King Henry V

Black Box Theatre, Galway ****

IT HAS been more than a century since a professional production of Shakespeare’s Henry V has played on an Irish stage. To some, that may seem like the consequence of an understandable grudge. Written during England’s war against Spain, while Queen Elizabeth was simultaneously stamping out rebellion in Ireland, Shakespeare’s history play may have a deft scepticism about the ethics of war, but it remains a soaring call to arms: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.” Even in the decades since independence, an Irish audience may find Shakespeare’s charismatic imperialist a more difficult subject to breach.

It takes a company as alert, considered and still gung-ho as Edward Hall’s all-male Propeller group, then, to tease out the play’s more complicated politics without compromising its battling rhetoric. They do this quite wonderfully, in a production full of brawn and brain, without repositioning it as an anti-war play yet still applying cooling ironies for a more suspicious age.

Still, there is a fascinating, nervy tension in this performance, which its sharp-witted performers deftly acknowledge – at one point hilariously. Military uniforms allude more to 20th-century war movies than the Battle of Agincourt, and nationalistic excess tips into jingoistic football chants or a chorus of The Clash’s London Calling.

The idea that war operates under a moral purpose but might have petty origins is there in the play, from Machiavellian clerics who encourage their wastrel king to invade France in order to protect their own finances, to Dugald Bruce-Lockhart’s magnetic Henry being roused from a petal-strewn torpor by a taunt – a gift of tennis balls – from Gunnar Cauthery’s mocking Dauphin. This, Hall makes clear, is a vision of England and the world created for a turbulent time (treachery is mercilessly punished, the king’s integrity never undermined). If the foreigners are written as phonetic caricatures, that is how Hall presents them (we even hear a snippet of the ’Allo ’Allo! theme tune), with the notable exception of Captain Macmorris. The slurring, querulous Irishman who asks, “What ish my nation?” is conveniently excised from the play, in what seems like an apologetic gesture (Welsh and Scottish stereotypes are merrily preserved).

What remains, surprisingly, is a stirring representation of battle and bloodshed, realised with a commandingly rough aesthetic and punctuated with the galvanising power or consoling beauty of Propeller’s extraordinary singing. Even in the rich comedy of Bruce-Lockhart’s wooing scene with Karl Davies’ Catherine (another act of conquest), the emphasis falls on harmony and discord. The next king Henry, the epilogue reminds us, lost everything. In the rhythm and sense Hall’s production brings to the play, there’s a lesson in balance that Shakespeare might have hinted at: Make music, not war.

– Peter Crawley

Until Jul 28