Word: v
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...second season of the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis opened with a palpable hit, Henry V, and a palpable miss, Saint Joan. There are shortcomings in both. After a year of playing Minneapolis, the company has adopted a broader style, giving the Midwest audience the kind of easy laughs it seems to demand. The play choices are scarcely venturesome. On the record of the Guthrie Theater so far, the oft-expressed hope that decentralized regional theater might revitalize the enfeebled condition of the drama in the U.S. must be deferred...
...Henry V. Something resembling a thunderbolt is heard offstage. Out of nowhere, what seem like a hundred men are shouting, sweating, straining as they haul a cannon to stage center. It belches smoke. It is hidden in smoke. The whole theater is going up in smoke. A man has mounted the cannon, but it is difficult to see him, let alone hear him. He is King Henry V (George Grizzard), and what he is saying is, "God for Harry, England and St. George." What the scene is saying is-the prop's the thing...
...this cannon is virtually the only conversation piece that Director Tyrone Guthrie has permitted himself. His Henry V is the least tricked-up Shakespearean production that Guthrie has ever been associated with in the U.S. Except for cutting some lines for pace, he trusts the author and the playgoer, for a change, and the play flashes like an unsheathed sword, keen, virile, inescapably compelling. It is a patriot's poem of valor, a memorial ode written in the bright and acrid air of combat for all men who ever fought, bled and died for their country's honor...
...those who may legitimately have felt that Olivier's magnificent film would dwarf future stage productions of Henry V, Guthrie's production is a revelation. The scope and sweep of action that he crams into "the wooden O" are astonishing. The arena stage helps, since action initiated offstage picks up tremendous momentum by the time it hits the stage: Guthrie sends soldiers winging down the aisles like javelins...
...limitations comes clearer with each performance he gives. When there is a broad streak of nastiness in a character, Grizzard plays the role splendidly, but something sly, evasive and insecure in his countenance and bearing saps all conviction from his attempts to play parts like Hamlet and Henry V. His "Once more unto the breach, dear friends" and St. Crispin's Day ("we happy few") speeches are not plunges of passion but sputterings of saliva...