The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
When stage is king
Director adapts a lean, spare version of ‘Henry V’ staged in the round
“He’s saying, ‘No set. We’ll have a couple of knives, not a full-out sword fight.’ ”
Elizabeth Williamson, director, ‘Henry V’
Hartford Stage associate artistic director Elizabeth Williamson didn’t take long to accept the opportunity to stage her first Shakespeare play at the Tony Award-winning regional theater. She conceived her current production of “Henry V” back in sixth grade.
“You know, probably when I was 11 years old,” said Williamson, whose “Henry V” runs through Nov. 11. “It’s the first Shakespeare play I fell in love with. And what I fell in love with is the storytelling of the Chorus,” said Williamson, referring to the single character who opens the play (“O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend/The brightest heaven of invention…”) and closes it, with some nifty soliloquys in between.
“Just the bravado of the playwright saying ‘we’ve got a bunch of actors, a couple of costumes, and the costumes are great, to be honest,’” she said. “’There aren’t many of us —you’re going to have to work with us.’ I sat there in junior high,” Williamson added, “reading the prologue, saying, ‘This is extraordinarily written,’ and what an exciting provocation for theater.”
Williamson’s production, which officially opens Friday after a week of previews, serves to make the most of Shakespeare’s “inherent theatricality,” as the director called one of the Bard’s (and the play’s) finer points. Williamson is staging “Henry V” in the round, only the second production staged in such configuration ever at Hartford Stage. Williamson’s lean cast of 15 actors includes several women playing traditionally men’s roles.
Stephen Louis Grush leads the cast in the title role. The ensemble features Karen Aldridge (Exeter), Miles Anderson (Pistol), Kate Forbes (the Constable of France and Burgundy), Peter Francis James (the Chorus and Sir Thomas Erpingham), Felicity Jones Latta (the Archbishop of Canterbury, Nym and Alice), and Baron Vaughn (Fluellen and Mistress Quickly).
The story itself examines the rapid transition from frat-boy Prince of Wales to respected warrior and leader who defeats France in the gruesome Battle of Agincourt, overcoming a fresh army outnumbering the Brits 4 to 1, fighting on home turf.
What resonates most currently in Williamson are the questions the play raises, as she listed them.
“Who gets to make major decisions for a country?” she said. “Do the people making these decisions really think about the people who are really impacted by those decisions? What is it to become a leader...? All that was in my mind while thinking of what play to do this fall.”
Unlike the many recent productions of “Julius Caesar”
designed to draw parallels to the current POTUS, Williamson steers clear of exploiting the topical.
“That’s what I feel very strongly about,” said Williamson, who received her bachelor’s degree in theater directing and comparative literature from Bennington College in Vermont and a master’s in European literature from Oxford University in England. “There isn’t an equal fit for this moment. I think the questions of leadership and, in particular, a kind of bravado and braggadocio and self-absorption is there in Henry. Henry is very young. But he’s figuring it out. And, hopefully, there’s that maturation through the play.”
Staging “Henry V” in the round, Williamson said, gives Hartford Stage audiences a closer sense of intimacy that’s diffused in physically grander productions staged for a proscenium or even a thrust configuration.
“I’ve been thinking about how the play existed in its time,” said Williamson, adding that Shakespeare wrote “Henry V” as The Globe Theatre was under construction. “This play,
most of all in the canon, is specifically invoking scenography that Shakespeare was writing for. He’s saying, ‘No set. We’ll have a couple of knives, not a fullout sword fight.’ ”
Williamson, who previously directed the world premiere of “Seder” by Sarah Gancher and Caryl Churchill’s “Cloud 9” at Hartford Stage, simply finds that entertainment is the objective, not to provide political commentary on current affairs.
“Shakespeare is so inherently theatrical,” said Williamson. “The way I’m approaching this production is saying: A company of actors have gathered to tell you a story. They may not be the best company of actors to tell you the story. These aren’t the best costumes…’ That’s what the Chorus says in the first act.
“To me, this is about the fun of watching the best company of 15 actors I could pull together to tell this story as an ensemble,” she said. “They’re playing characters. We’re being inherently and deeply theatrical.”