The profession has bewailed the dearth of good female roles in Shakespeare for centuries. So what do you do about it? Simply forget gender and cast women in men’s roles.
Enter Michelle Terry as a very powerful Henry once you see past her diminutive stature. At the beginning, during the Archbishop’s Sir Humphrey-style attempts to manipulate him, Terry’s boyish, nervous, troubled, out of his depth young king works his fingers nervously. She allows him to get really angry on receiving the Dauphin’s tennis balls and thereafter presents a king growing visibly into leadership, sometimes sardonic and sometimes immovably resolute – at the sentencing to death of first Scroop and later Bardolph. She finds plenty of tension before the battle too in a king who is trying desperately to appear confident while privately beset by fears and worries. And when she gets to the wooing scene at the end of the play, Terry is gruff, mannish, absurd and funny. It’s a terrific performance and she rolls the verse with crystalline clarity.
Other traditionally male roles, played effectively by women include Charlotte Cornwell as a warm-voiced, ever attentive Chorus, seated throughout at the stage side like a director. Mountjoy is interestingly played by Jessica Regan while Catrin Aaron’s Fluellen is feistily convincing. It cuts both ways too because male Ben Wiggins plays a very feminine Katharine
The piece is spare and crisp, shorn of most of the subplots. The offstage death of Falstaff, the full treatment of the three conspirators, the feud between Fluellen and Pistol have all gone which makes for direct story telling.
Then there’s the Taiko style rhythmic choral drumming, dazzling lights and line fighting in silhouette which make for stylised battle scenes as effective as I’ve ever seen them staged. Add to that soldiers running round the auditorium and the siege of Harfleur encompassing the entire space immersively and you’re in a pretty memorable Henry V.
Reviewed by Susan Elkin