After 400 years we still have much to learn from this play
“The patriarchal lineage is very important in the play,” Potts says. “The character of Henry is constantly wrestling with the expectations that he has inherited by being king, and more broadly the expectations of the role he is meant to play.
“We see characters struggling with being the best and the worst versions of themselves. That is the real conflict. Valour and courage are important, but ultimately it’s that struggle, the human one, that is problematic for men in this situation … and where the moral compass needs to be really strong.”
Potts is working with a cast of 11 and has chosen both male and female actors to play the mostly male roles, to highlight the common humanity of those affected by war.
“The females in the play are engaged in a kind of war of their own,” she says. “They are fighting for their voice, they are fighting against the colonisation of their bodies.”
Kazzi, 27, graduated from NIDA in 2023 and this play is his first Shakespeare – in the title role, no less.
As Henry he gets to deliver some of the dramatist’s most resonant speeches, including on the eve of the battle that he and his men must face on St Crispian’s Day: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…”
Kazzi says Henry makes this stirring invocation of camaraderie in the moment, discovering its formula as he speaks it.
“It’s a moment of complete vulnerability, and compassion and empathy, where he sees himself no longer as being a king above his men, but a man of many men, and a brother among them all,” he says. “There’s the very likely possibility of dying in the morning.”
‘It’s a moment of complete vulnerability, and compassion and empathy.’
JK Kazzi
Potts is returning to the theatre as a director after several years of working in administration roles – including as head of theatre at the Australia Council (now Creative Australia), and most recently as executive producer at touring company Performing Lines.
She has noticed, particularly since the COVID lockdowns, a diminishment in Australian theatre, both in the scale and number of plays produced.
“I don’t know that there is any one silver bullet, but the importance of cultural investment is critical,” she says.
“It’s about the arts being taken seriously as an important mechanism for a civil society. There are very few companies where you can direct something of the scale of Henry V. It’s important to be able to tackle the Everests of the repertoire.”
Henry 5 is at the Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, until April 5, then Wollongong, Canberra and Melbourne.
