Henry W

If you care about homegrown theatre, Friday was a great day on the HSU campus. In addition to ongoing rehearsals in the Van Duzer for the HSU Theatre/Music production of Urinetown: The Musical, opening this coming Thursday, and production meetings elsewhere on campus for the next HSU show, Relative Captivity by Margaret Thomas Kelso, there were two shows in Gist Hall Theatre--a matinee and the evening performance of North Coast Prep's Mortal Men, Mortal Men, and in the Studio Theatre, an evening performance of My Name is Rachel Corrie, an independent production.

I saw Mortal Men, Mortal Men that evening--it was kind of another opening night for the production, as major roles were rotated for the first time. Suzi Bhakti was an energetic Prince Hal, with fire in her eyes, and Jessica Knapp a stately King Henry IV. (Jeffrey Venturino and Connor Alston plays those roles on alternate nights.) I believe the Hotspur I saw as Keenan Hilton (alternating with Reed Benoit)--he was fiery and mercurial, as that character should be.

The play is, as previously indicated, Jean Bazemore's adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry IV and V plays. The first act covered both parts of Henry IV, though with emphasis on the first part, and the shorter second act zipped through Henry V. Because these productions have an educational function first (this one performed by freshmen and sophomores), the adaptations favor getting as many roles as possible on stage. But the emphasis was also on the costs of wars and their often dubious justifications, rather than the putative glory. So key moments were Falstaff's speech on honor ( "What is honor? A word. What is that word honor? Air.") delivered with intelligent and effective subtlety by Alexander Johnson (unless it was Jesse Drucker), and in particular, a moment not normally emphasized but given a riveting reading by Dillon Arevalo: as Williams, one of the common soldiers the disguised Henry V talks with on the eve of battle. Williams tells Henry "But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day..."

Gerald Beck's set of slanting platforms, the excellent costumes, the live student band, and the staging by director Jean Bazemore and Assistant Director Gretha Omey (who directed Henry IV Part 1 at North Coast Rep) provided these students superior support. I am impressed each time with their vocal performances in particular--they all speak clearly, within the range that's best heard from the stage, and in this case they speak Shakespeare's lines intelligently and expressively. There are more performances Saturday and Sunday evening at 7:30.

Henry V is one of the more familiar of Shakespeare's history plays mostly because of two movie versions. Laurence Olivier's portrayed Henry V as a hero forging a nation from nobles and common people with their own local and personal concerns, and rallying them in battle. The film was made in large part to rally England to fight the Nazis in World War II. Parts of the play that cast Hal in less than an heroic light were excised or downplayed (with the editing help of Winston Churchill.)

Then at the end of the 1980s, Kenneth Branagh portrayed Henry V as more introspective and doubting, but finally, also as a hero. With battle scenes that owe more to Orson Welles' The Chimes of Midnight (which centered on Falstaff in the action of the Henry IV and V plays) than to Olivier's version, the hellishness of war was better portrayed, but Henry's cause again justified.

Was his cause just? There's plenty in the plays to suggest otherwise. There's treachery--messages not conveyed, etc--and bad judgment (Hotspur, for example) and the supposed justification by the Archbishop of Canterbury (played as a pious warmonger in the NC Prep version), but there's also the clear motive from Henry IV to V that the best way to unify the nation and avoid civil war is to pick a foreign enemy, demonize it and rally the nation. Henry IV wanted to do that by means of the Crusades, while Henry V picked France. The result was more than 10,000 dead, Henry got little more than he was offered before the battle, and France and England were at war again within another generation.

Olivier and Branagh both directed and starred in their versions, so while they staged the movies visually, it seems they interpreted the character of Hal as actors, giving themselves strong parts to play. Others aren't so kind to Hal or the reasons for his war. Some critics see Shakespeare's Hal as an empty suit of armor, capable of charming anyone and playing any part, but without a moral center.

So it seems to me it would be fascinating to do Henry V as a kind of George W. Bush--a man with a complicated relationship to his father, the President, with a youthful record of carousing and avoiding responsibilities, whose main gift seems to be projecting an image of leadership. Who then uses rhetoric to unify a nation in a war that is more disastrous than dubious, and who even pretends to go down among the people, although his minions carefully make sure he doesn't hear anyone as forthright as Williams. The motives of the Iraq war can be seen as similiar, although the nation was unified for perhaps even less justifiable reasons. And in this war, the putative king has a very heavy reckoning.