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The Chorus 
 
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Penny Downie Steeped in History
 
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Penny Downie Bloodbath
 
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Diary Chorus
 

 
 

The Chorus

The Chorus is a defining role in Henry V . The Chorus sets the scene, and moves the action forward. Director Nicholas Hytner decided to cast against stereotype and, in an overwhelmingly male play, have a woman, Penny Downie, play the part.

"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.

 

From the National Theatre
Henry V
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People
Penny_Downie Penny Downie
Actor
Nicholas_Hytner Nicholas Hytner
Director
Issues
England At War
Connections: The King | Shadows of War | Playing Soldiers
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