TIME TRIALS.('Henry V')(Theater Review)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 28-JUL-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

"Henry V" (at the Delacorte Theatre, in Central Park, under the lively if uneven direction of Mark Wing-Davey) is Shakespeare's version of three-card monte: what you see is never what you get. What seems, on the surface, a panegyric to the victor of the battle of Agincourt is, in the ironies of its structure and the antitheses of its speech, a cunning commentary on the hypocrisy of political personality.

The prodigal Prince Hal, having ascended the throne, has been born again. "The courses of his youth promised it not," the Archbishop of Canterbury explains in the first scene:

The breath no sooner left his father's body, But that his wildness, mortified in him,, Seemed to die too. . . . , Never was such a sudden scholar made;, Never came reformation in a flood , With such a heady currance, scouring faults.

Now, to consolidate his kingship, Henry V (Liev Schreiber) follows the advice of his dying father in "Henry IV, Part 2"--"Busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels"--and attempts to turn a quarrel with France into a questionable war. For this, Henry needs the public and financial support of the Church; and, despite his fine display of judiciousness, as Shakespeare is at pains to show us through the positioning of scenes, the fix is more or less in.

Dissimulation is the name of Henry V's game, just...

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