HENRY 5

By Diana Simmonds

March 6 2025

HENRY 5, Bell Shakespeare Company at the Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, 1 March - 5 April 2025 and touring. Photography by Brett Boardman

The 2025 Bell Shakespeare production of Henry 5 is monochromatic, mysterious, and always compelling. It’s played on a bright, white floor surrounded by the charcoal-dark walls of the Playhouse stage. Suspended on chains, two chestnut leather punching bags serve that purpose, and others. A long, low structure of scaffolding is pushed to and fro and around by the actors to connote walls, battlements, and finally, when deconstructed into parts and stood erect, the lookout turrets or high hilltops of battlefields.

Throughout, an ever-changing play of light and faint swirling mist invokes gloomy regal hall or rural European autumn in all its dank chill. The company is clad in dark pants, jackets, and an occasional white shirt, with boots or sneakers sporting an on-point splash of orange or yellow at heel or toe. They strongly suggest, without dissing the seriousness, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and today’s European war. (Costume and set design Anna Tregloan, lighting Verity Hampson.)

Integral to the uninterrupted two hours is composer and sound designer Jethro Woodward’s almost constant – yet never imposing – disembodied percussion soundtrack. It conveys emotion with heart beats and heightened moments of fear; the weather in the susurrations of wind, rain, and fallen leave,s and the steady passing of time.

Always referred to as the greatest of Shakespeare’s “history plays”, Henry 5 is as much about the anticipation and effect of war as it is about war itself, even though the infamous battle of Agincourt is the central action. They do not know it but these – mainly – young men are caught up in what history would call the Hundred Years War when “… all the youth of England are on fire …” 

And JK Kazzi is the callow monarch just two years crowned, inexperience audible in the timbre of his voice as he responds to the insulting gift from the Dauphin. A box of tennis balls – meant to suggest the king’s playboy reputation – is a greater test than is immediately obvious, because the one-time carefree Prince Hal must overcome the joke. And so, kingship's awesome – often fatal – reality is heavy on his shoulders and is never hidden. And underlined in the febrile alertness of the Court of Jack Halabi, Alex Kirwan, Odile le Clézio, Ava Madon, Harrison Mills, Ella Prince, Jo Turner, Mararo Wangai, Rishab Kern and Ziggy Resnick and which is sustained throughout. Even in moments of rest and play, backs are never turned on the king and attention never wavers from high watchfulness, lest heads be lost on a furious whim or in a moment of imagined disloyalty.

Kazzi’s lightly boyish timbre is especially touching then, when he exhorts his men, as news of the superior French army is relayed on the eve of Agincourt: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he to-day that sheds his blood with me – Shall be my brother…” Although Henry is under no illusion that all is sweetness and light in the ranks as he adds, “Be he ne’er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition.”

Henry 5 is directed by Marion Potts, making a welcome return to the job after far too long being a Poobah in the country’s major arts organisations. The clarity and energy of the sharply edited text is mirrored in the performance of each actor. Every stage of the story is equally clearly delineated. We have time to understand the deceptively desultory life at Court as the nobles establish their places in the pecking order, and as Henry’s sense of birthright ambition to the throne of France is fed (comically in this instance via a sketched-in-the-air family tree).

A frighteningly realistic yet coolly-choreographed battle (movement and fight director Nigel Poulton) is a climactic scene. The colour red and any hint of blood is absent, by the way, which probably causes one’s imagination to see it everywhere. The visual starkness of the production also encourages this faculty and makes it vivid and many-hued when, in reality, it is not.

It’s a highly effective depiction of events most of us can barely visualise, despite the nightly news, and while showing the unevenness of a new show, it’s not something that deeply detracts. (When was war, fear, fury, and uncertainty an even experience anyway?) All in all, this Henry 5 blows away the cobwebs of history and reveals the catastrophic reality of young men at war.