Read Marion Pott's program notes for the 2025 production of Henry 5
“It is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.”
—Brian Friel, Translations
While I was researching Henry V, I read that in 1971, a service was held at Westminster Abbey to commemorate the restoration of Henry V’s effigy. A sculptor had been commissioned to create new hands for the statue and it was revealed that they had been modelled, not on another monarch’s hands or a direct descendant of Henry’s, but on the hands of Laurence Olivier.
I found this bizarre – but consistent with so much blurring and smudging of historical myth-making. For example, much of the narrative appeal and nationalistic pride in the Battle of Agincourt lies in the English being outnumbered by the French 5:1. This has always been discredited by the French (of course) but by reputable English historians too. The mythology of this conquest, as it’s been spun by Shakespeare and then reworked through thousands of productions across the last four centuries, has somehow intervened in the historical process and shaped the way we think about it.
Olivier’s version was produced to affirm English exceptionalism in the face of Nazism. As a result, much of the violence of Henry’s speeches was heavily edited – a sanitised version of Shakespeare’s text omitted his references to war crimes like violence against women, or the murder of innocent children. History is not only written by the winners, but it’s shaped by their biases and services their needs.
Fast forward to 2025, and war is our geopolitical reality. Now more than ever, the way we record, interpret and communicate history (at the very moment it is being made) seems critical. As “audiences” to war, our grasp on events is always mediated: we’re relentlessly reframing our perspective – fact-checking, interrogating our newsfeeds or the veracity of certain video footage or of eye-witness accounts. Whether it comes from CNN or Sky News makes a big difference to the way we formulate our response to the information at hand. As spectators, our ethical position is fraught. Nobody goes to war thinking they’re wrong. We know that one person’s war-hero is another person’s war-criminal. When there are multiple truths at work, how do we navigate the impossibility of our roles without being complicit? How do we hold ourselves accountable? This production is certainly about Henry V, but it’s also about how we write the story of war.
The battle between France and England in 1415, as we depict it, acts as a working metaphor for many of humanity’s conflicts. While contemporary, the world of our production carries the vestiges of wars past and the seeds of those to come. A world either in perpetual ‘training’ for wars or delivering on its brutal promise. The audience intercepts it at a point in time, to figure out its own position.
Within this frame, Shakespeare cuts across time with themes we recognise as powerful accelerants of conflict: exceptionalism designed assert our superiority - to highlight our differences by eclipsing what we have in common; the use religion and God as a motivation, pretext or justification for war; patriarchal legacy also, and the pressures exerted on young men to kill and be killed – the ritualised, chronic suppression of their humanity. This is intergenerational violence well at work.
And the play isn’t about one war – it shows us layer upon layer of conflict: the war that Henry wages within himself about his competing responsibilities, or the war between fathers and sons on both sides. The women of the play (3 characters of the original 52) are involved in their own conflict: a war against voicelessness, against the suppression of their language, the colonisation of their bodies, their commodification as the spoils of war. They are also trying to take space and step into a breach. The cultural diversity and gender mix of our cast on both sides of the battle aims to show that ultimately, humanity is at war with itself.
All of this points to the richness of Shakespeare’s work – its ability to offer us infinite versions of ourselves. Directing it often feels like every idea, every line of verse, every image is a prism that opens up endlessly. And for all of that, Shakespeare is also a pragmatic person of the theatre: an optimistic entertainer, a craftsman who tells a great story and loves an audience, who gives actors the scope to exercise their full expressive range – emotional, physical, linguistic and more. It’s a unique kind of generosity.
Marion Potts
Director
