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A Sevenoaks-educated Shakespeare star |
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Page 6 of 7
Vine: We believe you wrote a thesis on Henry V at university?
GS: Actually I wrote about the Branagh and Olivier films of Henry V. I hadn’t seen it on stage. The films are not the entire play, they are both very edited versions of the play. And they both take a strong line on what the auteur wants the audience to see. Olivier’s is propaganda, and Branagh’s is a sort of alternative propaganda where the message is how brutal the consequences of war are. And neither, I think, is the whole play, because of course Shakespeare is more of a ratbag of contradictions than that. But knowing what they have done casts a long shadow over the play, in trying to wrest it back and make it your own.
So I did have quite a struggle in making the character my own. Doing it in the context of eight other plays provided the key to what I thought about it. It’s too easy to judge this character either as someone who is pro-war or anti-war, or a warmonger, or a sort of nationalist. These labels are too easy to put on it. It felt to me that seeing it in the context of all the other plays, you realise that Shakespeare is working out how you govern in a period of inevitable war. What Henry does brilliantly is try to harness the inevitable conflict to some purpose. There is going to be a war.
Henry’s father says to him, ‘Make busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels’, so you know what’s coming. I don’t think he takes that on lightly. I think he recognises that tens of thousands of people have died in Richard II’s reign, tens of thousands of people have died in his father’s reign, tens of thousands of people are going to die more in his son’s reign because of his son’s inability to seize the situation and take control of it. So Henry says, ‘For better or for worse, I am going to try and harness this period of conflict to some nation-building end.’ And he doesn’t go into that lightly. It clearly wracks his conscience, how to prosecute that war. The hallmark of the man is the humanity with which he approaches every situation in the play and every decision that needs to be made. So that was my feeling about doing it, to show the human face of the leader who is attempting to make these decisions.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 07 July 2008 )
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