Once More Into The Park...

We made the annual trip to Shakespeare in the Park yesterday. This year's play is Henry V, starring Liev Schrieber, Bronson Pinchot and a cast of total unknowns. As these things go, it was better than average, but the director, Mark Wing-Davey, tried too hard to show the relevance of this play by not merely putting it in modern dress but layered on a good deal of modern reference. The result was a schizophrenic Henry V, as I could not tell if the director was taking the play seriously or not. Some scenes, with broad and rather obvious references to photo ops, Vietnam, Marilyn Monroe and the like, seemed at odds with the words we were hearing. Others matched the dialogue but only served to belabor the point. Only in the last two acts, as if the company ran out of "Irony Here" and "Don't Forget to Compare Dubya With Henry" signs, did the approach to the play serve the material. and even then I heard laughter from the audience at odd points, as if they now expected this to be a comedy. Nonetheless, the play still works.

I am that rarest of Shakespeare fans, a lover of the histories over the dramas and comedies. Granted, I have seen few of them on stage or film, but I guess the history buff in me likes the both the Bard's interpretation of history (faulty it may be) and his understanding of the men who make that history. (These plays read surprisingly well, and stayed in my memory well, years after reading them in college.) The play is not his best history, serving as anti-French, pro-monarchy propaganda, with a King Henry who can do no wrong. But Henry - even here after his days drinking with Falstaff - is still fascinating. Young Henry enters the war uneasy about the necessity to wage war but at the same time willing to sacrifice all to win. There is no need to embellish the irony of this play, as Henry embodies it.

This play is not, from what I see, either the simple work of propaganda that Olivier apparently created in WWII, or a warning about foreign misadventure as some would proclaim it. It is to me simply a retelling of one event in history relived again and again, as the glory, the horror and sometimes the necessity of war devolve on a nation and its leader. Shakespeare, through the resolute but troubled Henry, shows both sides and lets the audience figure out what's what. And the embellishments of this production served to detract from the Bard's words, though I suppose that the King's Men maybe also have not trusted the audience to think for itself, and would have approved of the theatricality of it all.

We are fortunate that Liev Schrieber, the rising young Shakespearean star of our day, takes to this role as well as he can. This is not as challenging a role as Iago, which we saw him perform oppposite Keith David in December 2001, and so at some moments Schrieber seems a touch detached. But he captures the internal conflict, and external swagger, of the king quite well, and gives a stirring reading of the play's famous speeches and monologues. He also plays the final scene, the courtship of Princess Katherine, with appropriate uncertainty, stumbling over his French in a fashion humorous but not slapstick. I cannot wait to see what role Schrieber takes on next. Perhpas it's time for him to do a comedy.

Lastly, kudos to the rest of the cast, almost all of whom play two or three roles (albeit rather confusingly in some cases as one or two actors do not change costume when changing roles). Specially of note is Bronson Pinchot as Pistol, the show's main soruce of comic relief. Pinchot has come a long way from his days playing Balki. True, Pistol - here played with a Brooklyn accent - is as broad a character as any on a sitcom, but not many actors could mesh Brooklyn and the Bard, and retain the beauty even of this coarser language and the sense of pathos that Pistol, caught in the war in France, surprisingly presents as his story unfolds. I would suspect that Pinchot, having now done two turns in Central Park, will likely be back again.