Why this St. John's man is taking on Henry V, and history

You may have seen it around town.

A flyer, featuring the black-and-white portrait of a youngish man with longish, somewhat scraggly hair.

He wears a crown. There's a faint smile on his face and a glint in his eyes. He looks a little too smug for his own good.

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Large letters running across his nobly-robed chest identify him as King Henry V of England, invader of France and hero of the famous Battle of Agincourt, in which a small contingent of English archers decimated a much larger force of heavily armed French knights.

Sunday next week, Oct. 25, will be the 600th anniversary of that battle.

So what?

Don't put that question to David Akenhead and expect a brief answer.

Months of preparation

Akenhead has been eating, drinking and breathing all things Henry V for close to five months now. He's the man behind the aforementioned flyer. He's also the drive behind a special production of William Shakespeare's play Henry V at St. Mary's Hall on Craigmillar Avenue in St. John's next weekend.

If there ever was a play which underlines the futility, the utter futility, of war, this has to be it- David Akenhead

He and his cast have one more week to put it all together. I dropped in on one of their rehearsals three days ago.

It's community theatre at its purest. Akenhead didn't go looking for actors in the usual corners of the arts and culture community; he simply put out word on the street. And they came.

Danielle Barron, for example, who has two roles: Henry V's lady in waiting, and the Earl of Southampton.

Barron has never acted in her life. She got the usual smattering of Shakespeare in school, but no much more. She got drawn in by the poster first, then hooked by Akenhead's sheer enthusiasm.

"I love David's passion for it," she says. "That's why I'm doing the play, honestly. I don't know much about it. But I'm glad that I tried it, that I'm doing it."

Relevant to modern times

Akenhead himself can keep you for hours talking about the play, the tangle of its historic context, all the myths that have grown around it, even its relevance to modern times.

"If there ever was a play which underlines the futility, the utter futility, of war, this has to be it," he says.

A quick Google scan confirms it. Nothing about Henry V's war is quite what it's been made out to be - the legitimate claim to the French throne, the glorious victory at Agincourt, the king's lasting status as a star among English monarchs.

Nothing about Shakespeare's play is quite what it seems either. Akenhead believes it wasn't even penned by the Bard of Avon but by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, a contemporary of Shakespeare and a reputed lover of Queen Elizabeth I herself.

Whoever wrote it, Shakespeare or de Vere, it's a masterpiece of ambiguity.

On a superficial level, King Henry V rises to every challenge, sometimes gamely, sometimes spectacularly. But on closer scrutiny, this solid ground breaksup into multiple layers of meaning. Ironies abound.

Stirring speeches reveal themselves as self-serving manipulation, brave actions as mere response to lucky breaks.

The debate over the true legacy of Henry V has been raging for more than one century. A mock trial organized in 2010 by the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, D.C., left judges divided over the question whether his claim to the French throne through his Norman mother was valid and his invasion of France legal.

The judges were unanimous in condemning him as a war criminal for ordering the murder of 8,000 French prisoners of war to save his victory.

'Nobody really wins'

In fact, his typhoid-ravaged army was in no shape to win any battle. Even the play has him conquer the fortress of Harfleur by bluff. The victory at the Battle of Agincourt is handed him by the sheer arrogance and stupidity by French leaders, who send their knights into action in knee-deep mud where English archers pick them off by the thousands.

The play leaves everything open, or, as Akenhead says, "There is no judgment in the play. That's the beauty of it. It's a kind of lesson in life, because nobody really wins."

Curtis Cronin, a thoughtful and quiet young man, plays the archer Williams, who lets the disguised Henry V know what he thinks of kings, their speeches and their promises.

Not much.

"It brings out the theme of paradox of kingship," Cronin says.

"How a king should appear to his subjects, how a king should act. And if you take that and apply it to the everyday person, how you see peopleappearing, and how they really behave, you can take that around you."

"Well, you can take it to the election that's going on right now," I suggest.

"Yes," he says. "Yes, you can."

Early in the rehearsal, Akenhead delivers one of the more famous lines of the play.

"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of a tiger."

I'm starting to wonder about that smug smile on Henry V's face.

Nothing wreaks more havoc on the truth than when would-be rulers send out their armies.