Henry V

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 10 March 2022

Kit Harington plays the King with a supporting cast of fourteen taking all the other roles in Max Webster's production of Henry V, designed by Fly Davis. On a bare stage of four marbled tiers or steps, with a featureless metallic wall at the back which occasionally splits apart in the form of a St George's Cross, the career of the hero king from wastrel prince to victorious military leader is played out with sobering attention to the darker side of his progress.

After the famous Prologue apologising for the paucity of stage effects when dealing with such weighty military and political actions, the low expectations of the new king's character are underscored by the interpolation of part of the first tavern scene between Prince Hal and Falstaff from Henry IV Part One, and the crushing rejection of the latter by the former from Henry IV Part Two. Only then are we presented with Hal's full transformation into King Henry as he listens to the Archbishop of Canterbury's interminable lecture about the Salic Law in France (or properly belonging somewhere further east, as the case may be), its tediousness underlined by a confusing Powerpoint presentation projected onto the back wall. The Dauphin's insulting gift of tennis balls does far more to kindle the King's ire and to convince him to invade France to claim his right to the kingdom.

The play veers beween high politics and the less glamorous life of the ordinary soldiers. Indeed, some of the named infantry were once Prince Hal's tavern friends, and two of them come to a bad end, Bardolph in particular singled out for a judicial hanging which the King watches with apparent impassivity. For this production, which is in modern dress, movement director Benoit Swan Pouffer brought in Tom Leigh, a former Royal Marines Commando, to teach the cast basic military drill and to discuss with them the often traumatic impact of combat. The result can be seen in the intimidating manoeuvres on stage, but also in the pained reactions to some events (in particular the order to kill all the French prisoners at Agincourt, which is brutally performed onstage) and in the wild partying following the battle.

All this helps to sharpen the contrast between the high flown rhetoric of the famous speeches, which are wonderfully delivered by Kit Harington, and the sordid reality of close combat. The mutual incomprehension of the two sides (English and French) is emphasised by having the French characters speak French among themselves, with English translations provided on a screen. This cleverly extends the device used in the scene with Princess Katharine as she struggles to learn English, which is often played for laughs. Here, it is not a matter for laughter, and later the Princess has a decidedly unromantic encounter with the King whose plain-speaking wooing is not the bumbling effort of a stranger to flirting (as he suggests), but rather nothing more than a steely determination to consolidate a business deal no matter what the Princess thinks.

Indeed several scenes often used to lighten the tone here receive a more sober and disturbing turn. Captain Fluellen, usually portrayed as an amusing pedant, is here more of an obsessive, and his baiting of Pistol, forcing him to eat a leek, is is an exercise in sadistic bullying. Luckily for the hapless soldier Williams, who had unwittingly wagered to box the King's ear (not knowing who he was talking to before the battle), the scene in which the King asks Fluellen to bear the exchanged glove was omitted: this Fluellen would probably have shot Williams out of hand. Instead the King and Williams resolve the matter directly without the intervening 'joke'. Everyone is clearly very skittish after the victory; the atmosphere is credibly febrile and the King himself erupts in brittle laughter when he is presented with the account of the slain.

It was inevitable that the play would resonate with the current crisis in Ukraine. 'Once more unto the breach' is the rallying cry of a leader besieging an enemy town, and the King's later threats to the governor of Harfleur are a chilling reminder of what a victorious army can do to a town that did not surrender. It is not possible in view of the shelled urban areas in Ukraine to shrug this off as an example of medieval babarity which the modern world has outgrown. By contrast the great St Crispin's Day speech is the exhortaton of a leader in the face of overwhelming odds (a fact perhaps obscured by the unexpected outcome of the Agincourt battle). This too has its parallel in the events unfolding; the outcome is not yet known. 

In frank acknowledgement of the uneasy parallels between art and life, Kit Harington interrupted the audience applause at the end of the play to explain that there would be a retiring collection for the Red Cross, to which we were invited to contribute. It was generously supported.

Whodunnit [Unrehearsed] 2

by Jez Bond and Mark Cameron

seen at the Park Theatre, Finsbury Park on 8 March 2022 

A disparate group of people forced to be together while on a cruise on the Nile; a time (the 1930s) when social status can be marked by accent and preoccupation; the interruption of pleasure by the discovery of a body; a confused detective brought in to solve the mystery: hasn't all this sort of thing been done before? Don't the stereotypes of a southern belle with a daughter who has ambitions on the stage, a toff from Eton, a European who could be a bounder, a nun who can send Morse code with a searchlight, and a deckhand with a past, just ring bells of alarm?

Yes, it has been done, and yes the bells do ring, but the result in this engaging play is a masterpiece of comedy, ranging from social satire to pantomime gags with a healthy dose of vertiginous unpredictability. For the major conceit of the production is that at each performance someone from a roll call of actors and entertainers will be the detective, without prior knowledge of the script. He or she is fed lnes through an earpiece with only minimal, or even positively misleading, clues as to who should be addressed or how the plot is developing. The permanent cast has to cope with the repercussionss of the detective's confusion while gently nudging him or her to do more or less the right thing at the right time.

At the performance I attended Detective Adam Hills took on the case with a mixture of glee and trepidation. The set up was explained to him and to the audience before the play started, and the lucky member of the audience whose name was picked from a ballot to take a minor role in the second half was identified. Then the fun began, and lasted for the duration. It proved impossible for even the experienced cast to keep straight faces throughout, and Adam Hills rose to the occasion with great flair and good humour, even responding to the demand to perform a Music Hall turn with a near flawless recitation of Banjo Paterson's poem 'Clancy of the Overflow'. Though he had carefully explained that the poem was written well before the 1930s, he inadvertently said 'Facebook' rather than 'cashbook' at one point, an anachronism too far which merely added to the chaos.

Jez Bond (also the director) and Mark Cameron (also Giovanni Scaletti the European bounder) have created a wonderful entertainment designed as a fundraising project for the theatre they love, with support from Caroline Deverill as Mrs Constance Coddle, Aisha Numah as her daughter Molly (yes, the puns were that bad), Adam Samuel-Bal as Jasper Jarvis whose excuse and explanation for everything was that he had been at Eton, Lewis Bruniges as Jack Jones the deckhand and Molly Barton as the semaphoring nun. Some degree of control was provided by the line feeders Natasha Colenso and Robert Blackwood. The various detectives provide their services without payment.

In a Q&A session after the show it was revealed that this was indeed the second Whodunnit, and a third is in the making. The authors have clearly learned how to fine-tune their material, while Adam Hills admitted that he had taken part in the first play so he knew that the best way to deal with the challenge was to cede all control to the cast and crew and simply enjoy himself. Luckily he knew Paterson's poem very well. Sometimes a Q&A session can detract from the magic, but on this occasion it served only to enhance it.

The Chairs

by Eugène Ionesco

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 2 March 2022

Omar Elerian directs his own adapted translation of Ionesco's 1952 play Les Chaises, in which an Old Man (Marcello Magni) and his wife (Kathryn Hunter) prepare for the arrival of a Speaker (Toby Sedgwick) who is to articulate the Old Man's important message to a specially invited audience. As more and more guests arrive the Old Man and the Old Woman become involved in arcane conversations while trying to set out enough chairs to seat everybody before the Speaker himself arrives.

The absurdist element to this play is that none of the guests is visible, so all the remarks they might be making have to be inferred from the reactions and replies of the old couple. Their conversation with each other mixes banality, exasperation and affection, and the situation veers between farce and total incomprehension. The Speaker, when he finally arrives, cannot speak.

In this production, designed by Cécile Trémolières and Naomi Kuyck-Cohen, the stage is initially masked by draped light blue curtains, which when opened reveal a space also hung with swaggd material. It gives the effect of a down-at-heel old-fashioned proscenium stage, suitable perhaps for the slightly hysterical music-hall turns of the elderly couple. A doorbell sounds noisily to announce the arrival of guests, but sometimes it is on the left and somethimes on the right. Neither the Old Man nor the Old Woman seems at all perplexed by this anomaly.

Marcello Magni and Kathryn Hunter (husband and wife in real life also) are masters at the art of conveying absolute attention to their predicament in a double act that holds the audience's attention through all the grotesquerie, giving hints of the tragedy that lies behind their evident loneliness and their desperate attempts to allay it. He is dressed smartly in intention, but somewhat dishevelled, while she looks like an overgrown and at times disturbingly wizened child. As these two actors have long been associated with the Complicité tradition there are some wonderful sight gags with imaginary and real props throughout the performance.

The adaptation departs in some significant respects from the original. It begins with an overheard conversation in which Magni is apparently suffering from stage fright and refusing to go on. It ends with a long rambling disquisition by Toby Sedgwick in his own persona on the playwright's intentions, and the way they have been subverted by the 'accident' of his being mistaken as one of the late arriving guests, rather than as the Speaker himself. And in the middle of the performance the fourth wall is deliberately broken as two members of the audience are invited onto the stage to help greet the guests. There is of course much fun to be had with this ploy, since the Old Man can confidently reprimand one of these helpers for tripping over a guest, or for holding out a hand to someone who is plainly not there.

The final monologue defuses the manic energy of what has gone before, but it was a great opportunity to see one of the defining works of Absurdist drama revived by a stellar double act.