Review: Henry V, Theatre Delicatessen

Written for Culture Wars

“On, on you noblest English,” bellowed Brian Blessed two years ago, paid by the BBC to stoke the fires of patriotism during the last World Cup. With England’s footballers needing a win against Slovenia to make it through the group stages, it was to Henry V they turned: “Cry God for Fabio, England and St George.”

Roland Smith might go easier on the patriotism, but he wants us to see the play in similarly upstanding terms. His immersive production – much more of which later – switches the Hundred Years War for the Falklands, and emphasises the dignity and selflessness of fighting for a noble cause throughout. From Philip Desmeules’s Henry down, the British are always pristinely turned out, as if ready to parade on the banks of the Somme should it be required.

There are two fundamental problems with this. First, the Falklands and 14th Century France are very different situations and it looks rather perverse to equate them. In one, Britain is defending its territory. In the other, it is seeking to expand it. Harder to overlook, post-Afghanistan, post-Iraq, is Henry’s rejoicing at the discrepancy between ‘their’ dead and ‘ours’: some 10,000 to 520. That Smith can maintain the nobility of any such lopsided conflict today is faintly gobsmacking. This is a military leader that directly orders every soldier in his command to kill his prisoners.

Smith gives us not war, but a childhood dream of it, free from horrors, fear and even death. He shows us commanders and vigilantes, goodies and baddies, and, in the process, almost entirely forgets about the common soldier. Sure, the play focuses on various Earls and Dukes, but there are more clergymen here than there are non-RP squaddies. Pistol and Bardolph are the only examples and the latter – adding a extra, uninterrogated layer to the 1980’s dramaturgy – speaks in a thick Northern Irish accent.

This becomes a story of tacticians, not soldiers; of warcraft, not war itself. It’s rather like watching a CCF training exercise on the fields of some public school and, when Desmeules’s Henry cries, “The game’s afoot,” he could be ordering his employees into a paintballing arena.

This is a problem of performance register; a classic case of ill-thought immersive theatre. Smith and his designer Katharine Heath place us in an impressive barracks setting, perched on sandbags, and then use it as an empty space stage, taking us into the battlefield itself. It defeats the object and uses design as mere frame. Every couple of minutes, one of three stock explosion noises sounds behind us with all the artifice of a bird scarer. It’s a long, long way to Islas Malvinas.

Nor can this afford a cast that recites before it attempts to communicate. Only Liam Smith (Pistol) speaks with enough irreverence to actually convey meaning; breaking rhythm and flow for sense and character. The rest is pickled poetry, worthy of any school declamation trophy, but useless when it comes to drama. “The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.”

Played onstage we might have accepted all these conventions that counteract theatre’s inevitable shortcomings; here, however, the same performances look all the more contrived and, given the subject matter, unacceptably naïve and crass.

Photograph: Lorna Palmer