Adrian Lester on Henry V Read online

  Adrian Lester

  on

  Henry V

  Taken from

  SHAKESPEARE ON STAGE

  Thirteen Leading Actors on Thirteen Key Roles

  by Julian Curry

  NICK HERN BOOKS

  London

  www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

  Contents

  Production Information

  Adrian Lester on Henry V

  Other Interviews Available

  About the Author

  Copyright Information

  Adrian Lester

  on

  Henry V

  Henry V (1599)

  National Theatre

  Opened at the Olivier Theatre, London on 13 May 2003

  Directed by Nicholas Hytner

  Designed by Tim Hatley

  With Peter Blythe as Exeter, Robert Blythe as Fluellen, Penny Downie as the Chorus, Ian Hogg as the King of France, Félicité du Jeu as Princess Katherine, and Adam Levy as the Dauphin

  The play covers events surrounding King Henry V’s victory over France at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. It is the fourth in Shakespeare’s cycle of eight history plays spanning the Wars of the Roses. A tradition holds that Henry V inaugurated the newly built Globe Theatre in 1599 – hence the ‘wooden O’ mentioned in the opening Chorus.

  Shakespeare had already introduced Henry V in his Henry IV plays as Prince Hal, the freewheeling teenager who lived it up with Falstaff’s gang in the tavern at Eastcheap. Since then, following his painful rejection of Falstaff at the end of Henry IV, Part 2, Henry has matured almost beyond recognition. He now has a pragmatism, focus and charisma rarely glimpsed before. As King he shows great resolve, and at times an unscrupulous determination to achieve his ends. He displays brilliant rhetorical skills, which he employs in a variety of different modes. He terrifies the Governor of Harfleur into surrender with threats of carnage, while contriving to foist responsibility onto him should the butchery actually take place. He is passionate and inspiring to his outnumbered soldiers before battle. And in Act 5 we see him charm the French Princess Katherine into marriage. A king for all seasons.

  The play’s attitude to warfare has been variously interpreted. On the one hand as a piece of tub-thumping patriotism, a celebration of English valour leading to a miraculous triumph. In Shakespeare’s time it would have reflected nationalistic pride at recent conquests in Spain and Ireland. The most stirring passages have been widely adopted. Henry V is a favourite of politicians, and an urgent rallying cry is often referred to as a ‘St Crispin’s Day Speech’. It has been quoted, adapted and parodied on numerous occasions. Conversely, however, Henry V can be seen as an anti-war allegory. The play pulls no punches in depicting the savagery of conflict. In the twenty-first century, many people are made uncomfortable by a celebration of martial glory. Henry is at times devious, seemingly sincere but willing to resort to any form of compulsion and deceit in order to achieve his objectives. And his constant invoking of God can seem disingenuous. The play has the capacity, in common with many great works of art, to be understood and interpreted in radically different ways.

  I’d never met Adrian Lester before, and sad to say, I didn’t see him play Henry V, so had to rely on his excellent reviews. But I was very well aware of his talent and remarkable versatility. If in doubt, talk to anyone who saw him play Rosalind in Cheek by Jowl’s all-male As You Like It in the 1990s. In terms of the demands made of an actor, there can’t be many characters further from Henry V. I was especially pleased when he agreed to discuss Henry V in view of the production’s strong contemporary resonances, being played in modern dress at the time of the invasion of Iraq. We met in February 2009 for lunch at a restaurant near his home in Dulwich, and he was generous with his time. We talked before the food arrived and again afterwards, and went on until interrupted by a call from his wife to remind him that he was late at home for babysitting duty.

  Julian Curry: You played the lead in what was described as an ‘urgently topical’ production of Henry V, at the time of the invasion of Iraq. Here’s part of a review: ‘This production will make you think deeply and disturbingly about the nature of war, of war leadership, with a shocking portrait of what war does to the souls of those engaged in it. It’s about national pride and the damage done to a politician’s soul in pursuing it.’ Does that ring a bell with you?

  Adrian Lester: Yes, it does. I think the situation we found ourselves in as a country, at the time we did the play, helped to scrape off a kind of romantic veneer that the play can sometimes have. Performances can get lost in poetry and the beauty of the language. The deeper and uglier the emotions involved in any of Shakespeare’s plays, I think, the more vibrant the production will be. I have to admit that before we started work on it, I had a slightly removed sense of Henry V. I felt that it was about the higher end of human thought and endeavour, bravery and patriotism. But when we put the play on its feet in that particular climate, we saw that there was so much more in there.

  For many people, Olivier’s film is the iconic Henry V. He made it in 1944 when heroes were hot and the validity of war was not an issue, and Churchill was Prime Minister. But by the time you played the part sixty years later, heroes were no longer fashionable, the war in Iraq was widely thought to be unjustified, and Tony Blair was Prime Minister. Each production reflected its time, but each was only partially true to Shakespeare’s text. Olivier expurgated the most gruesome aspects of war, but Nick Hytner maybe overemphasised them.

  I don’t think so. We were very careful not to use the play to make a political statement. We wanted to make sure that it correctly reflected what we knew of modern-day politics. In the opening scene where Henry asks the Archbishop to make a case for war [1.2], there’s the understanding that if he does not make it convincing, Henry will take the money he needs from the Church. Once you put that in a Cabinet setting, with suits, ties, glasses of water, files and laptops, people thought we were being cynical. But actually it’s exactly the situation that Shakespeare created, and it’s one that people felt they were watching on BBC News 24. We were being told we have to go to war, and these are the reasons. But people were thinking ‘We’re not being given the whole story here, there’s something else happening.’

  So if I asked if you were an anti-hero, you’d say no, would you?

  Some people felt that Henry was still heroic because the country comes before the individual, the public good comes before considerations of whether he as a leader can sleep at night.

  You’re making him sound a more selfless person than he sometimes seems.

  Sometimes, yes.

  He’s worried about his grave having a ‘tongueless mouth’, isn’t he, not even having ‘a waxen epitaph’. He’s concerned about his own legacy.

  Well, there was a reflection of that in ‘History will be my judge’, that Blair kept saying. And again, everyone went ‘Whoo, you’re being cynical.’ But no, Shakespeare wrote it.

  I have the impression that it was a brilliantly powerful account of the play, but some people felt it was not sufficiently equivocal.

  Maybe they did. But we felt we were riding the middle ground. We were trying to be quite exact, with the information we have now on the conditions and the psychological effects of war. We had a paratrooper and an ex-SAS sergeant who did drill with us, and taught us how to run and fall and use weaponry, look like soldiers. These guys described how, in the middle of battle when bombs have fallen and fires are burning, you have to navigate through dust and smoke, with this very strange orange light being your guide. It’s impossible to see, there’s the smell of burning wood or flesh, and it’s completely disorientating. Nick wanted to reflect that. A lot of dry ice was used. We had speakers around the auditorium, under seats and behind the public, so that when bombs went off we could turn up the volume and say ‘Look, it is this loud.’

  So the audience really felt they were in the middle of it.

  The earth moves when ordnance goes up. It’s terrifying. When we think of people suffering from the psychological effects of war, it’s hard to imagine the noise, eardrums popping, the sting of heat. You can’t see properly. A commander is shouting out commands: ‘Drop!’, ‘To the left!’, ‘Move forward, GO NOW!’ That’s all you have to hold on to. We tried to represent that. We tried to say ‘Listen, this is how difficult it gets. It’s not all clean.’

  The setting was completely modern. Tell me about it.

  We used videos.

  For what?

  We found two particular moments where Henry seemed to be addressing the public at large. We had those up on a big screen, filmed with a hand-held camera.

  You were performing live and being seen on-screen at the same time?

  At various moments. You got strong resonances of the situation in Iraq, where commanders in full fatigues would talk on camera: ‘We’ve taken this section here and we’re about to move on to such-and-such.’ But every time we did that, people said we were being opportunistic, exploiting the current climate.

  Isn’t that what putting on a play’s about?

  Well, yeah. But when Nick first decided to do Henry V, he didn’t know whether it would be a modern or a classic production. He chose the play because it had never been done at the National. It was his first show as Artistic Director. As he started talking to me about it, the situation in Iraq began to heat up. But we still didn’t know if we were going to war or not.

  What stage was the build-up to war in Iraq when you started rehearsal? r />
  At that stage the invasion was going ahead. It had just started. But at the time of casting, we didn’t know. Then as the situation escalated he said ‘Because of all the talk of soldiers preparing themselves, and the weapons inspectors going in and all of that, I don’t think we can get away with a classic production set in the past. I think we have to do a modern production.’

  You were overtaken by events.

  Suddenly the country went to war, as we were in rehearsal. We responded to the situation.

  Can you say something about Nick Hytner’s rehearsal methods?

  Straight up on its feet. Books in hand.

  He’s not a sitter-around and talker.

  We had a read-through as usual. And he talked a bit about acting Shakespeare, what he didn’t like, what he thought was ‘dead’ Shakespeare. He didn’t want to see that.

  What was the result?

  The result was that everyone freed up completely. At the beginning of rehearsal actors tend to worry whether their ideas about character and performance will fit in with the director’s, so that everything gels and they won’t be working at odds with each other. So they look to the director for the direction the play’s going in, which way they are pointing. Once they know that, all these experienced actors just take off. Nick stood up and said he wanted the Shakespeare to sound like modern language, like squaddies and officers on a battlefield, but without pausing and going ‘um’ and ‘ah’ in between, or saying ‘fuck’ and all the rest of it.

  So you didn’t worry a lot about the blank verse.

  We didn’t worry that every syllable was absolutely correct. But there were times when he said ‘No, no, no. Come on, stick to the metre here, make sure you honour the text.’

  How much did you refer backwards in your thinking about King Henry, in the sense of him being a sequel to Prince Hal? At the end of Henry IV, Part 2 he renounces his old self, doesn’t he, when he says to Falstaff ‘I know thee not, old man’ [5.5].

  Early, in Henry IV, Part 1 [1.2], Hal says:

  I know you all, and will awhile uphold

  The unyok’d humour of your idleness.

  Yet herein will I imitate the sun,

  Who doth permit the base contagious clouds

  To smother up his beauty from the world…

  And you see a massive ego. He knows what’s going to be asked of him, and he has a plan. The way in which he’s going to be remarkable is to seem unremarkable, seem sullied and a wrong’un, as it were. So that when he then adopts the mantle of the King he will be ‘more wonder’d at’ (his words) and held in higher esteem than those who had become kings before him.

  Does that make him a hypocrite?

  Well, yes. Except… here’s a story. A mate of mine did a radio interview, representing Labour on some topic, and the Conservative he was up against was a friend he’d known at college. He was terrified because this guy was very witty and quite strong. They met beforehand, and the Tory went ‘Oh, you’ll be fine, don’t be nervous.’ On the radio my mate suddenly goes for his old friend on certain policy details, and rips him to shreds, embarrasses him on the radio. And he thinks ‘Oh my God, now I’ve done it, he’s gonna hate me.’ Afterwards they’re walking out of the studio, and the Tory says ‘There you are, I told you it would be fine. I loved that lashing you gave me – ooh, very good, I’ve got to watch you!’ And he said he felt really disheartened. He said it’s just like some big game.

  Water off a duck’s back.

  My mate said ‘That’s what you do. You make believe there are two opposing points of view, and you just play the game, you score points.’ And I thought to myself ‘Well, Hal is a bit hypocritical.’ But actually doesn’t that make him a really good leader, understanding what is leadership?

  A brilliant leader but perhaps not a brilliant man.

  Perhaps not. But if you are a brilliant man, can you also be a great leader? That’s the area in which his character exists in this play. I think we oscillate between his conscience as a man and his conscience as King, and we bounce between the two as we go through the story.

  Tell me about the preparation you did before rehearsal.

  I did a bit of reading on the real Henry V, and of course on Shakespeare’s Henry and the Protestant nature of his beliefs, rather than the Catholic that Henry was. And then a lot of research on the conflict and what Blair was saying – how he was sounding, his intonations, his patterns – and what was happening in the field. As we were rehearsing, some British commander used Henry’s St Crispin’s Day speech to his soldiers before they went into a town. He took elements of it: ‘The war hinges on this moment… it’s going to be remembered… we wear the uniform and take up arms not for self-preservation, but for the preservation of those who are not with us’, and so on. It was reported in the paper. And we went ‘Oh my God. Life imitating art, imitating life!’ So the research had three different strands.

  Here are a couple more quotes from notices: ‘The great heart of this performance beats in its combination of humanity and ruthlessness.’

  The duality, that’s great.

  ‘More flashes of anger and impetuosity than the text invites.’ Any response to that?

  I thought of him earlier as Prince Hal hanging out with Falstaff, Nym and Pistol, the gang – the old days in the tavern. Bringing it up to the modern day, our Henry would have been mixing with that kind of crowd. He’d spent a bit of time on the street, he knew proper hard men. He knew the flick-knife brigade, people who had been cut or scarred because they’d crossed the wrong man. I imagined him being able to hold his own in that territory, and then becoming King. He had to cover all of that up. But now and again the surface cracked and you saw a flash of him wanting to deal with things in a much more direct manner – like receiving the tennis balls from the Dauphin [1.2]. I felt it was much more interesting to make sure the diplomatic choice was the final choice.

  How do you mean?

  Rather than be completely in control, what he wanted to do was grab the guy by the throat and drag him out over the table and hit him or snap a bottle. I felt that was his impulse. But he chose to speak instead. And I think that happened throughout the play.

  You playing Henry V was called ‘a triumph of colour-blind casting’. Did it worry some people?

  It’s strange, because as I carry out my job I don’t see the performance. But I know that some people will make judgements in connection with my skin colour, and for them the performance will become something new. For every individual it depends what references they make.

  You’ve played Rosalind in As You Like It, who’s traditionally not only white but female. So you’re no stranger to adventurous casting. However, she’s fictional, whereas Henry V is a famous historical character.

  You have to think ‘It’s not real, it’s not a documentary.’ In the theatre you sit beside strangers watching a stage, we are telling you a story. Nowadays, people say ‘Oh, that’s fine, that’s great, yeah, tell us a story.’ But earlier on it was ‘You can’t really tell us that story cos you’re not white.’ When I was fifteen, doing Sweeney Todd in Birmingham, a couple of reviews said ‘It’s wonderful, but they wouldn’t have that guy in London. It just wouldn’t happen.’ In those days everybody could tell the story and become different characters apart from the black guy: ‘He’s black, so he can’t be anything other than black.’ But that doesn’t happen any longer.

  Tell me about the Chorus.

  That was Penny Downie. It wasn’t easy for her at first. She began with the notion of being a war correspondent. Then she got introduced to the idea of playing it like a lecturer trying to reimagine the play for the audience. So she came on with books. ‘Now, imagine, if you will…’ at times referring to the action onstage. I don’t think she was quite happy with the Chorus as a three-dimensional character. But in the end she was both in the play and completely separate from it, which is what the Chorus is. It’s an interesting path to walk. She was in love with what this guy did. In her eyes he was brilliant, a great king. She was caught right up in the excitement of the heroism and the sacrifice.