The Hollow Crown: Henry V, BBC Two, review

There was a scene towards the end of The Hollow Crown: Henry V (BBC Two, Saturday) when the young king considered his victory at Agincourt; his sword was lowered and behind him flapped a tattered St George’s Cross. It was a visual metaphor that represented Thea Sharrock’s take on what is probably Shakespeare’s best-known history play. This version showed Henry as a ruler not only averse to jingoism, but also weary of his own rhetoric.

Henry V is a play which, in the past, has been used both to justify war (as in Olivier’s 1944 version) and expose its horrors (Branagh’s, in 1989). But Sharrock was not going to be drawn on a definitive line here. Tom Hiddleston’s Henry imbued every word he spoke with ambiguity. When he got tough at Harfleur, proclaiming that “the gates of mercy shall be all shut up”, it was as if he was having to will himself to believe in his own words. The play’s two most famous speeches – “Once more unto the breach” and “We few, we happy few” – were delivered not as rabble-rousing set pieces, framed by cheering knights and a perfectly formed shower of arrows, but in close up. Through Hiddleston’s rheumy-eyes and wavering voice, these speeches which once cheered a nation became twisted with self-doubt; the words of a king who had been made aware of the heavy cost of warfare and remained unconvinced whether power was his by divine right.

Hiddleston’s performance was a clever one. He is a cerebral actor and for that reason failed to convince in his early scenes (in Henry IV Part One) as a roister-doister. It was only when his heart was heavy, meditating on his destiny in a corpse-strewn foreign field, that you realised his quiet power.

When this Henry V didn’t work, the fault lay with Shakespeare. Rare is the production where the scenes featuring the Dauphin crackle with any sort of dramatic vigour – they didn’t here – and the courtship between Henry and the French princess Katherine, though deeply charming in some ways, felt like a stodgy encumbrance after the lean action of Agincourt.

It is of course a play that is weighed down with the triumphs of previous productions, but Sharrock did enough to make it feel reinvigorated. It may have lacked the cinematic chutzpah of Rupert Goold’s Richard II which opened The Hollow Crown series, but there were still moments of beautiful dramatic clarity; not least in Sharrock’s reinvention of the former page to Falstaff, whose boyhood is ripped asunder by battle and who, at the end of the play, is presumed dead, sensationally killed off as a martyr by the French. Here, he became an onlooker, surviving the battle to be made prematurely wise by what he had seen. In the final moments, he metamorphosed into John Hurt’s fruity-voiced Chorus. When he uttered the words, “Our bending author hath pursu’d the story”, it was the sound of a voice that had experienced loss, adding great potency to that last speech.

There were many good performances. and in keeping with Hiddleston’s, they were on a small scale: Anton Lesser’s steely, grave Exeter; Owen Teale’s weary, pensive Fluellen and above all, Paul Ritter, an actor who is surely destined for greatness very soon. His Pistol conveyed perfectly the shock of a man who reluctantly had left behind the rowdy cheer of Eastcheap, and found himself in middle age contemplating the melancholy of a medieval autumn.

The BBC is often criticised for various reasons, some more serious than others. But it is a sobering thought that no other TV company would have contemplated making The Hollow Crown, and we would be all the poorer without it.