In 1951, a few months after my children’s TV encounter with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I remarked over the family dinner table that I “had never seen a stage play.” (I had been taken to Christmas pantomimes – three, I think – at the Shepherds Bush Empire, an old variety theatre soon to be taken over by the BBC, but that was all; I only knew the term “stage play” from having read it in the Radio Times, in the credits for a once-removed adaptation of  a classic novel.) My father said... that something had to be done about that, and consulted the theatre listings in the evening paper. He asked me how I would like to see Henry V at the Old Vic; I said I would, very much, and we did. That night.

We got to the theatre on time (we must have eaten early), and he bought us seats in the gallery. I think I had just about heard of the Old Vic (London’s “home of Shakespeare”) and I had at least skimmed Henry V in the Complete Works; I had gravitated to the histories because they were full of battles. My dad, consulting his program, seemed impressed by finding that Henry was being played by Alec Clunes and the Chorus by Roger Livesey. Neither name meant anything to me, though they soon would. 

I can’t claim to recall much about the production, at least in detail, but I know that I enjoyed it and that my dad, with more to compare it with, liked it too. I do remember the huge laugh with which an audience still in the throes of post-war rationing greeted the line “these English are shrewdly out of beef”.  I didn’t really understand but I laughed along anyway.

My Shakespearean theatrical experience had got off to an auspicious start. And that wasn’t just my opinion. When I was able, a few years later, to look up some of the critical responses, it turned out that I had seen what was, for its time, the definitive production. And the company was extraordinary. Admittedly old cast-lists tend to be mouth-watering, in light of their performers’ subsequent careers, but take a look at this one. Clunes and Livesey were established stars at the time. Dorothy Tutin (a mischievous Katharine) was shortly to emerge as the leading young English actress of her generation. Dorothy Green (Queen of France) was one of the grande dames of the British theatre, a noted Cleopatra in her day.  William Devlin (a Scotsman cast as the Welsh Fluellen) and Mark Dignam (Exeter) were recognised pillars of the classical theatre, and would remain so; Devlin had been a notable Lear in his twenties. Robert Eddison (Pistol, miscast by his own admission, but still) was a great eccentric stylist and would be so for decades, gaining in distinction by the year. Paul Rogers (Dauphin and Burgundy) and Leo McKern (Nym) were to become two of my own personal favourites, backbones of the theatre, never quite stars, though they got to play some star roles, immensely powerful and funny and versatile. Douglas Wilmer (French King) was nearly their equal. Rupert Davies (Williams) was to become famous as TV’s Inspector Maigret. Pauline Jameson (Alice) was another near-star, a poised delightful comedienne with a bewitching voice.  John Blatchley (Bardolph) was to blossom as an actor, director and teacher. Douglas Campbell (Ambassador) and Tony Van Bridge (Westmoreland) were to figure in my life much later; they had both migrated to Canada in the 1950s, and became moving spirits in the burgeoning Canadian theatre, at the Stratford Festival (of whose company Campbell was a founding member) and beyond; when I moved there myself some thirty years later, they were still vigorously contributing.  Richard Pasco (Gloucester), very young at the time, was to become one of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s signature leading men. Brian Smith (Boy) was an effervescent classical juvenile; writing this has unexpectedly brought back to me the image of his character’s dead body carried silently on stage in the aftermath of Agincourt.  

Glen Byam Shaw’s production was generally praised for its sparseness and humanity, which accords with my own obviously hazy impressions. One critic, speaking for most, called it “an achievement of sheer artistry of which the theatre can be proud.” The young Kenneth Tynan, in the earliest of his reviews to be included in his bumper anthology Curtains called it “perhaps the best all-round Shakespeare production the Vic has presented since the war”. The Old Vic Theatre itself had in fact been bombed in the blitz but the Vic company had survived, eventually moving to the New Theatre (now the Noel Coward) in the West End, where its joint artistic directors were Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, each of whom delivered a series of apparently stunning performances: a brief golden age spanning the last two years of the war, recalled with reverence for decades after. The succeeding seasons saw a progressive decline, though in 1949-50 there was something of a resurgence under a new artistic director, Hugh Hunt. He was still in charge when the Vic moved back to its old now-renovated home in the Waterloo Road. Henry V was the outstanding production of that new reopening season. Without knowing it, I had stumbled into theatrical history.

Alec Clunes was a hugely sympathetic golden-voiced actor and his Henry was probably, by later standards, a romantic one. It was not, though, as uncomplicatedly patriotic as the wartime morale-boosting Olivier movie, a film invariably cited and decried by a later generation of literary critics as an example of how a text can be made to reflect the values of its time. (It sometimes seemed to be the only Shakespeare production any of these scholars had ever seen.) Tynan described Clunes’ Henry, with obvious approval, as a “triumphantly gentle gamester”.  A few years later he changed his tune, if not perhaps his mind: “By stressing the ‘gentle gamester’ aspect of the part and delivering the rest as a trumpet voluntary, many actors have been able to blind us to the barbarity of Henry V” – a barbarity of which he had made no mention in his earlier article. He was writing now about Richard Burton’s 1955 Henry, again at the Vic; a production and performance I wish I had seen. In 1951 he had written, approvingly, “The play drives straight to those emotions of soil, birth, and breeding which we all profess to have outgrown.” His 1955 review began “Harry of Monmouth, butcher and sophist, is a figure hard to love for himself alone” and he went on to praise Burton for giving us “a cunning warrior, stocky and astute, unafraid of harshness or of curling the royal lip”.

Anti-heroic views of Henry, both the character and the play, were hardly new, though they had perhaps been more prevalent in the study than in the theatre (William Hazlitt in the early 19th century had been especially scathing), and they had gone into understandable abeyance during and just after the war. The best later productions have realised that the play is complex, or maybe just opaque. It’s a patriotic chronicle whose last long speech, spoken by a Frenchman, laments the devastation of war (though without explicitly blaming the English invaders) and one of whose two most affecting scenes confronts the king with three of his soldiers, bitingly aware that their lives will likely be forfeit in the next day’s battle: “if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make”. This is the only Shakespeare play, other than the partly-authored Pericles, to employ a full-time narrating Chorus, and I fancy that he is there to keep the play on the approved Elizabethan rails; “Oh Lord, how hot they were/On the false Frenchmen” wrote Shakespeare’s friend and contemporary Michael Drayton in his jingoistic Ballad of Agincourt, and the Chorus toes the same party line though on a rather higher poetic level. Still, if the Chorus’ job is to tell the story, the play’s is to explore it in depth; it’s hardly surprising that their perspectives shouldn’t quite align. The play’s most resonant verdict on its protagonist may be that of the despised Corporal Nym: “the king is a good king, but things must be as they may. He passes some humours and careers.” There we have it: the king is a good king, but.

Nym says those words in the shadow of the imminent death of Sir John Falstaff, the king’s old discarded companion. “The king has killed his heart” is the opinion of Falstaff’s former followers, but curiously there is no mention of Henry, for or against, in the description two scenes later of the old knight’s death – the play’s other heart-piercing passage. It’s possible that Shakespeare is insinuating that the loss of Falstaff signifies a spiritual impoverishment of England and its king which should reverberate silently through the rest of the play (where he’s only mentioned once and that dismissively); without him the air is, appropriately, thinner but I suspect that his wonderfully sad and funny epitaph is a stand-alone interlude in Henry V, an obligatory rounding-off of one of the story-lines of Henry IV.

My own second theatrical exposure to Henry V came in 1960, at London’s then-new Mermaid Theatre, which had opened the previous year. The play was billed as Henry V – in battledress, and it was a heavily-edited version set in the First World War. This was a pretty radical idea at the time; indeed it anticipated by some fifty-five years a production at the Shaw Festival in Canada. It was scorned by purists, including myself and my school-friends, and it probably wasn’t very good, even on its own terms. Standards at the Mermaid were rough and not always ready. I don’t remember the show as being especially pro-or-anti-war, or pro-or-anti-Henry though the actor playing him seemed a sensitive plant to be sprouting on those battlefields.  It was noisy, I remember that. Chorus played a moody mouth-organ, and the French characters sounded German, which I guess suited the setting.

My later experiences of the play divide between those that stage it as part of a history cycle and those that might be called independent. There’s a third best-of-both-worlds category in which Henry V is staged concurrently with the two parts of Henry IV but is not conceptually bound to them. This happened at Canada’s Stratford in 2001; Graham Abbey gave searching performances of Hal-into-Henry, but the plays were staged in separate theatres and in separate ways; Henry V was more hi-tech with the English again fighting World War One and the outmatched French looking medieval, the Boy apparently filming the whole thing on a present-day camcorder. It tried to be timeless and succeeded. In 1975, at the English Stratford, the Royal Shakespeare Company had staged the same three plays, in a sparer fashion and with more of an emphasis on continuity. But they did Henry V first, so it came off as its own animal, and an invigorating one, probably the best I had seen since my first. Alan Howard played an unusually complex Henry, of heroic stature but racked with doubts.

In 1964 the RSC had staged the play as the chronological centrepiece of a complete set of histories, from Richard II to Richard III, with Ian Holm an excellent king, small and scrappy and ruthlessly likeable. The following year it was re-staged, on its own, in London, and seemed diminished. This was one time when the serial treatment was the best. Maybe this was because, with Henry VI and Richard III to follow, Henry V didn’t have to be the finale.  When it merely follows Richard II and the double Henry IV, it seems an anti-climax; it simply isn’t as rich a play. This had apparently been the case at Stratford in 1951 when the quartet had been produced in a season that was, in every sense, historic (it may never have been done before), with another of those incredible-sounding companies. Henry IV got raves, Henry V occasioned mild disappointment. Burton, four years before his Old Vic performance, was a hypnotic Hal but a tentative Henry (“trimmed to fit a tetralogy” as once critic wrote of the play itself).  Many years later (1987) the iconoclastic English Shakespeare Company mounted another complete eight-play cycle, of which Henry V was the only instalment I saw. It was a modern-dress staging, emphatically anti-heroic, in which the English troops were played as soccer hooligans, chanting “here we go! here we go! here we go!” as they embarked for France. The production seemed to loathe Henry himself, so insistently that it became boring. (And I liked the actor.) The approach was at least as simplistic as any old-fashioned flag-waving extravaganza.    

Back in 1956, at the Canadian Stratford, there had been a traditionally-staged production of Henry V alone that must have been far more exciting, and was certainly historic. It was the festival’s fourth season and the first with a roof over its head (the three previous ones had been under canvas). Christopher Plummer made his Stratford debut in the title role, and Michael Langham made his as artistic director. Langham’s won especial attention for its casting of French-Canadian actors in the French roles: an event to be held up by some later writers as a sadly unique example of a real Canadian Shakespeare. How this example was meant to be followed in the vast majority of plays that don’t have both English and French characters was never explained.  

The best one-off Henry I myself have seen in (comparatively) recent years was also a debut: Kenneth Branagh’s, for the RSC, in 1984: an extraordinarily direct and assured performance, in a fast-moving production by Adrian Noble. Some of its ideas seeped into Branagh’s subsequent movie, just as Olivier’s film had apparently drawn on Tyrone Guthrie’s Old Vic production in which he had triumphed in the 1930s. I also enjoyed Nicholas Hytner’s more elaborate production at the National Theatre in 2003, with Adrian Lester: an unevenly acted production but brilliantly and probingly staged. The Iraq war was on everybody’s mind, certainly on Hytner’s; he called Henry “the best available play about any war”. I might want to qualify that by saying the best available English play, but otherwise the claim is unchallengeable. I don’t imagine I could have known that back in 1951 at the Old Vic. But I like to think I would have sensed it.