On Stage

...now here is Joseph Papp's production of it in Central Park, directed by Papp himself...

...After such reinterpretations, it took Joe Papp and his supremely American cast to put epic and Empire back into the work with a vengeance, as if they had tried to stage not so much Shakespeare's play as Olivier's movie...

...The tendency in recent British productions has been to get away from the heroic-epic aspects of the play—the glorification of the ideal monarch and the mystique of the Crown—that Laurence Olivier's film version, made toward the end of World War II, did such rousingly jingoistic justice to...

...Now, whereas Montjoy might genuflect to the victorious monarch, this posture for both of them, as if they were contracting a mystic marriage, is patently absurd...

...Subsequent productions would have had to rebel against this version for the same reasons children feel compelled to rebel against a too successful and established father...

...There have always been language problems with any American Shakespeare production...

...Martin Aronstein's lighting is apt, as is William Elliott's spare but sufficient music...

...At 36, Rudd looks wonderfully boyish, and splendidly British as well...

...Clarence Felder performed the Duke of Exeter passably but looked like a gross buffoon...

...Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them," says the Chorus...

...He does improve somewhat in the closing wooing scene, yet that is virtually foolproof, especially opposite a Katherine as pert and incisive as Meryl Streep...

...Papp did, however, commit two major miscalculations in casting...

...Years may pass between productions in New York of Shakespeare's Henry V; then, all of a sudden there is a season with two of them...

...John Arnone's set is functional and inexpensively tasteful...

...Philip Bosco clung to his customary high Gielgudian vocables, even though these are totally inappropriate for Pistol...

...The swordplay was staged by Erik Fredricksen, who also acts three small parts unremarkably, albeit with more acumen than there is to his amateurishly devised, lackluster duels...

...but Papp brings on elaborately constructed hobby horses that we actually see...

...In the end, one of them has become a true suburban matron and mother, whose husband is cheating on her with the second member of the trio, who, in turn, has become a somewhat disenchanted swinger, Europe bum and erotic-art-gallery owner...

...I reported last spring on the spectacular but uneven Henry V that the Royal Shakespeare Company brought over from England...

...In the 1975 RSC production, briefly seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Terry Hands, the director, and Alan Howard, the leading actor, made the King still less heroic: a troubled human being struggling to find himself in the midst of kingship and war...

...The times are 1963, '68 and '74...

...The acting was, on the whole, above the usual New York Shakespeare Festival level, displaying a decent enough average...

...Crispin speech by lying prone before him in a semicircle, each with his head toward the erect King, so that they look like a human sun dial...

...Vanities is a comedy with supposedly serious overtones in three short enough acts to be called "scenes" that tune in on the careers of three middle-American girl chums: in high school, in college and in life, so to speak...

...The passages in French, of course, presented yet anther layer of difficulty, turning "this wooden O" into quite a Tower of Babel...

...Already in 1951, Anthony Quayle's Stratford production gave us a King Harry who, in the person of Richard Burton, "fought shy of heroics," as Robert Speaight recalls in Shakespeare on the Stage...

...It may be that a Scottish accent was too much for anyone in this cast, for Jamy was cut out of the production, but, then, so were a number of other things and characters, notably the Duke of Burgundy...

...all of them look their parts perfectly, too...

...Garland Wright has directed tidily...

...But soon he proved both emotionally and vocally dry and constricted—stuffed, somehow, with sawdust...

...Gower might have been cut out as well: Gerry Bamman performed him without noticeable acting ability, military bearing, or English accent, where accent is of the essence...

...The war is a real activity, but it is also a metaphor...

...In her Henry V: The Cautious Conqueror, Margaret Wade Labarge concludes that "Henry had none of the more attractive virtues" like" charm or a sense of humor, but that he was efficient, able and just...

...It is well enough acted by Jane Galloway, Susan Merson (who is a little less convincing), and, most racily, Kathy Bates...

...Papp's direction is acceptable, although rather less than inspired...

...There is more of this sort of thing, but not enough to mar the play's otherwise doughty, though pedestrian, progress...

...The entire cast was linguistically adrift...

...Still, there is nothing new in this harmless exercise in triviality to make it eye-opening or compelling...

...There was no growth in stature or even sound...

...Best of all is his idea of keeping the girls onstage during intermissions, dressing and making up before their mirrors...

...in the early scenes, where the young King fluctuates between impetuosity and tentativeness, Rudd seemed like a good choice...

...Perhaps that is why the main piece of scenery was a tiered and compartmentalized wooden tower on casters...

...the third girl, who also has something to do with the husband of the first, and appears to be somebody's kept woman, remains a mystery...

...It could be rolled on or off or turned around, and served many purposes...

...A little play called Vanities by Jack Heifner has been holding its own for months off-Broadway...

...Walter McGinn, a usually fine actor, disappointed as Michael Williams, yet was not offensive...

...After Agincourt, Harry and the French herald Montjoy parlay facing each other on their knees...

...Without wishing to overencourage or damn with faint praise, let me just say that people who, on a pleasant evening and after a good meal, sit through this event free of charge will probably feel they got their no-money's worth...

...This was particularly evident in that grand but gratuitous shower of arrows shot into the lake at the back of the stage—and in the whole elaborate pantomime of the Battle of Agincourt, for which Papp engaged Lee Breuer of the avant-garde Mabou Mines Company as "choreographer...

...unfortunately, there is more drama in this than in the play itself...

...What we do not do during his production is think...

...I can see Rudd going on to play indefinitely the befuddled American youths he does so well (most recently in Streamers)—not Shakespearean heroes...

...By Central Park standards, this is not a bad production—it even marks a step ahead for Papp as a director...

...There is some accurate observation here and a touch of genuine, even if fairly obvious, humor...

...Hands, who perceived the drama as having also much to do with defining what is theater—in other words, as self-referential—was careful to make what little is seen of actual warfare as unglamorous as possible...

...Aside from the aforesaid Gower, only Jerome Dempsey's French King, Ben Slack's Nym, and Sasha von Scherler's Mistress Quickly and Queen of France were without redeeming features...

...Lenny Baker invested the Dauphin's speeches with gallant attempts at authentic gallicism, while other Frenchmen came no closer to French than the fried potatoes in their mouths, and so on...

...the girls are first seen as typical, silly cheerleaders...

...Commendably, the author does not patronize his characters...

...Jaime Montilla played the Boy with a pronounced Puerto Rican accent (though otherwise adequately...

...The English warriors express their fealty to Henry during the St...

...It permits itself a few bold touches that do not so much misfire as overfire—like that cannon at the siege of Harfleur breaching two large holes in the wooden defenses with a single ball...

...in fact, during the soul-trying night-camp scene, Rudd gave us a toy soldier with a voice as wooden as a rattle's...

...Conversely, there were some unneeded interpolations...

...in one of Papp's fancier conceits it even became a section of the Globe Theater full of jeering groundlings...

...In Peter Hall's 1964 Royal Shakespeare Company production (which I caught at Stratford), Ian Holm's Henry was a sly, rough-and-tumble little fellow: a good soldier, democratic comrade-at-arms to all his men, and shrewd strategist, but no hero or visionary...

...then as already faintly nostalgic sorority big wheels, among whom certain basic differences and, in one girl, even doubts have arisen...

...So, too, this production is generally efficient, able to hold at least a little of our interest, and just what many might want from a summer evening...

...The bigger error was casting Paul Rudd as Henry...

...David Mitchell's scenery and Timothy Miller's costumes are judiciously sober, with browns, grays and blacks predominating...

...I have not reviewed it thus far because I always assumed it would close before my review reached print...

...The lesser of these was choosing Michael Moriarty for the Chorus and letting him indulge himself in that combination of smirking condescension, and abstracted self-absorption he tends to mistake for acting...

...In Henry V they are particularly acute: Not only do our actors, poorly trained to speak even American prose, have to cope here with English verse, they also have to manage the various Cockney characters from the Boar's Head Inn, and, hardest of all, the captains—Cower, Jamy, MacMorris, and Fluellen—who must personify England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales through their speech...

...As Howard himself put it, "The men in this play are at war both with each other and within themselves...