Henry V at the Royal Shakespeare Company (2026): War Beneath the National Myth
Tamara Harvey’s 2026 production of Henry V is, overall, a relatively restrained and conventional staging. Its use of stage technology and adaptive innovation is not especially striking; compared with last year’s Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure and Hamlet, or Othello the year before, this production feels much closer to a straightforward rendering of Shakespeare’s text, supplemented by choreography and elements of physical theatre.
Of course, Henry V, as a history play and a war-driven royal biography, offers less space for directorial play than Shakespeare’s tragedies or comedies. Within those limits, however, Harvey does what she can to inflect this patriotic, propagandistic heroic narrative with an anti-war sensibility, drawing attention to the painful realities obscured beneath its grand rhetoric.
Blood on the Scaffold
Visually, the set is one of the clearest statements of the production. The entire stage resembles an iron structure soaked in blood: the grey-white metal floor and the large scaffold dominating the middle and upper levels are marked with bloodstains, as if violence has seeped into the very fabric of the world itself. These stains suggest accumulation: layer upon layer of slaughter, the residue of war that cannot be washed away.
Even before the performance begins, Henry IV is already lying centre stage on a bed, the blanket over his body soaked in blood. Harvey’s directorial intention is clear. From the moment the audience enters, the sacrifices of war are visible beneath the machinery of the heroic national narrative. Significantly, the Chorus is eliminated entirely in this production, with its lines redistributed among other characters, a choice that also diminishes the play’s national-epic frame.
In the Prologue, Henry IV and Hal, still a prince, both appear in soft white nightgowns, costumes that starkly contrast with the blood-soaked metal surroundings. For Henry IV, death is imminent, and he looks almost like a ghost; for Hal, not yet Henry V, this remains the reckless, wayward prince familiar from Henry IV, at once unruly and charismatic. In this opening scene of succession through Henry IV’s death, Hal, in his white nightgown, appears strikingly vulnerable: a young man desperate to prove himself just as immense responsibility is about to fall upon him. Once he changes into practical padded armour and stands ready for battle, his fate, along with the decisions that will lead to war, arrives with him.
The French Court and the Politics of Costume
Costume design is especially pointed in its portrayal of the French royal family. Unlike the English court, which is uniformly clad in practical padded armour, fitted sleeves, and leather greaves, only the Dauphin wears a silver quilted jerkin, while the rest of the French court appears in gowns. For Queen Isabel and Princess Katherine, this is unsurprising: they do not join the war. The King of France, however, is dressed in a dark green gauzy nightgown with a ruffled collar and lace-trimmed sleeves, a choice that creates an almost excessive softness.
Since Shakespeare’s text already satirises the French aristocracy, who boast of their horses and military splendour while underestimating the English army, only to be defeated by Henry against the odds, Lucy Osborne’s costume design here feels very deliberate. A king who remains in a lace-trimmed gown from negotiation through defeat, and even at the moment his daughter is effectively handed over in marriage to the enemy, is portrayed as weak, indulgent, and politically inept. His failure, along with his tolerance for the Dauphin’s mocking gift of tennis balls, indirectly sets war and death in motion.
Physical Theatre and the Machinery of War
The most notable formal aspect of this production is its extensive use of physical theatre. In depicting battle after battle, Harvey avoids traditional sword-fighting choreography between armour-clad actors. Instead, she focuses on movement.
From the first declaration of war, the actors exhale loudly, hunch forward, bend their legs, and approach the audience with heavy footsteps, like predators closing in. During the combat scenes, they run, leap, collapse, and rise again. Instead of engaging in literal one-on-one combat, they perform a stylised, collective fighting vocabulary: each appears to struggle alone, yet also as part of a larger, almost abstract mass. In the programme, movement director Annie-Lunnette notes the influence of Belgian choreographer Damien Jalet’s Tr(o)ugh, where dancers slide, fall, rise, and repeat these motions across the stage. That influence is clearly apparent here.
Combined with the production’s lighting, sound, and rotating scaffold, this movement language becomes highly effective. The earlier battle scenes are lit in murky yellow with hints of red, while Agincourt erupts under violently flashing blood-red light. Actors leap, collapse, and move in slow motion; they climb the scaffold, slide across it, and appear to fight on its metal frame. Annie-Lunnette transforms what would traditionally be staged as combat between individual principal characters into a collective image of warfare.
Those who fall dead rise again moments later, only to be struck down once more by invisible enemies. These figures do not represent a single soldier or a single death. They stand for every life consumed by war. For them, war is not an isolated event but a permanent state, an unending cycle of struggle and annihilation.
Katherine’s Lesson and the Wounded Body
If battle is central to the production, so too are the wounded and the dead. One of Harvey’s most astute choices is the treatment of the comic scene where Princess Katherine learns English words: hand, fingers, arm, elbow, neck. Here, that language lesson is set alongside the tending of wounded soldiers. As Katherine and her gentlewoman repeat the words, they also bandage injured bodies.
In doing so, Harvey links what is usually a moment of comic relief to the brutal reality still unfolding around it. This war was started by the royals and aristocrats of two nations, men who stay in palaces and negotiate from positions of comfort, while bloodshed continues elsewhere without pause.
The scene becomes even more layered when considered within the play’s political conclusion. Katherine’s acquisition of English already hints at the upcoming dynastic marriage. In contrast, Henry V is never required to improve his French, and the seemingly comic charm of the ending relies on this very asymmetry, with mutual affection portrayed through linguistic misunderstanding.
Language learning in this context is not innocent. Acquiring a new vocabulary, particularly one pertaining to the human body, suggests cultural invasion and replacement. Brian Friel’s Translations provides a particularly strong parallel for this. By connecting Katherine’s language lesson to the bandaging of wounded soldiers, this production suggests a deeper anti-war perspective, linking military invasion with cultural invasion and highlighting their interconnection.
Henry’s Speeches and the People He Cannot See
This critical perspective shapes how the production depicts Henry’s great speeches. One of the most revealing aspects of Alfred Enoch’s Henry is that, throughout the production, he rarely seems genuinely to recognise the people drawn into this war.
In the opening scenes with the traitors and the declaration of war, Henry stands with his back to the other actors and addresses the audience directly. The three traitors are raised high on the scaffold by white ropes; as their bodies drop and hang in visible agony, the machinery of war is set in motion.
During the Harfleur speech, meanwhile, the soldiers are already collapsed on the ground, exhausted and wounded, while Henry stands among them, intensely focused, urging them on, repeatedly calling on them to charge like tigers. He steps across their bodies as he speaks. As Enoch moves, a stark spotlight follows him, directing the audience’s gaze solely towards Henry.
Not only does Henry fail to see those who must fight, but the audience, too, is led to see only the brilliance and power of his oratory.
Lanterns Before Agincourt
The scene before Agincourt features one of the production’s most subtle effects. Since it begins the second half, the stage is cloaked in darkness, illuminated only by a single dim lantern placed downstage right. The light hardly extends beyond its immediate area. From the darkness, a hooded, cloaked figure appears, delivering lines originally assigned to the Chorus.
With the Chorus omitted from this production, this alteration creates a moment of ambiguity: the audience is encouraged to guess who is speaking. Gradually, more lanterns start to glow upstage. These belong to the soldiers, who are cold, hungry, and burdened by the weight of war. Only then does it become clear that the cloaked speaker is Henry himself.
Yet even here, when Henry debates with his soldiers about whether a king bears responsibility for the deaths of those who fight for him, he still only perceives the individual directly before him: the one soldier who responds, the one he can confront as an equal, the one he can rhetorically transform into ‘brother.’ The many others standing further back behind the scaffold remain both physically and morally peripheral. They are easy for Henry to overlook, and for the audience as well.
Almost immediately afterwards, the production returns us to Henry’s inner world through another soliloquy on the burdens of kingship. What remains centred, once again, is the king’s psychology rather than the lives consumed by his decisions.
A King Among the Dead
After Agincourt, however, Harvey grants Henry a more human dimension. She reads his insistence that glory belongs not to him but to God partly as propaganda, a form of divine legitimation for war and kingship. Yet she also seeks to recover something sincere in him, something of Hal still alive within the king. The young man who once drank with Falstaff and his tavern companions is not untouched by mass death.
As Henry reads the casualty lists of both the English and French dead, the surrounding actors, those representing nobles and soldiers alike, collapse one by one to the floor in pain. By the end, everyone is down. Henry, tears in his eyes, sinks to his knees at centre stage among the dead, curling inwards in grief and repentance.
The Latin hymn that might otherwise celebrate victory is transformed into a lament. Triumph gives way to mourning.
Katherine’s Final Words
One final directorial choice needs to be emphasised. In the Epilogue, the lines originally assigned to the Chorus, those that remind us Henry’s greatness was followed by the weakness of Henry VI, the loss of France, and renewed civil war, are given here to Katherine. The French princess speaks the final words of the production in sorrow.
From my perspective, this sorrow does not register as grief over her son’s future inadequacy, but as grief for war itself, and for her own position within its logic: a political bride forced to marry the man whose campaign has brought death to so many of her people. It is a fitting close to this anti-war production.
Watching this anti-war Henry V today, in a world still marked by conflict, instability, and lack of peace, I am again reminded of Ben Jonson’s famous claim that Shakespeare ‘was not of an age, but for all time.’ Regardless of the specific historical moment, Shakespeare’s plays continue to reveal the contours of our own world.
Production Details
Production: Henry V
Company: Royal Shakespeare Company
Director: Tamara Harvey
Venue: Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Date Viewed: 19 March 2026
