After 400 years we still have much to learn from this play

On a cold and drizzly day last September, Marion Potts, Anna Tregloan and JK Kazzi made a pilgrimage of sorts to Azincourt in northern France, site of the legendary battle between English and French armies in 1415.

The terrain there is much like that of the Somme – the scene of more bloodshed 500 years later – and when it rains, the flat fields quickly turn to mud.

Visiting Azincourt – known to the English as Agincourt – helped shape Potts’ thinking as she prepares to stage Shakespeare’s famous depiction of the battle, in Henry V, next month. Tregloan is designing the sets and costumes, and Kazzi will make his professional stage debut as Henry in the play that Bell Shakespeare is marketing as Henry 5.

Australian theatre director Marion Potts and JK Kazzi. Marion is directing the Bell Shakespeare’s production of Henry 5 at the Sydney Opera House next month.Credit: James Brickwood

The museum at Azincourt has a display about Shakespeare’s drama, and the audio guide, Potts says, makes no bones about the play being English propaganda.

“What was really clear is that there are multiple perspectives on history – and this play is putting that idea front and centre,” she says. “It is about Henry, but it’s also about the way we write history, the way we tell stories, and the way those stories permeate our consciousness and the identity we create for ourselves.”

Henry V charts the young king’s sudden maturity from the roistering, roguish Prince Hal to the leader of an outnumbered army on foreign soil where victory is by no means certain. The speeches he makes to his men have echoed through time, whether on fields of battle or in motivational seminars: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more…”

Potts is setting the play not in the historical past but in an unidentified present, “a world where young men are in perpetual training either to go to war, or to prepare for war”, but she is deliberate in not alluding to any particular conflict or civil strife.

And, while she doesn’t use the phrase “toxic masculinity”, her aim is to unpack the dehumanising nature of war and military culture, and the expectations on young men to “toughen up”; to be killing machines.

“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.

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