Henry V in the park: a timely French-English reconciliation

This production of Henry V is a first for the Company of Fools, trying their hand at one of Shakespeare’s most accurate historical dramas with long monologues, multiple sites, many characters and epic war scenes.

In the first moments, the play is put into perspective for all to see.   “Chorus” presents Shakespeare’s own words as he invites us to imagine the scene, and “gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play”. Thus it clearly presents the characters as  actors who are going to perform an event where our imagination must fill in the gaps.   The  show revolves around actors,  a perfectly functional collection of objects including an empty chest that serves as a walled city, some wooden volumes and royal red curtains set up under the trees, as well as a group of puppets.  It’s all  about creating a play  and since that is the case,  men can play women’s roles as they did in Shakespeare’s time, or women can play men’s roles as they do now in our time. It all fits.

The first thing that struck me was that all 25 characters, and counting, get lost in the crowd.  Given that  Katie Ryerson, Kelly Rigole, Simon  Bradshaw nd Virginia West   ( Margo MacDonald only  plays Henry V)  keep shifting roles as fast as you can blink, one easily loses track of who is who  and where they are supposed to be.  Thus, the best thing is to relax, and try to follow the plot. 

Normally this is what the Fools do:   playful rewrites of Shakespeare that often incorporate parody of his work as well as current references to local culture. In Henry V, there are lots of laughs and monkey business accompanying the events leading up to one of the bloodiest battles of the 100 years’ War, the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, that  slaughter of  thousands of  French soldiers  by weary and downtrodden British troops. The play is also a tribute to King Henry V, his lineage and his controversial claim to the French throne as well as a desire to reconciliate the two countries after the horror is over.

To my mind,  the theatrical  highlight of the show is not winning the battle but precisely that reconciliatory encounter that turns into a comic duo between a nervous Henry V (Margot MacDonald)   and Princess Katherine de Valois, the French King’s daughter destined to be Henry’s wife. Simon Bradshaw as Katherine, steals the show by transforming himself into a cunning, flirtatious, weasel-eyed  little coquette and terrible tease,  allowing just enough of a  glance of his hairy legs  to excite a king who has no idea how to woo a lady.  It is terribly funny and just seems to sum up the spirit of the play,

The 100 years’ war is no longer on our radar today but what is interesting about this play is the French-English confrontation and it seems that director Geoff McBride and his team  have tried to play that up for all its worth and give it a contemporary feel with the actual battle becoming an absurd  combat of tennis balls, thus losing all its historically tragic  significance.

They turn that famous scene with the French lesson into a sexually naughty encounter that only a Katherine with a 5 o’clock shadow could accomplish! . Hidden behind a screen she /he tosses off her/his stockings, puts on a long curly wig and slinks about the stage, conversing with her lady in waiting, Alice, the delightful little puppet.   Alice explains to her lady Katherine, the parts of the body in an  English subverted by a French pronunciation that  Simon Bradshaw , that saucy little Princess  plays to the hilt. Obviously their so called “French” accents in  English are  just  a lot of approximate sounds that are rather silly but   Bradshaw  takes the mix  further afield suggesting words with  double meanings and this coupled with a sleazy body language, not at all shakespearian  produces  unmentionable meanings  that the five  year old audience  members didn’t catch! And probably were not supposed to!

The scenes in the French court brought  King Charles  VI (Virginia West) and the Dauphin  (Katie Ryerson) together as the most obnoxious stereotypes of  fashion obsessed members of the  Famille royale. In their satin sheen jackets and plumed hats they would seem to be more at home on the Champs Élysées than the battle fields of France. .  Prancing about with  fluffy effeminate gestures, they speak in overblown metaphors and poetic exaggeration, a degenerate culture too obsessed with style.  Virginia West and Katie Ryerson captured all that but it was most often overdone with high pitched voices and expansive gestures that soon became too much.

Then we are back in the mud and slop of the battlefield with the English soldiers discussing their problems, the war and everything else. The Company caught the hard earthy humour of those situations, even having the actors change accents so the Welsh the Irish and the Scottish  bands were all represented. The humour did not seem to take a detour from Shakespeare’s  text which is also  full of low-brow comedy of its own. Virginia West was a particularly  perverse  Archbishop of Canterbury hungering to get his hands into a bloody war against the French. She also produced a lusty  Fluellen, the Welsh captain carousing on the battlefied.

Margo MacDonald as King Henry V offered a fine stabilizing, royal presence  with great panache and strength. She had many long heroic monologues  about war and the role of the monarch, his efforts to keep peace and avoid  slaughter but he is also  the one, who  must incite his men to fight by addressing his “ blood brothers”. MacDonald established a kingly figure who  went beyond any gender divide, whose voice resonated above all others, incarnating the portrait of Henry V that the monologues  constructed.  She  elevated the performance to heights that could very well give us some insite into a perfectly  traditional staging.

What did disappear in this production was the  horror of war that underlies Shakespeare’s text; what remained were a few comic skirmishes which where well choregraphed by Craig Shackelton but not particularly noteworthy.  We are left with a sense of reconciliation between the French and the English and  the sense that a great battle has  become the theatrical device for engineering that reconciliation.  We also realize that a play based on so many monologues and long verbal exchanges,  can have moments when the spoken word takes over and creates problems for the rhythm of a potentially  comic performance. That is always a danger with this play and perhaps a problem for any historical play that the Fools might want to undertake in the future.

However, we do appreciate this as a comic encounter between the English and the French that feeds  off present day English/ French tension, ultimately defused at the end. Even if much of  Shakespeare’s text remains, and even if Margo MacDonald shows that she can give much meaning  to Henry’s monologues,  the play no longer belongs to the Bard.   It has become something else.

Thus, Henry V,  as redone by the Company of Fools, had the  young ones in the audience  engrossed the whole time and the adults were obviously intrigued by the whole thing.   As for me,  I found that moments of it were highly amusing.

Henry V  plays in various parks around the city.  This is a show for  the whole family. See full schedule on their site http://fools.ca/shows/upcoming/   Photo by Barbara Gray.

Henry V

by William Shakespeare

A Company of Fools, Torchlight Shakespeare

Directed by  Geoff McBride

Set  Jean Doucet

Costumes  Judy De Boer

Props  Jessica Preece

Fight Choreography  Craig Shackleton

CAST

Thirty six characters  are performed by

Margo MacDonald   who plays  only   Henry V

Simon Bradshaw

Kelly Rigole

Katie Ryerson

Virginia West

and several anonymous puppets with wigs and whatnots