SHAKESPEARE knew as well as Marx that men make their own history but not under conditions of their own choosing.

His Henry IV-V trilogy bears this out in its exploration of the struggle of the plays’ protagonist Prince Hal on the road to reluctant kingship.

For those who do not know the earlier plays, the Bard supplies reminders of the background of the young man who preferred the company and entertainment of London street life to the arid politicking of the court.

Gregory Doran’s splendidly shaped and coherently delivered production presents us — in the superbly nuanced performance of Alex Hassel’s tentative and isolated king — with a man feeling his way into a role he neither wanted nor understood.

Wary of the Archbishop’s convoluted legal advice supporting invasion of France, his doubts are overcome in an explosion of suppressed anger at the Dauphin’s derisory gift of tennis balls.

As the play progresses towards the mayhem leading to English triumph at Agincourt, in which Shakespeare doesn’t forget Welsh, Irish and Scottish assistance, Hassel delivers the great patriotic gung-ho speeches, laying aside but clearly not forgetting the lessons he has learned from his disguised pre-battle night visit to his disillusioned army.

He knows, despite the crown, that: “The king is but a man, as I am,” as one soldier tells him.

His is a journey to a confidence honed on painful expediency and strategic compromises with his natural human sympathies.

He confirms the capital punishment of his old-time bar-room companions for looting and the killing of the French prisoners at a moment of battle crisis. At the same time, he has acquired a sense of the schizophrenic stress involved in wielding political power and retaining the human touch.

Among a fine supporting cast, Joshua Richards’s cod-Welsh officer Fluellen carries much of the humour while Oliver Ford Davies’s Chorus handles Shakespeare’s repeated reminders to use our imaginations to conjure the shifting medieval scenes from London to the French court and battlefields with all the excited energy of an aged adolescent.
He cajoles and at times bullies the audience to such an extent that the cast, in unison, tell him to shut up.

Greg Doran’s production, as so often, reveals the man beneath the mask.

Runs until October 25, box office: rsc.org.uk

Review by Gordon Parsons