Vine: Is it true you sought advice from your brother who’s an army officer?
GS: When I was researching the role, I felt there were a couple of key lines in it that were my way into it. Henry says, ‘For as I am a soldier, a name that in my thoughts becomes me best.’ He identifies himself as a military leader. And when he is wooing Catherine he puts to her very bluntly that he is not an eloquent man in the courtly sense, he is a military man and she must recognise that if she wants to take him on.
And I thought, having a brother in the army is quite useful from that point of view. What does somebody who is a trained soldier feel about having to make these sorts of decisions? So I took quite a lot of the conundrums that are set by Shakespeare in the play -- how do you approach talking to your soldiers the night before battle, what sort of thing do you want to say to them on the day of battle, all these things that we take as read, that Shakespeare has coined brilliantly, and I tried to see what kind of relevance they might have to nowadays. And interestingly, Shakespeare has hit the nail on the head in most of these situations, in the fine point detail of the behaviour not only of Henry but also of his men during the campaign, to the point where my brother felt it held an absolute mirror up to the way the army is and its leaders are right now.
Vine: Has your brother served in Iraq or Afghanistan?
GS: He has done tours in Bosnia and Kosovo and Northern Ireland and he will probably be going to one of those other two later this year. He’s had a desk job for two years.
Vine: Did you learn something new from him about Henry V or just confirm what you thought?
GS: It confirmed something that Shakespeare says of the character, that he thinks of himself as a soldier. So as a way into it, I thought, how does a soldier think? Because he doesn’t think of himself as king. His father stole the crown and he has run away from it as a kid. And eventually he says, I’ll take it on, but he’s not a natural born king by nature. By temperament he obviously feels he is not a king but a soldier. And so some other things come into play about how he thinks about his campaign and the safety of his men.
These become very important questions for him as a soldier. And that gives it great modern relevance as well. That was my approach, rather than trying to hold up a mirror to the Iraq or Afghanistan conflicts and comparing Henry and his dodgy basis for going to war to George Bush or Tony Blair.
