Henry V (Play)

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    Stars Battle It Out on London Stages

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    In West End productions, Jonathan Bailey and Taron Egerton play a fighting couple, and Kit Harington from “Game of Thrones” plays the warrior king in “Henry V.”LONDON — There’s no nudity in “Cock,” the 2009 Mike Bartlett play that opened Tuesday in a starry revival at the Ambassadors Theater here. But by the time its 105 minutes, no intermission, have come to an end, you’ve seen its characters stripped emotionally bare.The play has had quite a trajectory, from its London origins in the Royal Court’s 80-seat studio space to a run in New York (where it had the longer, less provocative title “The Cockfight Play”) and now to a commercial West End perch where tickets are going for three figures — prices you might find for a big musical like “Cabaret.”The show’s director, Marianne Elliott, is a significant force in London theater, and the cast is led by Jonathan Bailey and Taron Egerton, two theater-trained actors more widely known these days onscreen. Bailey came to prominence in the Netflix series “Bridgerton,” while Egerton was a hugely charismatic Elton John in the biopic “Rocketman” and has starred in several of the “Kingsman” films.The play’s author has enjoyed his own ascent. He won acclaim in London and on Broadway for “King Charles III,” which predicts how England’s monarchy might evolve after the queen dies, and has two new plays due in London this spring, one of which, “The 47th,” imagines Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign for the presidency. (That one opens next month at the Old Vic.)“Cock,” by contrast, features no real-life characters. Only one of them gets an actual name: John (Bailey), a young man in crisis as he pivots between the affections of his male partner of seven years, a broker known simply as M (Egerton), and a female teaching assistant, W. After John and W have sex, he begins contemplating a new life.Jade Anouka acquits herself beautifully as the outsider to a gay relationship on the ropes: a woman who asks for courtesy from M and is met with condescension and worse. He dismisses her job in the classroom as “babysitting,” and some of his euphemisms for the female anatomy will raise an eyebrow or two.Bailey and Jade Anouka in “Cock.”Brinkhoff-MoegenburgThis defining trio widens in a climactic dinner party scene to include M’s father, F (a feisty Phil Daniels), who arrives in time for his son’s home-cooked beef and a “goopy” cheesecake that hasn’t gone quite according to plan. Not that we ever see food or, indeed, props of any kind. In keeping with the stripped-back demands of the writing, the action plays out on a curved bare set, designed by Merle Hensel and illuminated from above by the tubular rods of Paule Constable’s lighting.The playbill credits a gender and sexuality consultant to the production, John Mercer, and includes a glossary of “LGBTQ+ terms,” such as “asexual” and “polyamory.” Some of those weren’t much in use when the play was written, but John would probably have rejected them, anyway: Asked repeatedly to decide who, or what, he is, he simply cannot answer, preferring an identity beyond labels.I must confess to wondering midway through whether John was worth all this fuss. If this production is less moving than the Royal Court original, that may owe something to a different emphasis in the casting. In that show, the wraithlike Ben Whishaw fit perfectly with John’s pencil-drawing wiriness as described in the text. A vigorous, muscular Bailey, by contrast, looks more than able to take care of himself, and he brings to the part the same manic energy that distinguished his bravura performance in Elliott’s 2018 West End production of “Company,” for which he won an Olivier.Egerton made headlines early in the show’s run when he fainted during the first preview, but he recovered quickly enough to joke about it on social media. Inheriting a part originated by Andrew Scott, Egerton brings a sad-eyed defensiveness to his role, reminding us that, in British parlance, to make a mess of things is “to cock things up.”Kit Harington in “Henry V,” directed by Max Webster at the Donmar Warehouse.Helen MurrayAnd things get really messy in the play’s final scene. “Off we go into battle,” remarks F as the episode begins. His readiness would be equally at home on the battlefield of “Henry V,” currently lit up by some star wattage of its own through April 9 at the Donmar Warehouse, where the “Game of Thrones” star Kit Harington is in firm command of the challenging title role.Presented in modern dress and with multiple gender flips (as is the Shakespeare norm in London these days), the production charts a neat path between the potential jingoism of a play celebrating England’s military prowess and the dubious aspects of its martial conquests. England’s success comes at sizable cost to France, whose princess, Katherine (Anoushka Lucas), is more or less ordered to be Henry’s bride, without much say in the matter.The play is from the same director, Max Webster, whose show “Life of Pi” received nine Olivier award nominations last week; that adaptation of the Yann Martel novel, still running in London, features inventive puppetry and stagecraft. In “Henry V,” however, the impact comes from the characters, particularly Henry, who abandons his drunken, carousing ways to become a man of war. If Harington finds a compelling ambivalence in the role, that’s because Henry, rather like John in “Cock,” discovers he is a man divided: a sensitive soul whose legacy, he comes to realize, is forever linked to slaughter.Cock. Directed by Marianne Elliott. Ambassadors Theater, through June 4.Henry V. Directed by Max Webster. Donmar Warehouse, through April 9. More

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      I Love London Theater. But Not London Theatergoing.

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      While full of fine shows, a long-awaited binge was also full of stress about how loosely audiences followed rules about staying healthy in a pandemic.LONDON — On the February morning when England’s National Health Service pinged me, saying I’d been identified as a contact of someone who had tested positive for Covid, I freaked out completely.Not out of fear of getting sick; I’m boosted, and I think if I got the virus I would probably be fine. But the last time I came to London, in September, my euphoric playgoing trip was thrown into disarray when I tested positive post-arrival, which banished me to a hotel room for 10 solitary, asymptomatic days. Was I about to get stuck here again?I’d only seen one friend this trip and he was OK, so it had to be a stranger, this person with Covid. My mind scrambled to figure out where our paths had crossed. Based on the time frame that the N.H.S. suggested, I would bet it was at a small, crowded theater two nights earlier — my prime suspect being the guy in front of me who’d sneezed mid-show. That’s when I noticed he wasn’t wearing a mask.Which made him pretty unremarkable here, in a city with genuinely world-beating theater but audience Covid safety protocols ranging from lax to cavalier, and getting looser. Over my 12-day visit, which included some gorgeous productions I am grateful to have seen, that lack of stringency dampened my anticipation of shows, my enjoyment of them — and ultimately my interest in going to them.Because even in this not-yet-over pandemic with its ever-shifting rules, I’m used to feeling safe at the theater; used to feeling like we are all looking out for one another, trying to keep everyone onstage and backstage and in the house healthy, in pursuit of this art that we love. It’s not a minor thing, this feeling; it’s rooted in empathy.And on a purely practical level? We Americans do have to test negative before we’re allowed to fly home — on planes that are still nowhere near as crowded as they used to be.TRAVELING TO SEE THEATER is one of those prepandemic habits that has yet to return for most of us, and it’s been driving me a little bit crazy.I am one of those people — maybe you are, too — who reads the news about which plays are being done in which far-flung places and aches to be in the room with them, burns with envy of those who can be, keeps checking and rechecking the mental calculus of “Can I risk it yet?” against “Can I bear one more second not to?” Evelyn Miller and James McAvoy in “Cyrano de Bergerac.” The production was wonderful, but the audience at a return performance — not so much.Marc BrennerSo when my editor, wanting a profile of the actor James McAvoy, emailed to ask if I would be willing to do the interview in London, where he is starring in Jamie Lloyd’s electrifying production of “Cyrano de Bergerac” in the West End, my answer was an all-caps, unfettered yes. It is one of my favorite cities, and I missed it. The time to risk going, it suddenly seemed, was now.I would need to see that “Cyrano” again — twist my arm — because it had been more than two years since I’d caught it in early previews during its original run. To take full advantage of the slog across the Atlantic, I would stay a while and see a slew of other shows — starting, just hours after passing through customs at Heathrow, with a matinee chosen to go easy on my jet-lagged brain.That was “& Juliet,” a pop-musical riff on “Romeo and Juliet” at the Shaftesbury Theater, where we did have to show proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test to get in, and the people near me were wearing masks. It was a jolt, though, in a more than century-old West End theater that couldn’t be described as airy, to see whole groups of people walk in and take their seats barefaced.Assembling onstage before the performance began, the actors did try, in a spirit befitting their frolic of a show, to encourage safer behavior. One briefly held up a chalkboard with a hand-lettered message: “Hello,” it said, which got cheerful hellos back from the crowd. Another brief chalkboard, another message: “Thank you,” which got some applause.But the wordless chalkboard in between those two — bearing a friendly pastel drawing of a mask — got only silence. Which, in the circumstances, counted as a response.“& Juliet” turned out not to be my cup of tea. Still, I’d have stayed if I’d been able to stop thinking about the ventilation, wondering what I was breathing and whether it was worth it.I decided it wasn’t and fled at intermission, back onto the street, back into the open air.Heather Forster and Samuel Creasey in “The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage.”Manuel Harlan“THE BOOK OF DUST: La Belle Sauvage,” that night at the Bridge Theater, was leagues more rewarding. Adapted by Bryony Lavery from Philip Pullman’s fantasy prequel to “His Dark Materials,” and staged by Nicholas Hytner with beguiling visuals, it’s the character Lyra Belacqua’s origin story.The stagecraft is more enchanting than the narrative, but what marvelous stagecraft it is: projections conjuring a watery world, life-size boats moving through it with a choreographed fluidity more persuasive than I’d ever witnessed onstage. And of course the spectral puppets, glowing from within.The lovely guy next to me, masked when he wasn’t snacking, told me he felt perfectly safe at the Bridge precisely because it was airy — not like some old West End house, he said. Until that evening, he hadn’t been to any theater since the pandemic began. (You can see “The Book of Dust,” whose Bridge run has ended, in a National Theater Live recording.)It makes me happy when I’m in London at the same time as an Emma Rice production. This trip it was her adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” at the National Theater: a 19th-century classic warmed with music and breathed to life as if it had taken as its cue something Charlotte Brontë once wrote about the novel: that it “was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials.”The moor is a kind of Greek chorus in the play, while the storytelling is nimble and full of fun; Katy Owen is comic perfection as Little Linton, the pampered princeling of Wuthering Heights. But when Catherine (Lucy McCormick) dies and Heathcliff (Ash Hunter) cries, “Catherine Earnshaw, haunt me!,” his jagged grief rips through us, straight to the soul.Lennie James, left, and Paapa Essiedu in the Old Vic production of Caryl Churchill’s two-hander “A Number.”Manuel HarlanIn Caryl Churchill’s brisk two-hander “A Number,” given a stellar production by Lyndsey Turner at the Old Vic, every moment of Paapa Essiedu’s beautifully modulated performance has a similar visceral reach, right into the center of us. Opposite Lennie James as a father who secretly replaced his original son with a clone, Essiedu plays three disparate but genetically identical men with an unshowy humanity that pops against Es Devlin’s stylized tomato-red set.OF EVERYTHING I SAW, though, the production that brought me there is the one that left me absolutely stunned. The first time I saw “Cyrano de Bergerac,” on Thanksgiving Day 2019, the production was still a work in progress.This time, I left the Harold Pinter Theater with a sensation through my limbs like an electrical charge. We are all bodies in space at the theater, and I responded to this “Cyrano” on a cellular level.I saw other shows, too: at the Hampstead Theater, Florian Zeller’s weary new psychological drama, “The Forest,” about a man whose seemingly perfect life is blown up by his infidelity (but at least the cast includes Gina McKee and Finbar Lynch); at the Almeida Theater, Omar Elerian’s overlong take on Ionesco’s “The Chairs,” with the reliably first-rate Kathryn Hunter in slapstick clown mode; and, at the Donmar Warehouse, “Henry V,” starring Kit Harington and featuring — this will sound strange, but it is absolutely true — the most entrancing stage rain I have ever seen. I was able to snag a ticket (a terrible one; I spent a lot of time with actors’ butts blocking my view) the day a lethal storm blew into Britain and people canceled plans.Kit Harington, center, in the Donmar Warehouse production of “Henry V.” The theater was one of the few that explicitly requested that attendees wear masks.Helen MurrayI’d canceled my own theatergoing plans earlier that week, when the N.H.S. texted me about that contact and told me to take rapid tests for five days. In my initial flood of anxiety, I nixed a train trip to Bristol and returned my ticket to see Mark Rylance there in “Dr. Semmelweis” — a play about a pioneer in the prevention of needless infection.Then, at the pharmacy, a clerk handed me a free box of seven rapid tests, from the N.H.S. — a perk of pandemic life in England that Boris Johnson, the prime minister, would announce the end of for most people days later, along with other precautions including contact tracing.Apparently I was fine. Each time I took a test, the result was negative — and each time I reported that online to the N.H.S., the automated response reminded me to “wear a face covering in crowded settings.”It boggles my mind that so many theatergoers in London, sitting side by side for hours, don’t bother with that elementary precaution — if not for themselves, then for the actors, who are not masked, and for other people in the audience who might be medically vulnerable, not able to be vaccinated yet or in close contact with people in either of those groups. It is such a simple kindness. It is also an act of inclusion.The only theater that I saw actively request it was the Donmar, and people complied. Elsewhere any such request was timid, and certainly not face to face. When major West End theater operators said recently that they would no longer require mask wearing or proof of vaccination from audience members, I had to wonder how a mask policy could count as mandatory if it had gone unenforced.One night I went to the Duke of York’s Theater to see “The Ocean at the End of the Lane,” an adaptation of the Neil Gaiman novel. The show hadn’t started yet when I noticed that the guy on one side of me wasn’t wearing a mask. Then a barefaced guy sat down on my other side. I thought: If this were the subway, I would get up immediately. So I left.HOW DOES A CITY — or an industry — that wants to welcome the world and its wallet not worry about things like that? The contrast between playgoing in New York and in London isn’t about quirky cultural differences. These are fundamentally divergent ways of navigating the pandemic.One is cautious, cognizant of the frailty of bodies; of the gaps that remain in our knowledge of Covid and long Covid; of the fact that we learn of new variants only after they start spreading. The other seems heedless — telling the audience, in effect, that they can take their chances or stay home. I wonder how many people, surveying the options, have decided to keep their money and keep safe.I spent a bit more of mine, returning to the Pinter for “Cyrano.” A good single seat had opened up, and I grabbed it. I didn’t want to wait until the show got to Brooklyn to see it again. But I wish I had.The audience was, hands down, the most overwhelmingly barefaced I had seen. I kept looking at the performers, doing their jobs so gloriously on that stage, and wondering how anyone could be so reckless as to gamble with their health. That’s not a right that a ticket ought to buy you.The next night, my last in London before I flew back to New York, I didn’t go to the theater. Unthinkably, it had lost its appeal. More

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      Lost in 2020: Epic Shakespeare, and the Theater That Planned It

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookLost in 2020: Epic Shakespeare, and the Theater That Planned ItBrave Spirits Theater expected to mount an ambitious cycle of eight history plays. Instead it became yet another victim of the pandemic.Brendan Edward Kennedy, center, in the title role of “Henry V” at Brave Spirits Theater in Virginia.Credit…Claire KimballDec. 29, 2020I’ve written several versions of this story. First it was supposed to be an account of a small theater company’s ambitious stage project, then a story about that interrupted project and the company’s plan to regroup because of the pandemic. Now it’s an elegy for a small theater that the coronavirus shut down.On a bright but chilly Saturday afternoon in February, I hopped on a train to Alexandria, Va., just outside of Washington. I was visiting Brave Spirits Theater, which was presenting the first part of a bold endeavor: staging eight of Shakespeare’s history plays (the two tetralogies, from “Richard II” to “Richard III”) in repertory, over the course of 18 months, culminating in a marathon performance of all eight works.I was there to see the first two plays in the series, beginning with a matinee performance of “Richard II.” On the car from the train station, I peeked at the quiet suburbs of Alexandria — brick houses with wraparound porches, American flags by the door — until I arrived at the theater, which channeled the small-town whimsy of a playhouse in a storybook. The space, a converted church building, had pale yellow columns out front and bright turquoise trim around the windows, with red accents throughout.Charlene V. Smith, a co-founder of Brave Spirits. Credit…Greg Kahn for The New York TimesCharlene V. Smith, who co-founded Brave Spirits in 2011, told me that the idea for the project occurred to her in 2008, when she saw the Royal Shakespeare Company in London do a marathon performance of the histories. Brave Spirits was claiming to be making history by being the “first professional American theater company to mount full productions of Shakespeare’s two history plays tetralogies and perform them in repertory.”A few feet away from where we were sitting, in one corner of the lobby, was a chalkboard. Four calendar months were neatly drawn in perfectly symmetrical boxes — January, February, March, April — with a color-coded schedule of performances of the first tetralogy, which the company named “The King’s Shadow”: Richard in bright red, the first Henry in clover green, the second Henry in yellow and the last Henry in a crisp, royal purple.In a humble but well-done production, Brave Spirits had Richard II crowned and killed, and his successor, Henry Bolingbroke, a.k.a. Henry IV, was named the new king. After the audience left, the cast milled around the space, chatting in the kitchen, which doubled as the box office. “Is your bag of heads upstairs?” I heard someone call out from the hall. A few wore shirts that were being sold by the company, black tees with gray block lettering that read “Richard & Henry & Henry & Henry & Richard.” (Ever the Shakespeare nerd, I bought one.)That evening I saw “Henry IV, Part I,” and every seat was filled. Older couples and families and a couple of teens gabbed and waved at one another; everyone was a local. I left on the train the next morning, still buzzed with the energy in that tiny converted church.I wrote the article, but before it was published the pandemic shut down the performing arts across the nation, and the story of Brave Spirits changed. Like many other theaters, it was forced to cut short the histories project, which DC Metro Theater Arts predicted would be “one of the must-sees of the 2021 season.” April 19-20 was supposed to be a big weekend for the company, when all of the plays in the first tetralogy would be staged in repertory, ending in the capstone of the first half, “Henry V.”From left, Tom Howley, Duane Richards, and Michael Bannigan Jr. in “Henry V.”Credit…Claire KimballJacqueline Chenault, left, as Alice, and Nicole Ruthmarie as Princess Katherine in “Henry V.”Credit…Claire KimballJohn Stange, above, as Henry Bolingbroke and Gary DuBreuil as the title character in “Richard II.”Credit…Claire KimballOn March 12, Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia declared a state of emergency and, shortly after, the White House issued a proclamation declaring Covid-19 a national emergency. Brave Spirits decided to cancel the marathon weekend but still go out with one last performance — the opening-night show of “Henry V.”“At that point,” Smith said when I checked back in with her in late April, “people had put so much into it that everyone was like: ‘We need to open “Henry V.” We need that opening-night performance tomorrow. We just need it.’” Brendan Edward Kennedy reported that after the show, in his dressing room, he started to sing the wartime ballad “We’ll Meet Again.” (“We’ll meet again/Don’t know where/Don’t know when.”) He sang it briefly to me on the phone.After that “Henry V,” the theater froze: costumes still on racks and props in bins, stored under the audience risers. As for the tools of war — swords, spears — Smith had them stored for safekeeping in her home in McLean, Va.The theater put up a fight through the spring and summer; an annual fund-raiser netted over $7,000, compared with its usual $3,000, giving the cast and crew some hope. (Smith told me the company’s annual budget was around $50,000, but for the first histories project season it was tripled, to roughly $150,000.)For several weeks, the cast kept up with online script readings and planned for a fall with more virtual rehearsals until, they hoped, they would come back with the second half of the project in January 2021.That was supposed to be my new story: one about a small theater enduring despite the consequences — something that captured the stakes and scope of the difficulties but that still ultimately ended up being about hope and resilience.By this point you already know that’s not the story I’m telling now, 10 months after I first visited Virginia and nine months since the lockdown began. On Nov. 21, Brave Spirits announced its closure: “Without the ability to plan for future performances, Brave Spirits is unable to recover financially from the loss of Shakespeare’s Histories,” a news release stated, the last two words in bold as though spoken through a megaphone.Brave Spirits produced more than 20 plays and employed over 300 artists, and was known for its quietly subversive interpretations of classics, usually through a feminist lens. But the company announced it had one parting gift: audio recordings of the plays in the histories project, which they hope will come out in late 2021. It’s hard not to think of it as another reminder of all the things the coronavirus destroyed in just a couple of months.Brave Spirits Theater, which was housed in a former church.Credit…Greg Kahn for The New York TimesThe fact that Brave Spirits lost this battle would have been sad enough if it weren’t also so utterly, ironically Shakespearean. This spring, during a follow-up call with Kennedy, I asked the actor how he had attacked King Henry V’s famous St. Crispin’s Day speech.The speech is usually said to fanfare and fireworks. King Henry V, no longer the childish, mischievous Prince Hal, has become the brilliant leader, inspiring his men to perform a feat of greatness. Kennedy said that their approach to this scene was a bit different — a glorious moment that is nevertheless fatalistic, with the soldiers fully understanding the cost of war.Kennedy told me that he and Smith had imagined the soldiers’ bleak logic: “‘Let’s go out in a blaze of glory, and let’s hit them so hard that people are going to be talking about this for centuries. They’re gonna remember all of our names, and this deed is going to make us heroes in the annals of history.’” Kennedy was aware of the parallels — that, like the soldiers on St. Crispin’s Day, he and his fellow actors were going into the performance aware of “the possibility that this could be the last time that we ever do this.”The end of Brave Spirits isn’t the story I wanted to end up with. And yet this small theater in Virginia, which persevered until it couldn’t any longer, is just one of many that won’t make it out of 2020. It’s a shame, not just the closure itself, but the fact that the circumstances that led to it were preventable: The government’s poor response to the pandemic, and our country’s general refusal to value and subsidize the arts as it should, guaranteed that some theaters wouldn’t survive.I thought back to that day in February, when after I interviewed the cast, they celebrated a colleague’s birthday with pizza and cake and a round of “Happy Birthday” in the theater’s lobby.I packed up as quickly as I could, not wanting to interrupt, but they had happily forgotten me. Their conversations and laughter filled the space, a separate world and a safe haven for a community of artists. However briefly, I felt that. But this is all I can offer: the image of kings on a stage, a church-turned-theater in Virginia, a post-show pizza party. With Brave Spirits now closed, it’s all I have, and I wish it were enough.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More