"I felt a female presence in a brutally male play would be a way of theatricalizing the dialectics between rhetoric and reality." Says Director Nicholas Hytner, "The Chorus tells us, for instance, that we're going to see Henry moving from tent to tent raising the spirits when, in fact, he stirs up nothing but trouble". But what kind of woman? The original conception, taking a cue from contemporary events was to portray her as a gung-ho Fox News kind of war reporter, a cheerleader who sees Henry as an heroic wartime leader. But Penny Downie says, they soon found that this would not work. Instead the Chorus became a woman
steeped in history with a romantic view of Henry. Gradually however, as the
Rehearsal Diary explains, her commentary came to seem an ironic counterpoint. The action of the play as directed by Nicholas Hytner was designed to explore that ironic distance between the golden rhetoric the Chorus builds up and the grubby reality of some of Henry's actions. The play shows a flawed King, one who, for example, breaks one of the key rules of chivalry by ordering the killing of his prisoners. He is not the "war-like Harry" whom the Chorus asked the audience to compares to Mars, the God of war, he is a man, as other men are. By the epilogue the Chorus is openly questioning Henry’s legacy and the
bloodbath that ensued.