Conquests and coffins

One of the few certainties about Henry V is that every performance is a political act, or will certainly be read as such. On BBC2’s Newsnight Review the other day, Michael Gove wondered whether there’d been a single production since Olivier’s triumphalist film of 1944 that hadn’t been anti-war, anti-patriotic and anti-heroic. Although that isn’t totally true (see Emma Smith’s superb 2002 CUP edition of the play), it’s near the mark. Famously, or perhaps infamously, Michael Bogdanov’s 1980s version had the English soldiers embark for France under a banner inscribed ‘F**k the Frogs’ and singing ‘’Ere we go, ’ere we go, ’ere we go again’. Henry (Michael Pennington) was a warmongering criminal and not the saviour of his nation. Little wonder that the play has hardly ever been given in France, and that a brave performance at Avignon in 1999 was howled off the stage. Of all Shakespeare’s plays, this alone has been disregarded almost everywhere on the Continent, even in the long history of Germany’s adulation of the Bard.

The day on which the tiara’d and bespectacled Queen sat on her throne to open Parliament before setting off to open the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras also just happened to be the same one on which Michael Boyd unveiled his new Henry V at Stratford. What’s significant about his take on the play is that his politics are more or less those of the inscrutable author himself. The Francophobia was simply a given in the London of 1599. There’s precious little to be done about it. More interesting and to the point is that in itself the play is neither unequivocally ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, nor a tract against the folly of jingoism and war, but sits somewhere between the two.