Roger Warren
Designing Henry V
Designing an epic like Henry V could be an assault course. Just when you think you’ve leapt one hurdle there’s then a ditch, then a river and then something nasty round the bend.
In many respects the story is simple: it’s linear, dynamic and serves the central character’s journey — but that’s also a design challenge. How do you make a space that helps the ensemble keep up the pressure, turn the screw, win the day?! Edward Hall and I will spend many a meeting with script and sketchbook and, together, imagine a world that seeks to honour Shakespeare’s intentions but in a contemporary visual language.
We have conceived an interior space, a bunker, a barracks; fortress England, in which the darkest fears and proudest euphoria of a soldier’s imaginings can be shared across a darkened room. Ed and I sit in front of the carefully crafted model of our production’s scenic world…now what? Discussion, debate, speculation, frustration occasionally but with Propeller, always satisfying – call this ‘work’?!
I drew a full sequence of storyboard images that scope the dramatic landmarks of the production before the company rehearse. They can start as doodles in the margins of my script and notes in Ed’s, emerge from our individual copies and become a third, shared vision for the production that we can present and hopefully inspire the ensemble of performers and the team that are Propeller Theatre: to recruit our company.
The scenes change shape through the rehearsal process but the concept seems to hold up. Part-gym-part-parade ground: the designed ‘tool kit’ for the story is tested to the max by the boys in the rehearsal room, itself perhaps a parallel for the retold fable that is England, and tested ‘Once more…’ for the audience.
The key to unlocking this production undoubtedly lies in how we allow the audience to ‘make imaginary puissance’. There are objects in the space that help us to remind the audience that Shakespeare is dealing with ideas first, and immersion second. Take the two punch bags that we’ve placed on either side of the stage, for example. The scene in which Pistol wrangles, beats and torments his French prisoner for a promise of ransom won’t be effective if the audience are asked to witness a stage fight — it won’t be real in any sense. So how does the scenic world help the Propeller ensemble ‘do real’, do violent actions that the audience can stitch together with the dramatic situation? Two masked chorus thrash the punch bags with the full force of baseball bats whilst the characters make actions and reactions without full contact — it’s the audience that piece the two with their imaginings of pain with every thwack.
The creation of women is openly declared, constructed, architectural and, of course, a design opportunity. Princess Katherine has the interval to prepare her image but [with Propeller] in full view of the audience. She applies make up, is bathed, accompanied by the chorus of troops and is presented with her anachronistic late Elizabethan dress — she is dressed for her role politically, poetically and theatrically.
The all-maleness of the company stimulates our collaborative process and makes clearer the onstage game of tag that characterises good ensemble work, a game without the complication of blatant sexual chemistry. Depictions of gender can be reserved and deployed as simply another stylistic idea serving the narrative rather than a sideshow of naturalistic voyeurism.
The audience is constantly reminded that the actors are (very skilfully) pretending — which in turn requires the audience to collaborate in the pretence. The audience is therefore a crucial part of the ensemble. If they can agree to suspend their reality as the actors do and the scenography contextualizes the game, then anything’s possible — leaps in faith, time, space and conventional storytelling logic. I design ‘plastic’ worlds in which this can fluidly happen.
Michael Pavelka
Scale model of the set design
The Process of the Music for Henry V
There are many different types of musical styles in our production of Henry V. What unites them all is the earthy root of thirteen male actors performing it together to create an effect: to communicate something to the audience at a particular time. A Chorus both theatrical and musical. Whether creating an ecclesiastical atmosphere for the first scene between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely, or the lager-fuelled party of Pistol, Nym and Mistress Quickly, the power of having thirteen blokes all singing and moving together is a great storytelling force.
The trick is to harness what we have. We sat around on Day One and established whether anybody could play anything, and then Edward Hall said we needed a Te Deum and Non Nobis. Having played and written for piano and guitar in various shows, I said I’d give it a go. Others pitched in with what they could do. So we ended up in differing parts of the show with tap dance, accordion, saxophone and guitar all pootling away alongside four-part harmony choral singing.
We began to learn songs as a group — all of us standing around the piano, and taking various folk songs that we knew and playing with them — seeing whose voice sat where, who could accompany etc. Out of this came the folk tune ‘John O’Dreams’, that we now sing to introduce the Chorus of ‘Now entertain conjecture of a time’… on the night before Agincourt. We just sang it together for ages — a soft, beautiful tune which we split into four harmonies, listening to each other together filling the room with simple sound.
By the time I came to write the Te Deum and Non Nobis it was easy. I dreamt up an introduction and theme for it, but I never wrote it down as a piece of music. We just picked it out and fashioned it together into a rousing, spiritual piece with a religious, ‘choric’ feel. Gunnar Cauthery then said he would write a Requiem in response to the Te Deum — so in the two big Choral numbers there is a deliberate musical correlation. We then used his same music for the Kyrie. Once we had a musical language we found we could knit all sorts of things together. We created contemporary soldiers’ songs which allude to contemporary music.
Actors are extraordinarily adaptable creatures and will learn things very quickly, but to me, there is no point in imposing a piece of music or dance upon a group when most of them are intimidated and don’t think they can do it. They won’t enjoy what they’re doing, it is alien to them, and they won’t sing it very well. If it comes from the group, and we find it together, then the whole group can invest in it, find our joy in it, and therefore communicate what we need to do all the better. To me, there is no difference between dividing up the lines of the Chorus speeches, and the division of the music amongst the company. Each man plays his part. To say I wrote the Te Deum, or did the arrangements for some of the songs, is true in one sense, but actually it came from us all. And I still haven’t written it down.
Nick Asbury
This Edition
This is a shortened version of the text of Henry V as printed in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works (1623). It differs from the original in three principal respects. Most noticeably, all the Choruses are divided amongst the company, and in this text the speakers are simply indicated by numbers. Mistress Quickly’s account of the death of Falstaff is omitted, since it alludes to events of earlier plays, not to this one. And on the night before Agincourt, the scenes in the English camp are performed simultaneously with an earlier scene for the French nobles.
We are very grateful to Angie Kendall for her help in preparing this edition.
Edward Hall and Roger Warren
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