Theatrical Musings

Naturally, when someone offers you a $20 ticket to a play at Stratford, you say yes and go.  Which is how Greg and I ended up at a regrettable performance of Henry V this afternoon, a preview for the play, which opens July 13.  

It was such a cluttered unfocussed production.  Director Des McAnuff’s notes suggested his dilemma: Is Henry V, which today ran for three long hours excluding a 20-minute intermission, a celebration or a bitter condemnation of war? He suggested Shakespeare intended to present “a whole matrix of opposing yet equally persuasive points.”  

Perhaps, but it is the director’s job to clarify the paradox not to muddy it. Shakespeare’s Henry goes to war with romantic notions about heroism and the righteousness of his cause and comes out of the experience with his innocence lost. The audience are witnesses to his hardening and brutality.  

But in this production, Henry seems just about the same at the end as at the beginning. For one thing, Aaron Krohn’s Henry had little stage presence; maybe this was what director Des McAnuff intended in order to show the banality of war. If so, he succeeded. This Henry sat on a cannon during the St. Crispin’s Day speech. His voice fell away at the ends of lines when it should have swelled. His wooing of Catherine, which should be a combination of menace, temptation and flirtation, was wooden. The only time he seemed engaged with his lines was in his soliloquy on ceremony in the second act.

Alas, the actors seemed unaware of the importance of each word and placed the wrong emphasis on many, so the dramatic emphasis was lost.  This is a history play. You expect pageantry, declamation and heroic speech. Once you’ve been caught up in that, you mentally stand back and view what you may have been complicit in.  In this play, that didn’t happen. So many lines were thrown away. As Greg said, “Once more into the breach” was completely lost in ambient noise.

In fact, the actors were often up-staged by the busy-ness that went on. The play specifically calls the members of the audience to use their imaginations to picture battlefields. Instead, we were distracted by all sorts of stuff. We got saw-horse horses, which had to be put on stage and removed, a revolving parade of stretchers to indicate battlefield deaths, irritating slamming floor grates used for a variety of purposes: camp fires, blowing up prisoners, raising and lowering a throne and a bathtub featured in the only nude scene in the pay, which one of our party, to his great regret, missed because he had dozed off. There was an unnecessary diorama of Falstaff on his deathbed. The first act ended with the hanging of Bardolph ― histrionic ― and not in a good way. 

But that didn’t compare with the ending of the play when a huge Canadian flag unfurled, and we left the theatre to the strains of the Beatles’ Revolution. Too odd.

 We wondered why we hadn’t seen anything as suboptimal as this in years until I recalled that we are cowards: we usually wait and read the reviews and eschew anything which does not get at least three stars.   

Alas, the only thing meriting three, if not four, stars around this matinee was the picnic lunch we enjoyed with our friends before the performance. There, on the island in the Avon, the bubbly bubbled!

p.s.

Thanks to one of our lunching friends, here is a link to how the Band of Brothers speech should be said:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRj01LShXN8&feature=related