HENRY V. To 17 August.

Tour:

HENRY V:
by William Shakespeare.

Heartbreak Productions Tour to 17 August 2008. Runs: 2hr 30min One interval.
Review: Alan Geary 17 July at Nottingham Castle.

Good actors let down by incoherent ideas from director.
There are female characters in this great play but all five actors fielded by Heartbreak Productions are men. They overcome the obvious problem not by camping about in drag but by acting their way out of it. Standards here are high. Peter Collis’s performance in the central role is excellent, particularly in the self-doubt scenes on the eve of battle.

It’s a pity, therefore, that the production falls down in other respects. The ideas that director Peter Mimmack brings to it are incoherent.

Somewhat unoriginally, he sets the play within a play: it’s presented by a posh all-boys school, which in itself might have been a good wheeze, but the actors don’t perform the inner play as if they’re schoolboys. The French characters - except, that is, for the King himself - all speak with bogus French accents even when they’re talking amongst themselves. The low-life English soldiers, besides being soldiers, are rock musicians but their music doesn’t gel with the rest of what’s on offer. Neither does a clichéd slow-motion interlude after the battle.

There’s heavy editing. Some of the best speeches are either lost or under-played: Mistress Quickly’s moving lament over Falstaff’s death goes almost unnoticed; and even the two great ones by Henry are frittered away. The pathos of Bardolph’s rejection is dumped.

Instead of drawing overt but strained parallels between Henry’s campaign and the Falklands Conflict, Mimmack should have trusted his audience to arrive at its own conclusions about the moral issues surrounding warfare.

Cast: Peter Collis, Marcus Cooper, Paul O’Neill, Andrew Tait, Joe Herzfeld.

Director: Peter Mimmack.
Designer: Kate Unwin.
Movement: Junior Cunningham.

2008-07-19 00:46:38