Dr Peter Kirwan

Tag: Henry V

  • The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) [Revised] (Again) (American Shakespeare Center) @ The Blackfriars Playhouse

    The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) [Revised] (Again) (American Shakespeare Center) @ The Blackfriars Playhouse

    Every now and again, I’ve been lucky to see a revival of an existing play that makes that play feel freshly written, as if designed for that company and that moment. The reworking of Death of a Salesman for an African American family; Theatre Wallay’s reworking of The Taming of the Shrew as a commentary…

  • Henry V (Shakespeare’s Globe/Headlong) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

    Henry V (Shakespeare’s Globe/Headlong) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

    There have been anti-heroic Henry Vs before, but rarely does one commit quite so thoroughly to the bit as did Holly Race Roughan’s production for Shakespeare’s Globe. A collaboration with Headlong, Roughan’s production conflated anti-heroism with anti-theatricalism, or at least with a deconstructed approach to the performance event that formally punctured rhetorical acts of performance.…

  • Henry V (Donmar Warehouse) @ Broadway Cinema via NT Live

    Henry V (Donmar Warehouse) @ Broadway Cinema via NT Live

    In a pre-show interview that served as paratext to the NT Live broadcast of the Donmar’s Henry V, Kit Harington spoke candidly about his own experience of addiction and recovery. His substance use, at a time when his global fame was at a peak, reflected one response to the pressures and expectations of fame; his subsequent recovery allowed…

  • Henry V (RSC/Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre) @ Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre (archival recording)

    Henry V (RSC/Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre) @ Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre (archival recording)

    The RSC’s Folio Translation Project, designed to create new Chinese-language translations of the canon, began in 2016 with Owen Horsley’s production of So Kwok Wan’s translation of Henry V. Made available to delegates at the World Shakespeare Congress, the film of the production captures a lean, contemporary take on the play that is unmistakably RSC in its aesthetic (dark backgrounds,…

  • The King (film)

    The King (film)

    The King clearly sees the potential, in a post-Game of Thrones world, for the story of the Henry IV/Henry V plays to become the basis for a gritty, f-bomb-dropping, twenty-first-century medievalist fantasy of heroism and difficult choices and violence. The material is right there in the corrupt older generation, the sneering enemies, the balance of personal stakes and large-scale…

  • Henry V, or Harry England @ Shakespeare’s Globe

    Henry V, or Harry England @ Shakespeare’s Globe

    When I saw Sarah Amankwah in Doctor Faustus at the Sam Wanamaker just before Christmas, I expressed a hope that she’d be a regular at the Globe. The fact that, with very little Shakespeare experience behind her, she has then taken the major through-line role of the Henries trilogy as Hal/Henry V, suggests I wasn’t the only one struck by her…

  • Kings of War (Toneelgroep Amsterdam) @ The Barbican Theatre

    Kings of War (Toneelgroep Amsterdam) @ The Barbican Theatre

    In 2009 I was lucky enough to see Toneelgroep Amsterdam perform Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies at the Barbican. That mammoth reworking of Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra remains one of my lifetime theatrical highlights – not just for its length and ambition, but for its cohesive use of space, its innovative flexibility around the actor-audience arrangement, and its thorough…

  • Henry V (RSC) @ The Royal Shakespeare Theatre, via RSC Live

    Henry V (RSC) @ The Royal Shakespeare Theatre, via RSC Live

    Gregory Doran’s jaunt through the second tetralogy has come to its climax with this, a Henry V lauded by The Telegraph as ‘the production this country needs’. Following some discussions on Twitter, I remain unconvinced by what exactly this country might ‘need’ from Henry V. Leaders born into privilege who disguise their true purposes and manipulate their suffering subjects into making…

  • An Age of Kings (BBC) (film)

    An Age of Kings (BBC) (film)

    In 1960, the BBC undertook an extraordinary project. Shakespeare’s eight history plays covering the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, Edward IV, Edward V and Richard III were broadcast in fifteen hour-long episodes with a single ensemble company. Rehearsed quickly and recorded live, the films have been unavailable commercially until now,…

  • Henry V (Michael Grandage Company) @ The Noel Coward Theatre

    Henry V (Michael Grandage Company) @ The Noel Coward Theatre

    Following the underwhelming and frustratingly conservative Midsummer Night’s Dream, I didn’t have high hopes for the second Shakespeare in Michael Grandage’s West End season. With promotion once again based entirely around a celebrity actor (Jude Law, returning to the director-actor partnership of Hamlet), a theatre and audience unsuited to the interventionist or radical political readings possible with this play,…