Summary 
Spectacular exploration of the charming brute Henry V. An onstage musician provides a somber score, and video and photographic projections, all in bleak black and white, enhance the production. Modernized warfare is set in World War One but the chorus and a stage crew play a modern television news documentary team. The complexities of a handsome and eloquent but bullying and manipulated King are played as both stirring entertainment as well as brilliant irony.
Design
Directed by Jeannette Lambermont. Set and costumes by Dany Lyne. Lights by Bonnie Beecher. Sound and video by Wade Staples.
Cast
Seana McKenna (Chorus), Graham Abbey (King Henry V), Brad Rudy (Exeter), Diane D'Aquila (Nell, Queen Isabel), Keith Dinicol (Pistol), Paul Dunn (Boy), Wayne Best (Fluellen), Donald Carrier (King Charles VI), Nicholas Van Burek (Dauphin), Sara Topham (Katherine), Michael Therrault (Montjoy), Domini Blythe (Alice).
Analysis
Jeannette Lambermont's directorial approach to Henry V, staged within the narrow but deep Avon theatre, integrates the title character's dual nature of patriotic hero and Machiavellian warmonger. Lambermont accents this dark tone with murky lighting and shadows, and an omnipresent on-stage cellist provides a superb melancholy string score. The musician stands at either side of the stage, sometimes moving in and among the performers, playing moody background music or providing bursts of musical noise for emphasis or as sound effects.
Lambermont stages Henry V with a huge upstage projection screen that looms over the action. Photographic slides, artistic images, video clips, and live hand-held camera footage - all in stark black and white - fill the screen, which is almost constantly in use. Before the production begins, the screen features a loop of elegiac video close-ups of the play's principal characters.
A ramp at center stage dominates the performance space, rising from stage left to a height of about ten feet and leading off stage. Lambermont cleverly employs the confined space beneath the ramp, using it as the below-decks hold in the ships crossing from Southampton to France during 2.4, as the mines needed for the 3.1 siege of Harfleur, or as the flashlight-lit tents on the field before the 4.1 battle at Agincourt. In addition, a wall-like platform stands at stage left, dropping to represent the lowering drawbridge and reluctant 3.3 surrender of Harfleur, a long ramp for Katherine's elegant 3.4 entrance, and a sumptuous French banquet table for 3.5.
Lambermont's battlefield scenes and military costuming have an early 20th-century feel, with blighter soldiers wearing World War One era helmets, boots, and long olive-colored coats, and carrying carbine rifles and heavy packs. Yet the play begins like a 1990s telecast, with microphones, wiring, and television lighting standards visible onstage, and an unseen director issuing amplified commands. To the sound effect of the rising howl of wind, and lit from banks of glaring florescent lights, black-clad technicians bustle about as if at work upon a modern sound stage. They must step over and move around mounds of battlefield dead - actors and mannequins - scattered across the stage.
Additional time-frame anachronisms provide a sense of timelessness. The Chorus - dressed in black with closely cropped hair - is a television documentary host, making her Prologue apologies with the house lights still up. Henry V stands atop the ramp, his back turned to the audience, wearing royal red robes and crown. Despite the King's medieval attire, his court takes the stage in red-patched black military uniforms, and after the modern Chorus finishes her remarks and the 1.1 churchmen conclude their plotting, Henry finally turns to face his court and the audience. Three royal red banners are raised to unfurl behind him and color the bleak darkness of the stage.
Graham Abbey's Hal commands the stage, tall and imposing throughout, boyish and winning when he needs to be, as he is with Princess Katherine in 5.2. His eloquence inspires his soldiers at the 3.1 gates of Harfleur ("once more unto the breach") and before the 4.3 against-all-odds fight at Agincourt ("we band of brothers"). But Abbey's complex political hypocrite Henry V is also unforgiving, as with the 2.2 traitors at Southampton and the 3.6 execution by hanging of Bardolph, brutal, as he is with his 3.3 threats against the elderly, the women, and the children of Harleur, and vindictive, as he orders the 4.6 slaughter of defenseless French prisoners at Agincourt before being made aware in 4.7 of the French attack upon the boys and luggage.
Lambermont portrays the French leaders as confident and proud, rather than the more usual presentation of the French as disdainful and effeminate. In 2.4, they wear powder blue garments, rich with layers and ruffled velvet, laconic in their wealth and superior military position. The lovely Kate, attired in white, charms in her 3.4 attempt to acquire brutish English vocabulary, and the scene counterpoints the grim acceleration toward the bloodbath at Agincourt and ensuing political upheaval.
The 2.1 and 2.3 Eastcheap sequences begin with Bardolph emerging from a trap in the ramp to intervene in a fight between Nym and Pistol, who brandishes a pair of pistols. After the off-stage passing of Hal's old friend Falstaff - recalled with video footage from the Festival's concurrent 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV - the Boar's Head denizens sit on the edge of the stage to commiserate as stage fog roils in the darkness behind them. The cellist's music, somber and moving, enhances the scene.
The 3.1 siege of Harfleur, staged before a video backdrop of a setting sun, concludes with the King's vitriolic threats against the town's innocent citizens. Abbey's Henry rages over the heads of the audience, addressing the French mayor who stands within a spotlight in the first row of the balcony, behind the majority of the seats. The stage littered with bodies, the Boy takes live video footage of the carnage in and around the mines. Amid cannon shots and bursts of light and billowing smoke from the orchestra pit, Abbey's King helps fallen men rise to their feet, and some of the fallen, seeing the King helping them, rally to rise of their own volition. Finally, the Mayor relents and the drawbridge drops in sullen surrender.
Lambermont stresses the 3.6 hanging of Bardolph for thievery from a church, using the scene, with its implications of Hal as King literally turning his back on old friends and losing some of his humanity as the dramatic conclusion to the production's first half. With a close-up of Bardolph projected on the upstage screen, the King's companion is led by Exeter down the center stage ramp. His hands bound behind his back, Bardolph is guided to a platform and hooded, then a noose is tied around his neck. Abbey's Hal nods assent and turns his back on his friend and his former lifestyle, as Bardolph - dangling from a concealed harness - struggles and finally suffocates. With their heads bowed, King Henry's soldiers slowly march in struggling limps up the ramp. A live video feed from the top of the ramp projects onto the screen, capturing images of the war-weary soldiers. The King is the last man up the ramp, and he is pictured alone in mid-stride, hesitating by his executed old friend; when Henry exits, his close-up is freeze-framed and the house lights come up to signal the interval
Lambermont fills the production with memorable images. The Boy's defiance of the Eastcheap drunkards is shown in an intense, self-videotaped confession. Amid billowing smoke and the noise of war, the Boy's frightened face fills the upstage screen, and desperation quivers in his voice. During the 3.6 march across the French countryside, images of raindrops in mud are projected on the screen as the King first exhorts, then personally assists, his soldiers in their trek. They march up the ramp, but falter at the image of the hanging tree now projected upstage.
The strolling Chorus, accompanied by the cellist, begins Act Four by walking past crossed battle axes that now line the length of the ramp, and she adjusts the pieces of an elaborate chess game positioned at center stage. Next, the arrogant French ready themselves for war by taking positions along the ramp and removing their blue robes. After the 4.1 images of "a touch of Harry in the night" - with spotlights and flashlights cutting eerie swaths through the darkness - the French preen in 4.2 mirrors as they arm for what they believe will be a slaughter.
The pair of concluding scenes further demonstrates the duality of Henry V, with Abbey's King vicious at Agincourt, leaping from the ramp to throttle the herald Montjoy ("the day is yours"), then charming in his courtly 5.2 wooing of the smitten Kate. Lambermont's closing image of the Agincourt victory, with its singing of "Te Deum" to accompanied by cello, includes the surprise of gentle snowflakes slowly falling down upon the victors.
Political success follows on the heels of military victories, but the supposed happy ending for Henry and Katherine is marred by the downstage remnants of the battlefield dead from Agincourt. Henry lays down his sword and comments that he and Kate are "the makers of manners," but the words are belied by the grim reminders of the prices paid and the questionable reasons for the war. The Chorus' closing comments on the subsequent loss of Henry V's "gains" conclude the play on a sardonic rather than sorrowful note.
Lambermont's production, expertly conceived and well anchored by the handsome and earnest Graham Abbey as the "lovely bully," would be excellent simply in its dark and complex execution. But with the addition of a haunting on-stage cello score and a series of wisely chosen black-and-white images and videos, this Henry V becomes a masterpiece in its extraordinary examination of what this man becomes once crowned a King.
Note: A version of this article was edited and published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Vol.20, No.2, Spring 2002.