out the prologue, with its exhortations to the audience to use our imaginations and think about horses.

The one actor who doesn't get to partake in all this group storytelling, now or later, is he who plays the king. Not, that is, until the finale when he's left alone onstage to deliver the epilogue, telling how the French conquests we've just seen achieved were squandered under his successor. There's a satisfying sense here of a circle being completed: the hero joining in the telling of his own story while stepping outside his role to do so.

It's spoiled, though, by the fact that he's never seemed much inside it in the first place. Henry is played by Aaron Krohn, the young American actor who was so chillingly funny last year as Lenny in The Homecoming. He's equally chilling as Henry, though not at all funny, and it's hard to tell how much of this is intentional. He speaks his lines intelligently and intelligibly, but that's about all that happens. There's little personality there, no warmth, no discernible reason for his soldiers to follow him. There's no sense of self-doubt, so the big speech about "ceremony" goes for nothing. So, in another key, does his broken-French wooing of the enemy princess; we don't care enough to laugh either with or at him.

Henry V is a very slippery play. On one side of it, we have the chorus exalting "the mirror of all Christian kings" and the choice cavaliers who follow him to France. On the other, we have a ruler waging aggressive war for questionable purposes, with an army some of whom are dogged but skeptical while others are skulking profiteers. It's possible that Shakespeare used a chorus in this play because he was nervous that, if he left the action to speak for itself, it would get away from him. Making the chorus a collective rather than an individual voice, though, has the unexpected result of weakening its role.

Meanwhile, this king's most notable characteristic becomes a kind of calculating callowness. Henry's is, after Hamlet and Richard III, the longest role in Shakespeare, and that's a lot of time to spend learning that the production doesn't like him very much. There's plenty of anti-war material in the play as written; it doesn't need to be forced down our throats.

As it is, this may be the only production of Henry V in which the king is the villain, and the hero is, of all people, Pistol. Tom Rooney, whom I wrote just a couple of days ago could play anything, is here mired in contradictions. He does in fact rise above them, but he can't obscure them, and they mostly stop him from being funny or even, in the way of a confessed rogue, endearing. This Pistol is a champion of the underclass and of the underdog; he knuckles under to Fluellen (Ben Carlson, magnetic as ever, though with a strange beard) not because he's a coward but because the Welsh captain is a bully. The giveaway is the amount of textual fiddling that has to be done to get these and allied points across.

On the other hand - though I'm afraid it makes for confusion rather than complexity - McAnuff has kept, in their entirety, the speeches in which the Boy (well played by Sophia Walker, though a real boy would be preferable) tells us, very persuasively, just what a craven loudmouth Pistol is. There's also some unusually graphic corpse-robbing. What might be called the post-Falstaff scenes are generally well done, with Lucy Peacock making the Hostess's tragic-comic eulogy expectedly effective, and the mourners amusingly sagging under the weight of the fat knight's coffin.

Randy Hughson is an excellent Bardolph, though his hanging and Henry's reaction to it are even more sentimentalized than in the Kenneth Branagh film; the more they try to move us with it, the less they succeed. The king's disguised encounter with his troops pre-Agincourt, usually the play's great scene, is here remarkably ineffective; while having the principal soldier later defy the king to his face is psychologically implausible, historically impossible and - again - textually unsound.

The show looks good; the battles are exciting and the costumes medievally gorgeous, especially those for the French. There are some nice symmetries; the English bishops, those crafty war lobbyists, appear on symbolic horses, and the archbishop is also a silent, oily presence at the final peace conference. The French, too, get to appear on horses, even while talking about them; they're well played too, with Richard Binsley a gentle king, Michael Blake a dry sardonic Constable, and Gareth Potter a preening Dauphin properly presented as the bizarro Henry.

The final, unexpected image is of the Canadian flag: maybe a homage to Michael Langham's legendary bicultural production of 1956 (whose star, Christopher Plummer, was in the opening night audience), maybe a pious hope that French and English could finally get along. After a production apparently dedicated to showing that they couldn't, it did not seem earned.