Rehearsal Diary

Other actors explore the relationship their character has to other characters in the play, but the Chorus has a unique relationship: with the audience. Penny Downie rehearsed often only with the Director, and even in the latter stages of rehearsal she still seemed an almost marginal figure. However, as soon as the play began to run, the role of the Chorus became both clear and central. She not only establishes in her first speech that the conventions of the performance require the audience to use their imagination and "piece out imperfections", but also the part set up a counterpoint between the power and longevity of the mythical and historical Henry V and the picture of that man and the events surrounding him that are portrayed in this production.

The Chorus – perhaps like Olivier's film in 1944, and those officials in the Pentagon who gave out copies of Henry V to American troops about to embark for action in Bosnia – searches for a romantic, idealistic hero-figure who will inspire and lead. Sometimes, of course, the Henry of the play does that: he is capable of heroic action and courage in the face of great adversity, but he is also shown as profoundly human and therefore inherently fallible. It is that gap between rhetoric and reality, and the tension between how we choose to report historic events and what actually takes place, to which the Chorus draws attention; she wants, as perhaps most of us do, to believe that genuinely heroic action is possible and that history contains models of it. But her "star" is also the man who summarily executes his old friend and drinking companion Bardolph by shooting him in the head at point blank range. As she talks in the early stages of the play, the gap between what she says and what the audience sees is already apparent: "Now all the youth of England are on fire,/And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies. Now thrive the armourers, and honour’s thought/Reigns solely in the breast of every man." But even as the words are leaving her mouth, the audience see Nym and Pistol engaged, not with "honours thought", but in a potentially bloody feud that is eventually ended only by Bardolph's display of superior force and the recognition of their mutual and corrupt self-interest.