"...magnificent, electric, moving, and explosive."

July 27, 2002 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Theatre can be at its most exciting when a director and leading actor make bold choices that work. In Henry V, director Jonathan Epstein and actor Allyn Burrows have made those choices; the production is both insightful and delightful.

The play can be a problematic one to produce. Audiences come remembering Olivier’s super-patriot king or Branagh’s ironic one. Or, having loved Prince Hal in Henry IV, where as rogue prince he frolicked with Falstaff, they feel they will be unable to identify with a king who lets Falstaff die alone.

Be assured; forget all preconceptions. When the director is as sensitive and dynamic as Epstein and when Henry is played as brilliantly and diversely as Burrows plays him, the play is magnificent, electric, moving and explosive.

Epstein’s “take” on the script works all the way, and the ten actors who people the stage all play with skill, agility and gusto. Each plays one or more named characters; each as well dons a red clown nose and becomes present but nameless and invisible.

While comic characters, with names, appear in the script and in Elizabethan days were considered there to divert the groundlings in the pit, and while they still do so, "clowns” in this play serve a more serious purpose. When donning a red nose, these clowns can be anyone.

Epstein, in the program, describes them as an attempt to illuminate the unlit, give faces to the nameless. Their noses are worn as masks of shame or badges of honor. They do their best but often fail. They suffer. And he concludes, “At one time or other, each of us is the Clown.”

The Founders stage in this production is used dynamically. Actors not only appear on balconies but scale ladders, slide down poles, burrow their way through tunnels, and erupt everywhere. Bishops are eight feet tall, and sword battles are fought on woven steel horses designed and sculpted by Michael Melle.

At times the stage is abuzz with action. At other times it is totally still. A long speech by a single actor may be played without movement at all. The contrast is instinctively right, suiting pace and plot. The “chorus” which in Shakespeare’s script is a monolog delivered by a single actor to set the stage before each act, is broken up, lines taken by various actors and even by Henry himself. This too, works as played.

The plot is quickly summarized. Henry urged by the venal clergy, the discovery of a treacherous friend, and the need to atone for his dead father’s guilt in stealing the throne from Richard II, decides to lead an army to France and reclaim lost lands for England. While in England the common folk take leave of loved ones, in France the Princess starts learning English.

Henry goes; battles ensue. He wins when his men tunnel under the walls at Harfleur, but later at Agincourt, out-numbered five to one, expects defeat, delivers the memorable St. Crispin’s Day speech and unexpectedly wins. Peace is restored and once he woos and wins Katharine, Princess of France the play can end in victory.

As played currently at the Founders, it is gripping. War is filled with pain and death and horror; it also can offer what Yeats would call, “a terrible beauty” and what this production calls “hope.” The horror, the beauty and hope are all present.

The play begins with a hollow man of armor and straw standing downstage center. Henry seems to erupt from it and begins the opening “chorus”. This quintain is back again for the closing of the play. In the beginning knives and swords can pierce it, whirl it; at the end a straw infant, fruit of the union of Katherine and Henry rest in its arms. Through this image, Shakespeare in his King series leads us on to Henry VI. (which one can see afternoons at 5:00 outside in the Rose imprint.)

Allyn Burrows is a Henry you will not be able to forget. He is kingly and compassionate. He can make cruel decisions if he must, but can be shy and playful in wooing a Princess in French. And though he can do nothing about it, he remembers Falstaff. Although he is the play, as Shakespeare intended, he brings all into it. There is a small symbolic moment in which he quietly removes the noses of clowns that tells one a great deal about the thought that went into the developing of this rounded Henry.

The other nine actors all are marvelous as well. Each usually plays a French role as well as an English one and in so doing all are skillful in taking on the new character.

Johnny Lee Davenport has a wonderful voice that always delights. A tiny moment when he takes on the brief role of the Irish MacMorris and its challenge of, “What is my nation?... Who talks to me of my nation?” has special resonance and briefly evokes the ethnic challenge Leopold Bloom faces in Ulysses.(Joyce, that prolific borrower, may indeed have intentionally borrowed it from Shakespeare.)

Jason Asprey is a delightful Welsh Fluellen with a wonderful accent. His comparisons of Henry and Alexander the Great are marvelous as are his defense of the Welsh leek. He is handsome, agile and can be funny or serious as the role demands.

Jonathan Croy can be a feisty French king in a wheelchair or a rogue to out rogue all rogues as Pistol. His comedy in the later is zesty but never over-played. Ariel Bock in a small quiet moment downstage brings the death of Falstaff into the play in a moving way. As a formal, gesturing French messenger, Carolyn Roberts is a gem, adopting pose and tone to her task. She appears at other times elegantly as Queen of France.

Henry David Clark dies bravely, hung before our eyes in a bit of stage magic, and later reappears as an effete Dauphin. Tony Simotes and Michael F. Toomey as Nym and Barolph are villainous enough to have to be executed but fortunately are about to play French roles capably.

Susanna Apgar is a teasing French princess who, having boned up on her French understood much more than she pretends to and is perfectly happy to get her man.

This is a production of which Tina Packer can be proud. Director Epstein and these actors are a part of her theatre family whom over the years she has trained and in whom she has instilled not only skills but great loyalty and a devotion to her dreams for Shakespeare and Company.