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by William Shakespeare, directed by Des McAnuff

Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford

July 13-September 29, 2012

Chorus: “Piece out our imperfections with your mind.”

Des McAnuff’s production of Shakespeare’s Henry V proves yet again that McAnuff may be a fine director of rock musicals but doesn’t have a clue how to direct Shakespeare.  There’s no doubt that the show is visually spectacular.  But there is a kind of spectacle that enhances the meaning of a play and another that is completely empty.  The latter is McAnuff’s specialty.  Rock musicals don’t require subtlety.  Shakespeare does. 

The production begins with one of those scenes popular in the 1960s where the cast, supposedly in their street clothes, happen to wander onto the stage just when the play is set to start, chatting in twos and threes as if there were no audience present.  We known the whole set-up is phoney from the start because the clothing costume designer Paul Tazewell has given the cast is so out of keeping with the weather outside.  With temperatures outside around 30º C., why are actors wearing jackets, sweaters and long pants?  It soon transpires that McAnuff has turned all the actors into Shakespeare’s Chorus and has given each of the Chorus’s lines to a different actor. 

To do this is a major mistake.  On a practical level, doling out the Chorus’s lines at five iambs a person literally cuts the speeches to ribbons.  Whatever meaning they have is destroyed by the distraction of trying to find who is saying what.  On an interpretative level, turning the Chorus into the entire cast shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the play’s structure.  Shakespeare uses a chorus who guides us through the play from start to finish in only two works – Henry V and Pericles.  In Pericles the chorus Gower represents the author upon whose poem the play is based and who reminds the audience of the fictional nature of the story he has invented.  In Henry V the Chorus takes on the surprisingly modern function of continually reminding the audience that they are watching a play. 

Contrary to the chorus in Greek tragedy, the Chorus here does not participate in the action and is not the member of a group affected in some way by what transpires on stage.  Instead, Shakespeare uses the Chorus to distance us from what he shows us by constantly pointing out the inadequacy of the theatre to represent reality as it is on a stage: “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts”.  On the one hand, presenting what we see as only a pale and clumsy imitation of what happened in history elevates the historical event as beyond the powers of representation.  On the other hand, this ploy has the subversive effect of making us question the validity of what we see on stage.  McAnuff understands neither point.  Just when the Chorus exhorts us to “Eke out our performance with your mind”, he has the cast drag an enormous cannon on stage which as it fires thunderously requires no “eking out” at all.   

Henry V is the last instalment of Shakespeare’s two tetralogies about the period of unending strife from the usurpation of the crown from Richard II to the rise of the Tudor dynasty after the defeat of Richard III.  Why in the last of these eight plays should Shakespeare use such a narrator?  The answer is that the form of the play reflects its content.  Just as Henry V, the son of a usurper has to hold onto the crown, not rightly his, by the force of his personality and rhetoric, so the Chorus repeatedly underlines the unreality of the stage representation of his reign and victories.  Henry V is one of the most dramaturgically radical plays in the canon.  To remove the Chorus as a single figure intended to separate us from the action thus destroys the intellectual structure of the entire play.               

Something of the play’s import could be salvaged with a charismatic actor in the title role, but Aaron Krohn is not that actor.  Stratford audiences first saw Krohn last year when he gave a superlative performance as the verbally aggressive Lenny in Lenny in Pinter’s The Homecoming.  But it’s a long way from the sly menace in a small family in Pinter to the mastery of heroic oratory necessary to muster an entire nation necessary in Henry V.  Krohn speaks clearly and decisively but he never is able to lend Henry’s rhetoric imperial urgency, rather sounding more like a waspish social director than a king. 

McAnuff also shows real insensitivity in choosing an American to play this iconic role when the Stratford Festival is celebrating its 60th season.  Does he really think there are no Canadian’s who are equal to the task?  If so, he doesn’t recognize that that all the scenes with Ben Carlson as Fluellen, Welsh accent and all, are more effective than any of the scenes with Krohn as Henry.  To make things worse, McAnuff has chosen another American, Luke Humphrey, who as the soldier Michael Williams, is incapable of making sense of his lines, as Krohn’s understudy.  Stratford mounts Henry V about once ever ten years so that McAnuff’s action has prevented a generation of Canadians from playing one of Shakespeare’s greatest roles at the country’s most prominent Shakespeare festival.   

To be fair to Krohn, we must note that he receives no help from McAnuff, who has no clear understanding of the character.  McAnuff seems to want to erase any notion that Henry is the son of a usurper and allows us to hear of this in only one line: “Not to-day, O Lord, O, not to-day, think not upon the fault My father made in compassing the crown!”  McAnuff cuts off the soliloquy here and omits the following eleven lines beginning with “I Richard's body have interred anew; And on it have bestow'd more contrite tears Than from it issued forced drops of blood.”  This gives Krohn very little to work with.  Rather than letting him show that underneath all the bravado lies a guilty conscience, McAnuff only gives Krohn the bravado.  Any duality in Henry he tries to bring out in his actions.  Act 1 ends by lingering on the onstage hanging of Bardolph (Randy Hughson) as if that were somehow a worse betrayal than his heart-killing rebuff of Falstaff.  In Act 2 when Henry commands that the English retaliate for the Frenchmen’s killing of the English boys by ordering the death of all their French prisoners, McAnuff shows them being locked in their cells and burned alive.  It is an unnecessary barbarity and not portrayed so by Shakespeare, besides being historically inaccurate since burning was reserved for witches and heretics. 

Shakespeare clearly holds Henry responsible for the death of Falstaff and portrays that as the biggest personal transgression he had to commit in order to ascend the throne.  But McAnuff, in typical disregard for the text, minimizes this fact.  This is the first time I have ever seen Falstaff’s death portrayed as humorous with eight men struggling to hold up his large coffin.  The speech of Mistress Quickly (Lucy Peacock) about Falstaff’s death and how he felt “cold as any stone” ought to be one of the most moving in the play, but as directed by McAnuff gets a hearty and totally inappropriate laugh. 

Indeed, the strangest aspect of the production, brutal onstage deaths aside, is his complete blindness to the heavy layers of irony in the story.  As mentioned above, his dispersal of the Chorus and his shortening of Henry’s prayer before battle show that he cannot or does not want to deal with any of the factors that Shakespeare includes to complicate our view of Henry and the action.  He has James Blendick as the Archbishop of Canterbury expound on the ambiguous and convoluted Salic Law with such authority that Shakespeare’s deliberately ironic remark that Henry’s rationale for war is “as clear as is the summer's sun” goes missing.  Here we have Henry entering upon a war of choice based on dubious evidence in order, as Henry IV advised him in Henry IV, Act 4, “to busy giddy minds With foreign quarrels” and thus to distract them from the illegitimacy of his reign.  How, after the second Iraq War, McAnuff can portray without irony the role of internal politics in bringing a nation to war boggles the mind.  Is he afraid of offending the Festival’s American patrons?  Or does he not really understand Henry’s reasons for going to war?

The way McAnuff concludes the play delivers the coup de grâce to anyone who thought McAnuff has any coherent vision of the play.  He has Krohn, dressed as Henry, deliver the final speech of the Chorus.  Why make all the fuss of actors in their street clothes start the play?  Why not have Krohn remove his costume to reveal ordinary clothes underneath if that is the concept?  Following this, with a spotlight on the English flag on one side and the French flag on the other, McAnuff unfurls a gigantic Canadian flag between the two.  What, after Henry has just told us how Henry VI lost France plunging the two nations into the Hundred Years War, can this possibly mean?  If Canada, born of the conquest of New France by the British, is meant to parallel Henry V’s conquest of France, the future of Canada looks grim indeed.  Or, is Canada supposed to represent the ideal union of French and English that Henry V failed to achieve?  That’s possible, but then McAnuff uses The Beatles’ 1968 anti-activist song “Revolution” incomprehensibly as the curtain call music.    Maybe McAnuff thinks “it’s gonna be all right, all right, all right”, but his production shows that when he is in charge of Shakespeare, it’s certainly isn’t.     

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (top) Timothy D. Stickney as Duke of Exeter, David Collins as Bishop of Ely, Aaron Krohn as King Henry V, James Blendick as Archbishop of Canterbury, Tyrone Savage as Duke of Gloucester and Stephen Russell as the Earl of Westmoreland; (middle) Deborah Hay as Alice and Bethany Jillard as Catherine. ©2012 David Hou.

For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.