On Stage

...There is a posthumous odor to the entire venture, as if it came from a mausoleum whose inhabitants wrote it...

...is Jesuitical...

...To reduce the French court and army to four or five people while the onstage English are much more numerous destroys the sense of a small but spunky English army overcoming a large but inef-fectal French host...

...For the former—chiefly Nicol Williamson as Henry, and Penny Fuller as both Ann Boleyn and her daughter, Elizabeth—one feels genuine pity...

...Farrah's costumes are handsome and well gauged for progressive opulence, and there is suitably ominous or rousing lighting by Stewart Leviton...

...The presence of spotlight operators and musicians playing Guy Wolfenden's martial music on ramps above the sides of the stage is also effective: black-clad, they somehow suggest puppeteers or angels controlling the destinies below...

...This is not quite the original cast, and some substitutions are for the worse...

...regrettably, "well enough" in a play where so much depends on bravura performances is not good enough...

...In the wooing scene, Alan Howard even relaxes his asperity...

...Richard Moore is an unfunny Pistol, lacking in scapegrace grace...

...There are wonderful visual effects, such as the sudden appearance, behind the lowered cloth representing the walls of Harfleur, of a radiant Katherine—the promise of love and peace to come...

...it shows that sometimes two can direct as cheaply as one...

...In the Introduction to a special edition of the play, Hands argues persuasively the development of Henry as a human being through doubts and setbacks, and shows how his increasing stature as a king and leader derives from his growth as a man and comrade-at-arms...

...The Goetzes have thoroughly trivialized, indeed banalized, the novel, making of it a typical boulevard play with flossy characterizations, dialogue trying hard and vainly to be clever, and a couple of coups de theatre...

...we need at this point a third party...

...As her cold, embittered doctor father, Richard Kiley does well enough—except for a final outburst of pathetic despair that he cannot quite manage...

...I disapprove even more of the decision to commence with the actors in present-day rehearsal clothes, and only gradually introduce period costume, while keeping the Chorus 20th-century throughout...

...Or it may have been a piece of Brechtian alienation, or a nod to the Common Man in Bolt's A Man for All Seasons...

...The actors fall into two categories: those defeated by the material, and those defeated by themselves...

...Oliver Smith's set is strictly routine, unsug-gestive either of the opulence or the exquisite taste we expect from Dr...

...The others remain mostly unimpressive, and in the important part of the Chorus, Emrys James is downright repellent: oily and patronizing, his head cocked at what he must think is a rakish angle, he keeps talking up into the balcony while taking small, mincing steps and smirking like a butler drunk on the master's best old wine...

...The clearly English Chorus has no business talking of "Our fertile France...

...In any case, the attempt to make an efficacious English Hamlet out of Henry only makes the inefficacious Danish one loom larger in the greater richness of his inner life...

...For example, the surliness bordering on churlishness that Alan Howard brings to certain aspects of Henry, and the tendency to make the voice now grating, now a robotlike ratattat, throwing away lines deemed of lesser importance, could reflect the actor's choice...

...Ann Roth's costumes, however, are exactly right, and nicely convey Catherine s growing sophistication and self-possession...

...Not much need be said about Rex, a musical about Henry VIII by Richard Rodgers, with lyrics by Sheldon Harnick and book by Sherman Yellen...

...The blocking, though, is often brilliantly conceived and stoutly executed, the scenery by Farrah—drab tarpaulins that can be hoisted in the air to turn into tricolored panoply or cloth of gold...

...The Dauphin, however, is turned into a more heroic and sympathetic figure, well played by Geoffrey Hutchings, yet without, I think, adequate support from the text...

...rightly or wrongly, those of us who came to Henry V that way find it hard to be weaned to other interpretations, especially less seductive ones...

...or lowered again, to lie in irregular gray mounds suggesting the tents of a camp or, perhaps, volcanic terrain—is extremely imaginative...

...This production was directed in unusually close collaboration with the cast, and it is possible that some unorthodox choices should be attributed not to Hands, but to theatrical democracy in action...

...and Charles Dance is a virtually incomprehensible Williams...

...This may have been intended as a counterpart to Olivier's starting his film as a photographed play at the Globe, and not expanding it to cinematic dimensions until the Southampton scene...

...In the second, she becomes compelling, but it is too late...

...not only does he broadcast the character's disingenuousness from the start, he also makes the supposedly charming facade callow and at the same time gooey...

...my treatment here is perforce summary...

...Oliver Ford-Davies is a more than acceptable Montjoy (to whom Rambures' lines were added), and Carolle Rousseau and Yvonne Coulette are adequate as Katherine and Alice...

...Hands' explanation, "Does it matter who guides Henry, provided he is guided...

...Other weaknesses are in the acting...

...Among many other objections, let me mention only the cutting of the Duke of Burgundy, and the assigning of his important conciliatory speech to the Chorus in mufti...

...Last time round I listed some deplorable husband-and-wife playwriting teams...

...Whatever the motivation, the thing smells of contrivance...

...In other words, the production is intended as a corrective to Olivier's 1945 film emphasizing, in a time of national crisis, the glorious hero-king's virtually unimpeded progress to greatness and British hegemony on both sides of the Channel...

...Although the text can bear out such an interpretation, its pageantry and propaganda are so strong that there is insufficient room for a deeper analysis of Henry, to say nothing of the fleshing out of secondary characters...

...In the role of the dashing, opportunistic suitor, David Selby is execrable...

...Dania Krupska's sparse choreography reaches for gimmicks in the absence of genuine invention, and though John Conklin's costumes are sumptuous and apt, his scenery is nondescript and unevocative...

...the Burgundians, to help make peace between the warring powers...

...Among the comic characters, for instance, only Trevor Peacock's Fluellen passes muster...

...seldom have such able professionals been saddled with such amateurish material that nevertheless can't just be thrown away, but demands an embarrassing kind of emoting in an intellectual and emotional vacuum...

...and the judicious pruning of the text was almost all to the good...

...it comes across coy, or at best clever, in a production that otherwise aims to be thoughtful and honest...

...It raises many important questions that deserve pages of discussion...

...Perhaps the ultimate problem is the magnificence of Olivier's film and all the performances in it...

...or "Now, glory is as glory does/But none was ever glorier" variety, and with tunes that sound like imitations by a hack who once heard a few minor Rodgers numbers over a static-ridden radio...

...Some problems might stem from lack of funds...

...There have been so many superior treatments of this king on stage and screen that it is absurd to summon him up again in an inept and pointless book garnished with schoolboy jokes, with lyrics of the "Puzzled and confused am I,/ShalI I sing a lullaby...

...The fact that the company could not afford to bring over its companion productions of the two parts of Henry IV may contribute to obscuring the grand design...

...Howard can be very exciting in character parts, but he seems temperamentally unsuited for a straight leading man who must encompass sweetness...

...Sloper...

...What could make such a play bearable is great direction and magnificent performances...

...Unhappily, George Keathley is a plodding director, and he seems even to have made the gifted Jane Alexander play the heroine as a much too obvious simpleton with exaggerated gaucherie in the first half of the play...

...The staging is by Ed Sherin as revised by Hal Prince...

...Here comes a revival of an effort by one of them—The Heiress, adapted by Ruth and Augustus Goetz from Henry James' Washington Square, resuscitated by the Kennedy Center and the Xerox Corporation for their parade of Bicentennial zombies...

...Terry Hands, the gifted young director, perceives this work as equal to Shakespeare's best (perhaps taking his lead from Kenneth Tynan, who pronounced the histories Shakespeare's crowning achievement), and one's heart goes out to so gallant a revisionist view facing an opposition far more overwhelming than the English did at Agin-court...

...The Xerox-Kennedy Center idea of culture and theater could easily prove deadly to both—not Xerox and Kennedy Center, alas, but culture and theater...

...It is all very neat, earnest, and conventional —perhaps even uplifting: the cool, ladylike revenge of a homely woman on the fortune hunter who tricked her into falling for him...

...Hands demonstrates that Henry V is more haunted and problematical, that darkness lurks around its edges, and that the final victory is at least as much personal as it is monarchic...

...The production also deemphasizes French cynicism and effeteness (perhaps because Hands is married to Ludmila Mikael, the French actress who originally portrayed Katherine, and because the production is on its way to France), and fails to give the French any other identifying character or flavor...