Review: A Great, Problematic Ride: HENRY V at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company

This review will need to meander a bit, so let me start with the lede: The Chesapeake Shakespeare Company's new production of Shakespeare's Henry V is a fine rendition of a great but very difficult play. It is impossible to render Henry V in a totally straightforward way, as Shakespeare himself evidently recognized, apologizing for some of the problems - though not even the largest ones - in the first words spoken in the play. (The Chorus acknowledges that the huge spectacle the story tells cannot be fully conveyed using the resources of the stage.)

To put the biggest problem in contemporary terms, terms which doubtless occurred to many members of the audience besides just me: Is this a play about Zelensky or is it a play about Putin? You can characterize it as the story of a small army's gallant victory against a much larger and better-equipped force, or you can talk about it as the story of an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign foreign land in service of an improbable abstract notion of the invading country's imperial rights.

And that discomfort confronts us immediately; the action starts with two churchmen clearly acting out of their institution's self-interest, plotting to encourage and help finance a war, and then immediately supplying that encouragement to Henry. Though they may be objectively right about the legal quibble on which their encouragement turns, their blatant conflict of interest renders them irreparably suspect. Beyond that, it's not clear whether Henry genuinely accepts or on the other hand cynically professes to credit their argument; it can be played either way, and I've seen it played either way. (I've seen Olivier, in his movie version, dodge the question, and leave it open to interpretation what Henry believes.) But this we know: the absurd Russian campaign in Ukraine was founded upon more plausible claims.

And then, when Henry's war is won at the end, Henry insists that the French king give his daughter's hand in marriage to Henry as part of the peace deal. After the deal is sealed, Henry woos Katherine; the language barrier that Henry must surmount in his wooing can stand as a token of how far the two are from truly communicating, let alone being in what most of Shakespeare's contemporaries or we ourselves would call love. After all, Katherine has no real freedom to reject her royal suitor, and it is far from a coincidence that the union she and Henry will embark upon just happens to unite the royal houses of France and England. The union is pure realpolitik. Yet the scene is written with all the spirit and wit of the many true happy courtship scenes with which Shakespeare's plays are replete. Again, you can play this either way. But if you play it straight, i.e. depicting it as a love match, you do violence to what we all know about human nature. This is not how people really fall in love.

And what of the gallantry, the willingness to face long odds with the spirit, wit, courage and heart that Henry displays leading up to and through the Battle of Agincourt? Does that not render him an early avatar of Zelensky? It certainly would, were Henry defending England on English soil. But Henry is extricating an expeditionary force from a predicament he himself has created; he has waged a war of choice to vindicate an absurd claim: that a great and independent France could be forced into permanent vassalage to England merely because of accidents of Henry's bloodline.

And even this summary fails to mention all of the problems in the play, which crop out at almost every line, frequently at the moments when it looks as if Shakespeare is trying his hardest to make us like Henry, for instance when, on the eve of battle, Henry is roaming incognito through his force's tents, and confronted with the challenge of a claim that the king bears moral responsibility to see to it that any cause in which his soldiers may be injured or die be a just one. From the first instants of the play, we in the audience know how tenuous and legalistic (in the worst sense of the word) Henry's claim is; the challenge thrown out by the soldier really cannot be honestly answered, and Henry's spoken response to it proves to be word salad: "The king is not bound to answer for the particular endings of his soldiers, the father of his son, nor the master of his servant; for they purpose not their death when they purpose their services." Well, yeah, actually the leaders of military forces do purpose the death of some of their subordinates, because war cannot be waged without those deaths. Henry does exhibit an attractive sense of kinship with his soldiers, and he does acknowledge some kind of overall responsibility in his "Upon the king" soliloquy. But he slides clear of meaningful moral accountability. It may skirt rationality to explain Henry's disclaimer of any responsibility for the state of their souls should they die in his service. The one should be temperamentally linked to the other, but since it isn't, oh, well, look at Henry giving a stirring speech making the yeomen he's exposed to grave danger feel like his brothers and peers! How cool is that?

So this production, like all productions of Henry V, must then be an exercise in squaring the circle, either making us feel things our rational processes can't justify, or making us think things at odds with what we feel, or both. By enticing us to like and admire a man who, by any objective standard, is a moral monster, Shakespeare stages quite the challenge for a director. Alec Wild, the current director, cannily does not fight back. He sees that Shakespeare really wants us to love the monster, and so Wild too tries to persuade us to love him. And in Samuel Adams as Henry, Wild has an articulate and presentable young man to make the case of Henry as hero. Other choices follow from that choice; this Henry is directed in a way that makes him seem genuinely to believe in the justice of his cause. He likewise seems, however implausibly, to be truly smitten with the French princess. His concern for his troops is presented as unfeigned. He is the model young monarch.

This approach is a natural fit for the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company in any event, because, maybe more than ever, the company skews young and enthusiastic, traditionally given to stunts like presenting music before performances (though not here), raffling wine, and mingling freely with the customers after the show. It tries hard to be fun, even when tragedies are the subject. And it's a lot more fun to cheer a good guy than a bad one.

And speaking of fun, I particularly like the way the remarks of company co-founder Lesley Malin in her role of company spokesperson before the show and during the break segued almost imperceptibly into speeches as Chorus, introducing slices of the action. I was struck, too, with the intelligent use of flashbacks to the Henry IV plays inserted into the early expository speeches to bring audience-members up to speed. And while I missed the pre-curtain music, I enjoyed the insertion of Over The Hills and Far Away, a traditional marching song sung with beautiful harmony, into an appropriate part of the action (even if the song, which I fell in love with under titles in the Sharpe TV series, was obviously from the wrong era, the 18th Century, and the wrong war, referencing "Portugal and Spain"). I appreciated as well the historically accurate appearance in the battle scene of the strategically crucial English longbows which, together with the mud, were what won the battle. (My most recent previous Henry V had relied on a confused broadsword melee, and the one before that had been fought with rifles.)

Speaking of the Henry IV plays, which the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company assayed in 2019, much as I appreciated Samuel Adams' portrayal of Henry V, I missed Séamus Miller, who in 2019 had portrayed the then-Prince Henry as an only slightly younger man. (He is involved with this production as Assistant Director.) It would have been interesting to see the development of the character from the roisterer through the near-parricide (who, spiritually speaking, polishes off both John Falstaff and Hal's father Henry IV) to the triumphant conqueror, all in one performer's skin. But we all digest different James Bonds with total equanimity, compared to which this substitution on the field is of little moment. At least the set, by Dan O'Brien, whose interesting space impressed in the earlier shows, is quoted if not reproduced by the set here.

I wish there were time and space to praise the individual cast members in detail. I liked them all, especially Morgan Pavey, lively and game as Princess Katherine, and Michael Crowley (among other roles) flashing back to the remembered Henry IV and hamming up a Welsh accent as the gallant Fluellen.

Glorious as the experience of the play is in skillful hands, as here, it ends on a sad and tactful note. None can resist the tides of history, and here, as Shakespeare must acknowledge in the words of the Chorus, Henry's accomplishment was due to be swept away like a sand castle. It is ordained that England and France are two different lands, and no empire can ever unite them for long. Henry himself was due to be swept away at a young age, leaving the young Henry VI to succeed him, unsuccessfully. So, no matter how the audience ends up thinking of Henry and Agincourt, one cannot count it as a lasting triumph.

Still, it's a great ride. With all its unresolvable problems, Henry V is an enthralling play that justly enjoys its popularity, and this is a fine, level-headed approach to those problems.

Henry V, by William Shakespeare, directed by Alec Wild, presented through May 15 by the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, 7 S Calvert St, Baltimore, MD 21202. Tickets $19-$63, at https://www.chesapeakeshakespeare.com/shows-tickets/henry-v/ or 410-244-8570. Scenes of combat and killing, as well as some comic fisticuffs.

Production photo by Kirrstn Pagaan

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