There are moments in a reviewer’s life when a dream performance happens, when intonations are correctly-shaped, when clarity is a constant thus every word is dropped into your lap, when casting is well-nigh perfect, performances reach the heights and the gods of the theatre smile from beginning to end.
Under Greg Doran’s inspired direction all these things come together in that mysterious process known as theatre, and this Henry V becomes a complete triumph, being both funny, hugely comic, poignant and tragic.
The subject is war and the tragedy of war.
The young Henry V ( the remarkable Alex Hassell) anxious to reclaim hereditary lands in France, risks everything at the battle of Agincourt and wins, as every schoolboy who has studied the play knows so well.
But in this gripping production the twists and turns of Shakespeare’s plot are given their full worth. Lines seem to appear out of nowhere as though newly-minted and give the production colour and feeling, cohesion and a sense of space, which make the play work emotionally for the audience.
In the Agincourt sequences, for example, Hassell’s face is a marvellous register for the cataclysmic events which will lead to victory, but which will not lead to a peaceful reign.
When the battle-stained king softens his voice and reads out the list of the French and English dead, a deeply moving scene is concluded in a way as fine as anything I have seen at Stratford this year.
And always in Stephen Brimson Lewis’s atmospheric set, there a sense of the land, its sunrises and sunsets, its huge autumn moons, its spring and winter weather, a landscape which has seen it all seen it all before and will see it all again in years to come (think of the battle of the Somme which lies in wait).
But Doran, in this unforgettable and beautifully-shaped evening has also given Shakespeare’s comic scenes speed and total clarity.
Fluellen (the incomparable Joshua Richards) bashing Pistol over the head with a leek or spitting frustration as Bardolph took the audience along with him.
And in another earlier scene a battle-crazy lord confounds us with a totally incoherent Scottish accent that brought the house down.
Another high point in an evening rich with them, was the courtship sequence when the victorious prince attempts to win the French princess Katherine. He becomes a brash, overgrown, fumbling boy with barely any French and she has even less English.
There is a naughty joke in the text, where a pronunciation mishap leads to accusations of obscenity from the princess. Usually the point is missed, here it was made gloriously evident and stopped the show.
I can report with confidence that there is not a weak performance in this stunning production which filled the various foyers with an excitable buzz as the audience left.
