Images Of War

The challenge for Director Nicholas Hytner and Designer Tim Hatley was to convey the heroics and the horrors of war, on the wide-open space of the Olivier stage. Their approach was to keep the set as bare and simple as possible, and, taking their cue from the words of the Chorus in the Prologue, leave it to the audience to: "Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts".

As a modern dress production, using today’s army forage gear, weapons and even a real jeep on stage, there were resonances with the images in the media as Britain plunged into the war in Iraq. The Rehearsal Diary tells how one image came straight out of the headlines: the French prisoners of war are brought on with canvas bags over their heads, a picture of pathos and powerlessness copied from news photographs of captured Iraqi prisoners.

But part of the enduring strength of Henry V is that it’s the language that most powerfully conveys the imagery of war. We do see battle scenes on stage, but what we imagine is far worse than what we see. For instance when Adrian Lester, as Henry in a cold fury threatens the besieged citizens of Harfleur :

"The gates of mercy shall be all shut up, And the flesh'd soldier, rough and hard of heart, In liberty of bloody hand shall range With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants."

Another, more low-key occasion, is on the eve of the battle of Agincourt when David Kennedy as the soldier Michael Williams, muses on the next day. He summons up a horrifying vision of: "all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off."

Shakespeare is equally successful at stirring up a heroic, even thrilling, image of men at war, nowhere more successfully than in Henry's speech " legs and arms ", rousing his exhausted and demoralised force to return to the fight at Harfleur.

Nor does he neglect the imagery of the sorrows of war. We are familiar to the point of sometimes overlooking the war memorials of Britain, such as the Royal Artillery Memorial in London. This production shows us a poignant image of the human cost, as Peter Blythe as Exeter, conveys to Henry the news of the deaths of two of the King’s closest friends, the Duke of York and the Earl of Suffolk.