Everyone has their own Henry V. I have enjoyed many productions, but Laurence Olivier’s Oscarwinning portrayal is mine. The film of the play, “dedicated to the ‘Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain, the spirit of whose ancestors it has been humbly attempted to recapture”, was released at the time of the Normandy landings in 1944. Of course, patriotism dictated judicious cuts, among them the slitting of the throats of French prisoners during the battle at Agincourt and Henry’s refusal to reprieve his old friend Bardolph from a death sentence for looting. Also excised was the Chorus’s last speech, which inconveniently reminds the audience that Henry’s heir “lost France and made his England bleed”.
Amy Lidster’s Wartime Shakespeare, according to our reviewer Andrew Hadfield, looks at “larger issues of what a theatre is for and whether there should be performances at all in times of national crisis”. Henry V, overused as a morale-booster during the Seven Years War, was seldom performed during the American War of Independence. Curiously, King John and Cymbeline were frequently staged during Britain’s eighteenth-century wars, but the latter was once adapted “so that the Britons defeat the Romans at the end” – a bit like Goscinny and Uderzo’s cartoon series Asterix the Gaul. Since the Iraq War and the hunt for the elusive weapons of mass destruction, productions of Henry V have become more political, cynical. So it’s not so much “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, on
