The Barn Theatre production was recently streamed, in lieu of live programming due to the ongoing spread of COVID-19. In this writer’s opinion, this stream was much more than a single-camera archival capture of a year-old production. Barn Theatre pulled out the stops, creating a filmed version of Henry V that manages to capture––and, in some ways, heighten––the frenetic energy of director Hal Chambers’ tense vision of an England-France conflict.
Barn Theatre’s HENRY V Captures The High Stakes Of The Political Arena
The modernization of Henry V goes far beyond dressing the actors in camouflage rather than armor. It’s the small details of Barn Theatre’s production that truly hold the twisted mirror up to life: the chiron in the prologue announcing the death of King Henry IV; the shifting of court scenes into the more public arena of the all-smiles press conference; and the choice to stage many of the deaths that the Bard left offstage in full audience view. The movement sequence that opens the play, depicting a night on the town with Henry and his mates, spirals and trips its way through the debauchery that young Hal often found himself in during the Henry IV plays, a unique method of transporting Shakespeare’s prequel backstory into the standalone production.
You too might appreciate how this sequence makes the ingenuity of Barn Theatre’s streamed production first evident. Much of the production was illuminated, literally and conceptually, by designer Benjamin Collins’ richly detailed projection design, which stretches to every corner of the cyc (large white curtain) at the back of the stage. For the streamed production, much of this projection work and video mixing is transported from the theatre back wall to the digital fourth wall, intercutting performance footage with newly forged closeup footage of the actors that wouldn’t be possible to see from an audience member’s single viewpoint. Even with shots that come from standard house-mounted cameras, the constant cutting between different angles or close-ups in the livestream gives the production the vibe of modern political television, similarly filled with larger-than-life figures making snap decisions that may be less informed than we hope, and may leave more injured than we fear.
HENRY V Livestream Is Not Theatre, But Its Own Sort Of Entertainment
For those who were able to catch the live production of Henry V in May/June 2019, there may have been certain aspects of the production that read better on a stage than they do when captured on film. For this writer, at least, the slower pace of the first act felt like a hurdle to overcome before the more visceral speed of the play’s battle scenes––on stage, these moments may have their appeal when being able to trace the actor’s hesitations between lines, their unscripted interactions with their scene partners. Similarly, interactions with the audience from characters like the Dauphin, who opens Act II by speaking directly to the front row, lack a certain excitement when watched from the distance of a camera lens.
However, Barn Theatre also loads up the 3-hour livestream with plenty of moments that could only happen in the new medium. During the intermission, artistic director Iwan Lewis interviews three of the production’s stars individually––actors Aaron Sidwell (Henry V) and Lauren Samuels (Princess Katherine & others), as well as director Hal Chambers––before bringing all three together post-show to discuss the production further. With the benefit of nearly a year’s hindsight on the show, all three offer stirring commentary about the ensemble camaraderie, and the newly enriched vitality of the four-hundred-year-old play.
Theatre fans looking for a streamable substitute to the world’s now-shuttered stages may find more polished video work among the world’s well-known companies––the National Theatre’s weekly streams, or the Met Opera’s daily ones. That said, if theatre fans are willing to forgive the small editing errors and occasional shaky camera work of Barn Theatre’s production, they’ll find something much more than an archival recording of Henry V waiting for them. During his interview, Iwan Lewis states his wish that the production could return to the stage sometime in the future. Aaron Sidwell agrees, commenting that “there’s life in it still.” That life may be currently missing from the Barn Theatre’s Cirencester stage, but they’ve found a method of sharing their muse of fire with the rest of the world.
