Henry V – Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon

Writer: William Shakespeare

Director: Tamara Harvey

Henry V is Shakespeare’s most contested history play — part war epic, part political examination, part comedy — and getting the balance right has defeated many a production. Tamara Harvey’s RSC staging, strangely the first time a female director has taken on the play in the company’s history, finds an answer by committing unapologetically to accessibility and humour, without sacrificing the play’s darker undercurrents. The result is slick, fast-paced and frequently very funny, while still finding room for something more unsettling by the final scene.

The production announces its intentions early. Rather than opening with the Chorus’s famous prologue, we begin with material drawn from Henry IV Part 2 — the dying king asleep, Hal lifting the crown from his pillow — reworked here as a dialogue between father and son, ending with Henry IV’s death and Hal holding the crown aloft. It’s played with an eye on comedy, but it also establishes Hal’s ambition clearly from the outset. When Alfred Enoch then delivers the prologue as Henry V himself, the “O” of the opening becoming a reference to his crown rather than the traditional nod to the theatre’s shape, you understand the interpretive approach Harvey is taking. It’s an interesting directorial choice — drawing on another play to frame the one you’re staging — but it works, and similar moments of clever repositioning recur throughout.

The Salic law scene — ordinarily a test of patience even for seasoned Shakespeare-goers — is here another source of comedy, as Canterbury unravels a long scroll and works through both the geography and the genealogy with a pointer. It’s broad, it’s funny, and it serves the production’s commitment to keeping the audience with the play rather than drowning them in historical detail.

Lucy Osborne’s design gives the production considerable flexibility — a revolving scaffolding structure, its platforms linked by ladders, that shifts function and creates height as the play demands. Annie-Lunnette Deakin-Foster’s movement is precise and feels relentless, giving the battle scenes weight and meaning without a weapon in sight. The effect at Agincourt, where sound (Claire Windsor), lighting (Ryan Day) and stage positioning combine to conjure the arrow storm, is one of the production’s most striking sequences. Jamie Salisbury’s score threads through it all with purpose — taut and tense in the battle scenes, atmospheric in the court.

Alfred Enoch is a delight as Henry. He’s personable and relatable in a way that makes the harder edges of the character genuinely troubling rather than simply contradictory — you warm to him quickly, which is precisely what makes the execution orders land with force. His Harfleur speech is delivered with a focused, steady authority that never tips into the bombastic, and there’s a stillness to his performance that commands attention even in a crowded scene. His rapport with the audience is exceptional. In the St Crispin’s Day speech, he picks out audience members directly, so that you find yourself feeling briefly recruited into the cause — it’s well done, with his persuasive authority never in doubt.

The company handles the play’s many strong supporting roles well. Sion Pritchard brings a determined, persuasive energy to Fluellen. Paul Hunter’s Pistol is excellent physical comedy — a figure of mock-heroic swagger, prancing and strutting with great timing. Emmanuel Olusanya gives Bardolph a sly, slouching physicality, while Ewan Wardrop finds a good contrast between the greasiness of Nym and the rigid pride of the Constable of France. Tanvi Virmani, in the traditionally male role of the Boy here recast as the Girl, brings a quiet stage presence that registers without overstating. Thirty supernumeraries — eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds drawn from Coventry and Warwickshire — are given a genuine opportunity here too, their careful and deliberate movement part of the production rather than being merely decorative.

Natalie Kimmerling’s Katherine understands the diplomatic reality of her situation without accepting it passively, and her pairing with Diany Samba-Bandza’s Alice is warm and well-matched. The English lesson scene — so often an awkward exercise in mocking French pronunciation — is handled here with real invention: Katherine uses the bodies of the wounded to indicate the relevant body parts, shifting the comedy away from cultural caricature entirely. It’s an inspired solution to a scene that can easily sit awkwardly with modern audiences.

The production’s most revealing moment comes at the end. Enoch’s Henry in the wooing scene is not the soldier fumbling his way towards tenderness in peacetime. He’s a man who knows exactly what he wants and intends to have it, approaching Katherine with the same quiet determination he brought to Agincourt. The power imbalance is not softened — it’s placed front and centre, and it reframes much of what has come before.

Harvey has found a Henry V that is both accessible and thought-provoking, navigating the more troubling aspects of the piece with skill. It’s a confident introduction to her tenure in the RSC’s main house.

Runs until 25 April 2026