adapted by Edward Hall and Roger Warren
Associate Director Paul Hart
Production Manager Nick Ferguson
Costume supervisor Hannah Lobelson
Company Manager Nick Chesterfield
Stage Manager Laura Routledge
Deputy Stage Manager Eleanor Randall
Assistant Stage Manager Janine Bardsley
Wardrobe Mistress Bridget Fell
Executive Producer Caro MacKay
Production Photographer Manuel Harlan
Find out more about Propeller at www.propeller.org.uk.
Henry V was subsequently performed at:
Theatre Royal, Brighton
Milton Keynes Theatre
Festival Temporada Alta, Girona, Spain
Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham
The Lowry, Salford
Perth International Arts Festival, Australia
New Zealand International Arts Festival
Rose Theatre, Kingston
Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury
Watermill Theatre, Newbury
Theatre Royal, Newcastle
The Belgrade Theatre, Coventry
Theatre Royal, Norwich
Theatre Royal, Plymouth
National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing
Lyceum Theatre, Shanghai
Globe Theatre, Neuss, Germany
Hampstead Theatre, London
Galway Arts Festival
Propeller
Propeller is a theatre company inspired by Jill Fraser, which began life at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury, Berkshire in 1995. Since then we have been touring Shakespeare all over the world and have now grown in scale whilst still managing to retain the close knit family feel that has always been such an important part of our work. We like to mix a rigorous approach to the text with a modern physical aesthetic. We have been influenced by mask, animation, classic and contemporary film and music from all ages.
Propeller always places the actor at the centre of the story making process, which is exactly how it was in Shakespeare’s day. The Elizabethans were denied the modern luxuries of elaborate sets and lighting, instead relying on the skills of the actors themselves to help imagine the plays on stage in every way they could. And so it is with us. A Propeller actor is as likely to find himself shifting scenery, singing or playing rock and roll guitar, as he is to be playing his part on stage in a scene. Over the years, actors with many different skills have passed through the company, from tap dancing champions to highly skilled singers and musicians. Our work has become more and more intricate, needing choreography, musical arrangements and fight direction. At no time have we ever used an outside choreographer or composer to help us with this work. It is all generated from within the company, giving them true ownership of the work they are creating. These editions of some of the texts we have performed are designed to give the reader an idea of how we approached each production from text choices down to doubling schemes, design and music.
Edward Hall
Legend and Reality in Henry V
By the time Shakespeare wrote Henry V in 1599, his central character was already half-submerged in legend: the prodigal prince who seemed miraculously transformed into the heroic warrior-king who won the Battle of Agincourt. The story was familiar from the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed, but also from more popular sources, such as ballads and the drama. There had been at least two plays (probably more) about Henry V before Shakespeare’s. Did theatregoers at the newly constructed Globe in 1599 — when Henry V may have been the opening production — find a picture of Henry V similar to the one with which they were familiar? To some extent they did. The Chorus has some of Shakespeare’s most magnificent, eloquent verse; if you want a picture of the legendary hero-king, here it is; but the Chorus’s idealistic view is constantly juxtaposed with scenes of political and psychological realism — and from the very start.
After the Chorus’s opening panegyric, what does the audience see? Not the King in glory, but two ecclesiastical politicians out to defeat a possible attack on church finances by offering Henry a bribe to invade France. It is important to stress that the effect is not wholly ironic or cynical: Henry is not easily bought. He interrupts the Archbishop’s mumbo-jumbo about the Salic law with the penetrating single-line enquiry: ‘May I with right and conscience make this claim?’ Once reassured, he calls the French ambassador, who presents him with the Dauphin’s present of tennis balls and the mocking message that he ‘cannot revel into dukedoms here’. Henry points out that the Dauphin, in deriding ‘our wilder days’, has not noticed ‘what use we made of them’ — that is, acquiring the common touch that will prove so useful with his soldiers, especially at Agincourt. His speech then builds to an elaborate threat to revenge the Dauphin’s insults by invading France: he makes it appear that the invasion is the result of the Dauphin’s mockery, whereas he has already taken the decision to invade. This mental habit of taking a decision and then finding a reason for it is characteristic of the King’s mental processes.
Something similar occurs at the siege of Harfleur. At first, in his exhortation to his troops (‘Once more unto the breach’), he sounds like the heroic warrior-king whom the Chorus describes. But his threat to the inhabitants of Harfleur takes on quite a different tone. In the midst of vividly evoking the rape and pillage with which he threatens them, he asks: ‘What is’t to me, when you yourselves are cause?’ If they suffer from the siege, they have only themselves to blame. So with the lack of mercy shown to the three conspirators. In a characteristic cat-and-mouse game, Henry invites them to recommend mercy to another offender. They don’t, and so when they themselves plead for mercy, he can reply: ‘The mercy that was quick in us but late/By your own counsel is suppressed and killed.’ As at Harfleur, as with the Dauphin’s tennis balls, he passes the buck for tough decisions on to others; it is their responsibility, not his.
This question of a King’s responsibilities or otherwise comes to the fore in the great central scene of the play, the night before Agincourt. Introducing it, the Chorus is at its most eloquent in describing the King’s ‘largess universal, like the sun’, so that his soldiers see ‘a little touch of Harry in the night’. The audience, however, sees something more complicated. An argument breaks out between the soldier Williams and the disguised Henry about the extent to which the King is responsible for his soldiers, and for their souls. Williams says: ‘If these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it.’ Henry concludes that ‘every subject’s duty is the King’s, but every subject’s soul is his own’. This does not quite answer the question of his responsibility,
