Last night, I got my Christmas present – a night at the theater with a lovely lady.

She took me to see the Folger’s production of Henry V.

Back in the day (well, back in 1989), my friend Matt and I were taken by Beverly and Joe, two grown ups (Matt and I being in junior high) from my church (that was during an interlude in my longstanding atheism/agnosticism), to see the Kenneth Branagh movie of the play. It was definitely one of those defining moments in my life: the classics were freaking cool! People were executed, slaughtered in the field, hung from the neck until dead (I was a fourteen year old boy, so this was the kind of stuff that impressed me).

This Henry V was something very different.

The entire production emphasized the stage bound aspect of the play. The set itself was a series of scaffoldings which were set with beams on ropes that were partially lowered at various times to indicate various locales, but which still served to emphasize the artificiality of the set. Actors also played multiple roles, which, again, brought the audience’s gaze onto the fact that this was a play and not real. It wasn’t as explicit as that moment in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (the book, not the movie, people) when the author pulls up short and flat out tells the reader that this is just a book s/he is reading and that the characters aren’t real and none of this really happened, but it was pretty explicit. Though, of course, the broad sweep of events in Henry V actually happened.

Henry himself was played by Andrew Schwartz, instead of the usual actor, who was, apparently, ill last night. While he was at times uncertain and stumbled over a line or two, that also served the purpose. While still making clear the artificiality of the entire act of staging a play, it also really pushed the costs of war. This Henry was callow and uncertain and didn’t truly understand the cost of his actions to others around him. It’s actually hard to imagine anyone else playing the part in this production.

The notes in the playbill talked a good bit about how the quagmire-ish conflict in Ireland informed Shakespeare’s play. I don’t know whether it was intentional, but having read that, I can’t help but think of this and the Iraq War. The staged aspect brought to mind the political staging of the war by neocons for our consumption. At the end of the play, the Chorus reminds the audience that things went to hell in a hand basket almost immediately after the events depicted, what with  the disastrous, brief reign of Henry’s son (Henry VI) and the whole War of the Roses thing. So the entire episode could be viewed as the initial, made for television, stage of the Iraq War, when the statue toppled, before… the entire rest of the war and occupation.

Anyway, the run of Henry V has been extended, so go see it or something.