The Playhouse, March 5
8.5/10
There are glimpses of greatness here. In making his professional stage debut, JK Kazzi does not just perform Shakespeare, he tackles this play’s epic title role. Plucky. While his performance is flawed, when he spears the part, he humanises Henry and lifts him far above the pompous warmonger he’s often been.
Director Marion Potts’ vigorously physical production (in which a punching bag can become a hanged man) is often allied to a muscular way with the language uncommon in recent Bell Shakespeare productions. Then there’s her decision to have the French characters speak a French translation of the text (with surtitles), instantly making England’s adversaries more substantial and less like malevolent puppets.
Potts’ radical edit of the text requires just 11 actors and lasts less than two hours. It tosses the Chorus role between several characters, thereby realigning the story-telling in terms of perspective, and rattles along at cavalry-charge pace, so you’re suddenly at the Battle of Agincourt (now Azincourt, in French) before you’ve fully adjusted to the staging and actors. We lose, for instance, the affecting description of Falstaff’s death. But, given that we’ve not just been watching Henry IV, and Falstaff (rightly, on Shakespeare’s part) is not a character in this play of action and war, the gain in momentum seems worth the loss in elegiac poetry.
Anna Tregloan’s set primarily consists of box steel modules that change function scene by fast-moving scene, including, ingeniously, being a tunnel when the English besiege Harfleur. The modules form a downstage dais when Kazzi delivers the “Once more unto the breach…” speech, so he looms above us like a god, and his voice grows in proportion. If his soliloquy before the battle lacks inwardness and is too declamatory, his “St Crispian” speech takes flight.
Kazzi is blessed with a quality that can’t be taught: presence. He excels at the big moments, but could invest more conviction in the casual exchanges. He succeeds, nonetheless, when conversing with his soldiers on the battle’s eve, and is captivating wooing Katherine (a commendable Ava Madon) at the end. Here he mingles excruciating awkwardness with soldierly bluffness, culminating in being struck dumb when they kiss.
Two much smaller performances are even better. Odile Le Clezio makes such a complete being out of so very few lines as Alice, and gently illuminates the words with her eyes. Mararo Wangai’s Montjoy is far removed from the usual effete intellectual vision of that diplomat, instead being a warrior who engraves the very air with the force of his speeches.
For the battle, Tregloan has the stage covered in a sludge (like chocolate icing!) to represent mud, in which the French cavalry charge is metaphorically enacted, and the slipperiness symbolises perfectly the futility of the (mostly male) lust for war, while Jethro Woodward’s score is replete with such bassy thumps and rumbles, it’s as if the earth is grumbling at this futility.
Until April 5.
https://www.bellshakespeare.com.au/henry-5
https://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/bell-shakespeare/2025-season/henry-v