“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,” cries the eponymous monarch in Act III of Shakespeare’s Henry V. So begins one of the most evocative speeches in Shakespearean canon, nay the entirety of English literature. It is a speech virtually synonymous with the great Laurence Olivier, who delivers it with memorable panache in the much-celebrated 1944 film adaptation. Yet is it appropriate to imbue this stirring call-to-arms with such composed, almost calculated heartiness? Or to swan about in a gleaming suit of armour during one of the bitterest conflicts of the last millennia? Is this not war, after all? Is this not a harrowing theatre of horrific death, with “all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle”?

Luke Rollason, director of a 5th Week pro- duction of Henry V taking place in Worcester College, certainly thinks so. His play is imbued
with a gritty immediacy, quite divorced from the refined elegance of most adaptations. 

“I really hate the Olivier version,” he tells me, “because it seems to me as if he is just reciting the script. I think it’s incredibly lazy to interpret lines in that way because every speech is essentially a character improvising on the spot. With ‘Once more unto the breach…’, Henry really has to find a way of inspiring his exhausted men.”

His is a promenade produc- tion, in which the audience literally follow characters as their narrative journey takes them from location to location within Worcester ’ s grounds. For Rollason, this atypical approach to staging Shakespeare is integral to his vision of an engagingly visceral production. Think Saving Private Ryan with Elizabethan verse.

“Henry V is a play with real momentum, so it seemed right to perform it as a promenade. The audience will become part of the play, making up the cast of supporting characters, interacting with the actors, sharing soup with the soldiers. As far as I can tell, this has never been done in Oxford before.”

Every device is designed to heighten the script’s already palpable sense of urgency. I witness a rehearsal of the Siege of Harfleur in which rugby tackle bags, baseball bats and human battering rams are the English army’s updated armoury. Incoherent shouting, intense physicality and audible panting reign supreme. It’s tiring just to watch.

“I’m trying to find a way to break out of all those patterns that really tire and bore me as an audience member,” Rollason confesses. “The cardinal sin for any show, but especially for Shakespeare, is boring the audience. I want something interesting to be happening every two minutes. Everyone, including the audience, should be absolutely exhausted by the interval.”

Yet this is not just a tough PE lesson with a theatrical twist. In the deepening gloom of Worcester Gardens, James Colenutt, who plays Henry, rehearses the famous St Crispin’s Day speech. As torchlight illuminates his face from below and “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers” huddle closer against the cold, his voice rings with vitality.

Here is an original and genuinely engaging rendition of a thoroughly over-played song. Yes, these are the grounds of an Oxford college, not a blood-stained battlefield in Northern France, and yes, this is a gaggle of weary students, not a medieval army; but, as the prologue urges, if you let “your imaginary forces work”, the “vasty fields of France” will be crammed into Worcester’s gardens, complete with the essential ugliness of conflict. If you open your mind to the production’s undoubted potential, Rollason et al. will do the rest.

★★★★☆
Four Stars

Rooster Byron is a legend. For a start, his mobile home outside Flintlock provides a place for local teenagers and assorted misfits to get drunk, get high, and party. However, he also has a complex, self-constructed, and often contradictory mythology, in spite of some people (namely: his mate Ginger) dismissing this heroic narrative as “bollocks”. Jerusalem, by Jez Butterworth, tells the story of Byron through his interactions with his “band of educationally subnormal outcasts”, and with his arch-nemeses, Troy Whitworth, and the Kenton and Avon Council.

This brilliantly conceived production of Butterworth’s work is directed by Will Felton, and stars Barney Fishwick in the role of Rooster Byron, the play’s shambolic anti-hero. Rooster is a drug-dealer, a heavy drinker, and has fathered an unconfirmed number of illegitimate children across the South Wiltshire area. So far, so appropriately Byronic, and Fishwick’s handling of the play’s more comedic sections is masterful, drawing the audience into Rooster’s world and making them love a character who might on paper sound unsympathetic. Nonetheless, it is in more emotional moments that the extent of Fishwick’s talent really becomes apparent. It is almost impossible to remain unmoved during scenes in which Rooster’s façade of nonchalance breaks down into vengeful self-destruction, and intense investment in the stories he has half-jokingly related.

The supporting characters too are portrayed with energy and wit. Of particular note is Will Hislop’s Ginger: needy, the butt of everyone’s jokes, and possibly the only true friend Byron has amongst his various followers and hangers-on. Both Fishwick and Hislop have an enviable ability to make their characters, though infinite distances away from being model citizens, incredibly funny, and vulnerable enough to provoke heartfelt sympathy. Strong support is likewise on hand from Tom Pease and James Mooney — amusing as Australia-bound Lee and Irish barman Wesley.

The Keble O’Reilly is a versatile space, but rarely has it been so thoroughly transformed as for this production. The slightly scuzzy rural atmosphere of Byron’s wooded haunt is recreated with enviable attention to detail, right down to the turf which lines the floor of the stage, and the empty beer cans scattered haphazardly across it. Byron’s home seems to grow organically out of the countryside in all its ramshackle, Bacchanalian glory.

Byron’s dispute with the council might be the most obvious example of how nature and civilisation are visibly at loggerheads in this drugged-up, beaten-down pastoral, but it’s there too in the disconnect between commercialised elements of May Day celebrations at Flintlock Fair, and more primal, pagan tradi- tions that lie beneath this veneer of civil festivity. The play examines this conflict between nature and humanity, order and chaos, and reminds us that it’s not always as clear-cut as it may seem — the townsfolk are reliant on the underworld maintained by Byron to get their illicit thrills, and sometimes, the greatest dangers of all dwell within the houses and homes of Flintlock, and not in this Arcadia of eternal adolescence after all.

Butterworth’s play takes its name from a title given to William Blake’s And Did Those Feet In Ancient Time, and it picks out a strand of the poem often ignored in its popular, patriotic usage as an anthem of Englishness. As well as myths, socially accepted truths are questioned in a way of which the poet would be proud. Rooster Byron heart-wrenchingly and perhaps tragically calls on a faith in an older Britain, an ancient, untamed Albion, of which he is the last, doomed, remnant. Blake’s poem speculates as to whether such an idyllic past could have existed — Butterworth’s play asks its audience the same question.