Henry V (review)

As explicitly conveyed in Henry V, Shakespeare was well aware of the challenges he faced when attempting to retell history on stage. So too, apparently, is the Actors Shakespeare Company whose response to the challenge was to completely blur the spatial boundaries set by traditional theatre in their Spring, 2009 production of the play. The actors leapt from the stage, consistently addressed the audience, and even allowed parts of their performance to escape the view of the audience. Even though many of these methods surpass the traditional techniques that were used in the Elizabethan theatre to achieve the same effect, it appears that the company's devotion to breaking walls served as a grand tribute to the script itself, highlighting one of its most important textual assertions: that the events, characters, places, and ideas presented in this history play are "so great" they can scarcely be displayed (or contained) by the stage. In agreement with the text, the ASC didn't even try to limit its performance of Henry V to their literal or figurative spatial restraints. The result was impressive.

The ASC's Henry V spilled from the stage, apparently an "unworthy scaffold," in almost every scene. In addition to the stage itself, action consistently took place next to or in front of the eight-sided platform, a wooden structure that rose no more than a few inches from the floor. The actors played both on and off the stage, sometimes only inches from the audience; they entered and exited from all sides and angles; they claimed at least two separate backstage areas; and they fell out into the lobby.

When both the stage and venue failed to hold that "which cannot in their huge and proper life / Be here presented," the ASC pushed their spatial boundaries even further by completely removing a majority of act three's opening action from view, calling our "imaginary forces to work" at the invasion of Harfleur. The invasion's bloody details took place in a space behind the audience, completely out of sight. In turn, the audience watched a barren stage for whole minutes. They listened instead to violent battle cries and clanking swords, marked visually with only an intermittent flash of light. The result was that the ASC successfully relocated the victory to a space unidentified and undetermined.

Thus, in answer to the Chorus's question "Can this cock-pit hold / The vasty fields of France?", the ASC's answer was seemingly "no." However, they made more of an effort to say "yes" in response to the following, more specific, question: "… may we cram / Within this wooden O the very casques / That did affright the air in Agincourt?" While the company didn't try to "cram" the play's deciding battle onto the stage in full, they did allow the audience to view parts of it. Like the battle of Harfleur, the ASC hid much of the climactic battle from the audience's sight as the players fought behind the front curtain. Isolated moments of choreographed fighting did, however, occasionally burst onto the stage. Still, the scene maintained that the majority of its action should take place within a limitless, imaginary space.

One of the ASC's most interesting spatial experiments took place at the beginning of the Agincourt battle and shortly after the...