Adaptation Of Branagh's Henry V

Henry V was always going to be a bit of a deal breaker here. While the other plays in this series have all been previously adapted for television, Henry V has the double whammy of Olivier and Branagh’s on-screen precedents setting two very different benchmarks for all subsequent adaptations to try and match. The director can either meet the challenge head-on or change the rules and present a completely different beast altogether. And so The Hollow Crown came to a close with “The Tragedy of Henry V”. The surprisingly downbeat ending of the play, wherein the chorus alerts us of Henry’s early death was projected back to the very beginning of this production, which opens with Henry’s funeral and makes it clear to us all that everything we are about …show more content…
In particular, the cutting of the traitor’s scene raised my eyebrows somewhat; the scene is commonly leapt upon in post-world war productions to show the murky side of war and identifying enemies, but this production did not seem in a hurry to point out any particular villain in the piece – instead, just about everyone was tragic in their own way, but what surprised me most was how subdued they all were. The battle at Harfleur was reminiscent of Branagh’s film in looks – the murky night scenes, the Eastcheap crew huddled on the floor, but here, as elsewhere, Henry’s speeches, masterpieces of rhetoric as they are, were transformed from rabble rousing rants to individual addresses with an almost pleading nature – forgetting his own mantra that humility is best adopted in peace, not war. Both here and in the Crispin’s day speech, Hiddleston almost made himself giddy spinning around after each line to address the next one to a different face in the crowd, trying to secure each potential vote from the multitude. Anton Lesser’s Exeter was rather resigned and melancholic and Paterson Joseph, swapping his Brutus for York, regularly appeared to be holding …show more content…
I was more impressed with the all-round delivery of this production in its looks and quality than I was with Richard II; the dialogue-free scenes included to illustrate what was otherwise simply talked about – Bardolph stealing holy relics, the English forces preparing and signing up for war – did not feel like intrusions, nor patronising, but rather a utilisation of the medium to enrich the story. So what it did, it did well, but the question which I think will divide viewers is whether what it did was any good in the first place. Should Henry V really be so tragic? Was the suppression of so many of the comic scenes a justified loss or a cut too far? Should there be any glory in Henry’s campaign? It was definitely an experiment worth trying, but – forgive me – I’m sticking to Branagh for