Henry V by Pacific Resident Theatre (review)

When the audience entered Pacific Resident Theatre’s 34-seat store-front black box performance space, it found the cast members dressed in street clothes and variously occupied around two cheap folding tables: one worked a crossword, another played with a small dog, others bantered with the stage crew, while nervy 1970s-era glam and punk music played. A little after eight, one cast member (Alex Fernandez) stepped forward to point out the emergency exits and request that cell phones be turned off (one of the cast ran to the back of the room to turn off hers). He asked if the audience were ready, sat down at the table, picked up a dog-eared paperback copy of Henry V, commented, “This is a good one!” and began to read the Prologue. When he reached the “But …” in “But pardon, gentles all” (8), he paused, gesturing with a grin to the small, black, featureless room; the rest of the cast guffawed. Throughout the show, the only props were the two plastic tables and a few old chairs, inventively rearranged to create thrones, breaches, and battlefield bivouacs, and a single cheap crown hanging on a nail on the wall. This was clearly a production intended to test the audience’s powers of imaginative transformation.

Henry (Joe McGovern) wore skate shorts, a hoodie, red sneakers, and hipster stubble. At the reenactment of his investment as king, the sneakers were replaced with Doc Marten boots and the hoodie removed to reveal a sleeveless Slayer t-shirt and upper arm tattoo. This non-costume change nicely symbolized the production’s illuminating examination of Henry’s transformation from irresponsible prince to responsible king: the snotty anti-social pose the shirt signified had become a cruelly inescapable public responsibility. It was just one way in which the production constantly pressed the question of how Henry’s youthful rebellion would inform his kingship.

This question was raised more explicitly by flashbacks from earlier plays. These worked on one level to provide helpful context: for instance, when the Archbishop of Canterbury reminded the audience in the opening scene of Henry’s miraculous reformation, illustrative bits from both parts of Henry IVwere re-enacted. But the flashbacks also suggested ways in which the “courses of his youth” (1.1.25) may have been a kind of apprenticeship. Thus, the scene from early in 1 Henry IVwhere Hal tricks Falstaff into revealing the hypocrisy of his claims of reformation presaged Henry’s subsequent entrapment of Scroop (who stood in here for all the conspirators) through a similar ruse, implying that Henry’s youthful pranks among the cutthroat classes may have trained him for the cutthroat politics of the court. Similarly, when Henry later had to pass judgment on his former companions for looting, Falstaff appeared behind him and made his famous apologia from 1 Henry IV“Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world,” to which Henry replied, “I do. I will” (2.5.438–9). He then condemned Nym (not Bardolph, as in the text, and played as a slender youth), who was marched slowly between Henry and the audience, then back into darkness. Henry’s face, visible only to the audience, twitched visibly as Nym passed before him, revealing his unease in a kind of silent soliloquy.

Thus the production not only suggested ways in which those earlier experiences shaped or revealed aspects of his character that would become important to him as king, but also how they did not fully prepare him for the emotional consequences of accepting royal responsibility. They served him well as...