Review: Henry V, Weston Studio, Bristol Old Vic – ‘An excellent ensemble performance, full of power and fizz’

So, once more unto the good old breach, Henry Vee. I’m just having a momentary traumatic flashback to ‘O’ levels at Big School, where we waded through you and your predecessor, Henry One Vee parts 1 & 2.

Much like the young things of BOVTS, we did that with girls playing men (Shakespeare’s history plays are full of history boys, not history girls), though unlike them we sported drab navy-blue tunics, sensible shoes and lank hair.

No, this cast looks very cool and au point fashion-wise, a band of raggle-taggle street brats whose style is a punky mash-up of Adam Ant, Sid Vicious/Vyv Basterd, Roxy Music lounge lizard, and Jean Paul Gaultier-meets-Jean Genet, with a touch of Rocky Horror thrown in. Bravo to designer Hugo Dodsworth for his amusing stylistic nods to all those sources.

The set too is worthy of a mention and pretty ornate for a studio production: we’re at the rumpside of a French meat market complete with a metal fire escape, steel beams and a graffitied roller shutter, which evokes the mean streets of NYC at the same time.

This play already contains a mash-up of accents and languages, with its English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh captains of war – down to Shakespeare’s depiction of “our island” nation – and its French antagonists. The French princess Kate (Ariane Terrell) deftly plays a whole scene in fluent patois, gaily hacking a severed arm into joints with a meat cleaver while her (male! Ricardo Hernandez Morgan) nurse Alice gives her an amusing English lesson.

What was puzzling and even de trop was the attempt to give this production a Godfatherly mafia spin, with Henry scheming to muscle in on the French meat market according to the programme notes, something that doesn’t really translate into the fabric of the storyline and action in a sustained way. It’s more a case of tell rather than show, though meat is a tried metaphor for war.

All the English characters speak with American accents while referencing English victory and England as their homeland, a culture-bend that feels forced in comparison to the seamless gender-bending in this production. Their voice coaching is so good though that you could be forgiven for wondering at the start why this particular intake of BOVTS students all hail from the USA.

The real charm of this show lies in the youthful exuberance and raw energy of the cast under Gemma Fairlie’s even-handed direction. They leap about wielding blades and baseball bats in the battle scenes (evoking West Side Story gang warfare visually in a way that accents can’t do), they bleed and die, dash on and off, flirt, tussle, sing and multirole, having memorised swathes of text seemingly effortlessly with their combined zillions of still-living brain cells.

Caitlin Blackmore, commanding a nuanced yet solid central point as Henry, has over a thousand lines which she delivers unhaltingly – for line nerds, that’s only 400 less than Hamlet.

Rebecca Brudner plays Exeter with a drag king swagger and no vanity and later morphs magically into a shimmering nightclub singer with a gorgeous voice, while Oliver James Parkins shapeshifts ably between the roles of effete Dauphin and wild Cambridge.

Space is too tight to namecheck more than a “happy few”, but the power and fizz of this show lies in the ensemble work of this band of brother-sisters, and that’s all of them together.

For more information about all upcoming BOVTS shows and events, visit www.oldvic.ac.uk.

All photos: Craig Fuller

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