Ever since Shakespeare wrote Henry V people have claimed the central character as the model English leader and hero. Perhaps it's the backs-to-the-wall story of how the English army, exhausted, sick, and far from home managed, against all the odds, to defeat a numerically superior enemy that appeals. Perhaps it's the remarkable nature of military victory at relatively little cost (to Henry's army). Or, maybe, the lasting appeal of the play lies in the extraordinary power that Henry has over others, power that is exercised not only through his rank and position, but because of what he says: his rhetoric of persuasion. This is seen to best effect in this modern dress production, as Adrian Lester as Henry urges his shattered troops "
once more into the breach ", Henry is a supreme politician, a manager of people, and leader, someone who can use words as weapons of mass destruction.
Whatever the appeal, the play has certainly been used as a propaganda weapon at times of national crisis. No more so than in 1944, when Britain was at war with Germany, and Winston Churchill commissioned
Laurence Olivier's Henry V . Nicholas Hytner's new production at the National in 2003 was rehearsed and staged at a time when once again
England was at war , this time in Iraq.
Actor Penny Downie, who plays the Chorus, also talks of the
impact of war on the production. Hytner's reading focuses on a more complex and human Henry V than Olivier, with a darker side, capable of ordering the killing of prisoners of war, and threatening the mayor and the citizens of the
besieged Harfleur with terrible retribution if they do not surrender.