Review - Henry V - Shaw Festival

✭✩✩✩✩

by William Shakespeare, directed by Kevin Bennett & Tim Carroll

Shaw Festival, Studio Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

August 10-October 28, 2018

Boy: “I did never know so full a voice issue from so

empty a heart”

The Shaw Festival’s first-ever production of Shakespeare is a disaster. It is a mystery why the Festival would even consider doing Shakespeare when there is a well-known festival not far away dedicated to the Bard and while wandering troupes take his plays to parks around the province in summer. The problem, however, with the Shaw production of Henry V is that the directors, Kevin Bennett and Tim Carroll have created a concept for the play that necessarily renders it ineffective. The fact that the cast is uneven only exacerbates this flaw.

Because 2018 marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, Bennett and Carroll have chosen to present the play as if it were being recited by soldiers and nurses during the war. Act 1 opens with seven Canadian soldiers in a trench. During a lull in the fighting, they decide to run through their lines in Henry V for a production they will soon perform. We learn this only through bits of dialogue that the directors have added to the script. Graeme Somerville is the first of the actors to speak who share the role of the Chorus and says his lines as if he is struggling to remember them correctly. Gradually he becomes more fluent. Gray Powell, however, from beginning to end speaks all his lines with exactly the same distanced intonation as if he is reading them off an internal teleprompter. Outrage, thankfulness, joy, love all register in exactly the same unvaried manner.

Anyone who knows Powell’s previous work will know that such a seemingly distrait performance is completely unlike him. What we realize is that Powell is following all too closely his direction to play his part as if he were an ordinary soldier and non-actor simply recalling his lines. The fact that Bennett and Carroll have the other actors pay little or no attention to what Powell-as-Henry says only helps to negate our interest in the lines.

The concept of Bennett and Carroll thus places the professional actors of the Shaw Festival in the perverse position of speaking the lines of one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays as if they were amateurs. What is worse, Bennett and Carroll do not portray the actor-soldiers as rehearsing their roles but merely going through their lines to refresh their memories. The soldiers do not necessarily interact or even look at each other during the dialogue and move about even less. When not speaking they do not give focus to the speaker but doze or busy themselves with their kit.

Shakespeare’s stirring play could not be presented in a less engaging and less powerful way. Why present any play as if the speakers treat their speeches as a duty while the others only half listen if they listen at all?

I must say that I assumed that Bennett and Carroll staged the beginning of the play in so unpromising a fashion because they were then planning to show how the soldiers eventually got into their roles and were carried away by them. This never happens. In fact, Bennett and Carroll ensure when a spoken scene seems to be taking on some life, to add words of their own to interrupt the action. These include soldiers making fun of what is being said, expressing lack of understanding or adding other pointless comments or sound effects. When there is a fight the soldiers say “Shwing!” whenever they draw their fake swords and “Shwung!” when the put them back in their fake scabbards. This, like all the interpolated comments, gets a laugh but attracts attention away from the text.

Some actors neglect Bennett and Carroll’s conception of the soldiers as non-actors which is all to the play’s benefit. Patrick Galligan does a heroic job in clearly distinguishing his seven roles that include the smooth-voiced Chorus, the Welsh-accented Fluellen and the frightened French-speaking soldier. Damien Atkins similarly distinguishes with verve the low-life Nym, the unusually sensible French Dauphin and the French-speaking Katherine. Ric Reid, whose main role is the French King, and Graeme Somerville, whose main role is the rogue Pistol, fall somewhere in between feigning amateurism and simply playing their roles as best they can. Cameron Grant and Kristopher Bowman both seem new to Shakespeare and have difficulty making sense of their lines.

Act 1 ends in the during the comic English lesson between Alice and Katherine that is Act 3, Scene 4 in Shakespeare’s text. After intermission we find we are no longer in the narrow trench of Act 1 but in a hospital ward with six white metal beds and four nursing stations. Six soldiers from Act 1, minus Ric Reid’s character, presumably dead, occupy the beds. For reasons known only to themselves, Bennett and Carroll have two nurses, Yanna McIntosh and Natasha Mumba repeat the English lesson that Kristopher Bowman and Damien Atkins, whose character is now incapacitated, had nearly completed.

Bennett and Carroll have now made a situation that was possible but unlikely in Act 1 into one that is improbable and unmotivated in Act 2. What kind of field hospital is this with such a high ratio of staff to patients? How far from the front is it that the staff have so much free time that they read through Henry V together with the patients? Aren’t the nurses there to ensure their patients rest instead of allowing them to hobble about trying to play scenes with each other? Ludicrous as the set up is, McIntosh and Mumba along with Julia Course and Claire Jullien acquit themselves well as Shakespeareans even though they are forced mostly to feign reading their parts. (Note to potential ticket buyers, if you want to see the faces of the mostly immobile six soldiers well, you should sit on the south side of the Studio Theatre.)

If Bennett and Carroll’s direction of Henry V were not destructive enough, the two have so heavily cut the play that scenes appear without the context that would make sense of them. Early in the play Ric Reid’s characters refuses to speak the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Salic Law speech of Act 1, Scene 2, because it is too “confusing”, and so it is dropped. If Bennett and Carroll really wanted to set up a parallel between Henry’s justification for invading France and the beginning of World War I, the Salic Law speech would have been perfect precisely because it is confusing. It would have shown that fighting and dying for a patriotic cause whose real origins are obscure is really an age-old tactic.

Bennett and Carroll include Katherine’s English lesson but omit so much of the French court scenes that we have no idea who she is or why she wants to learn English. They omit Henry’s prayer before the battle of Agincourt that reveals Henry has gone to war for reasons other than those he states publicly. They include the Welsh Captain Fluellen but omit Captains MacMorris and Jamy. Altogether the three represent Wales, Ireland and Scotland to demonstrate, in what would have been a fine parallel with World War I, how all parts of the British Empire fight together for an English cause.

The result of Bennett and Carroll’s concept, cutting and additions is that they give us neither a fine production of Shakespeare’s Henry V nor no new insights about World War I, but rather a deliberately amateurish rendition of the text.

Those who have been seeing theatre in Ontario for a long time will remember the Henry V that the Stratford Festival staged in 1989 directed by John Wood with a World War I setting. There William Needles alone played the Chorus as an aged veteran whose memory of the past may have lent events a rosier hue than they really had. The single-actor Chorus in Wood’s production highlighted the theatricality of the play, which the shared Chorus in Bennett and Carroll does not, and cast doubt over the accuracy of the way events were depicted, which Bennett and Carroll also fail to do.

Wood demonstrated that simply by focussing on the text itself and encouraging engaged performances from a fine cast, Henry V can easily be staged as an anti-war play, since, as the Chorus points out at the conclusion, all Henry’s success in France was so ephemeral. Bennett and Carroll’s Shakespeare shows that the Shaw Festival should keep their focus on their namesake playwright and his contemporaries.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.

2018-08-08

Henry V