CAN SHAKESPEARE BE FILMED?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 367, 5 July 1946, Page 30

CAN SHAKESPEARE BE FILMED?

A Personal Impression of **Henry V’’

(Written for "The Listener" by

JAMES

SHELLEY

MUST confess that when I was urged to go to the Technicolour version of Shakespeare’s Henry V. some 18 months ago in London, I succumbed to the pressure with very serious misgivings. I had seem film attacks on Shakespeare before, and I had half made up my mind that his plays were by their very spirit foreign to the medium of the screen. I had come away even from Reinhardt’s Hollywood version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream feeling that I had been present at an elaborate insult to English literature. However, I went to Olivier’s production of Henry V and came away-I frankly, acknowledge-smitten to the heart with the beauty of it all. The screen foreign to Shakespeare! Why, here in this theatre in the Haymarket I had seen the realisation of the very dreams that stirred the poet’s imagination when the cramped conditions of his own Globe Theatre had forced him to sigh: O! for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention; A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene, PNP a ts ea Ba But pardon, gentles all, The flat unraised spirits that hath dar’d On this unworthy scaftold to bring forth So great an object; can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt?

What would Shakespeare have made of the film medium had he lived in our days? Let us not think that he would have scorned our modern scientific contraptions and confined his attention to weaving lovely tapestries of words. Not so. He was a working actor and knew all the tricks of the theatre, and in the making of his plays he took advantage of all the stage machinery. available at the Globe to quicken the dramatic picture he wished to paint in the minds of his varied audience. What would Shakespeare have made of the film medium? I know no better answer than has been given by ._Laurence Olivier in his astounding production of Henry V.; and until I saw it I did not think that there could be an i oe OT * A COUPLE of years or so after Shakespeare arrived in London-a young: impressionable man of 22-the pride of England was stirred to exuberant life by the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and the poet’s expression of that pride in the long series of chronicle plays during the next ten years culminated in this most English of all English plays — Henry V. Again the pride of England, and of the whole British people, was stirred in our

own generation by the D-Day landing of our troops on the coast of France within a gunshot of the landing place of Henry V. And while that miraculous landing was taking place this very film must have been in the making. We marvel that such a _ production could have been contemplated during critical stages of the greatest war in history and carried through with such unhurried triumph. And yet, I wonder if the triumph would have been so complete had it not been infused with the spirit of D-Day and of the Commandos to whom the picture is dedicated. During. my short visit to England early last year, 1 saw John Gielgud in a charming stage presentation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a not-so-charming presentation of Hamlet; I saw Olivier himself on the stage in Richard III.; but by far. the greatest thrill the theatres of England afforded me was this film of Henry V. I could wish all New Zealand would share the thrill with me. If this production were seen by the youth of our schools and colleges it would do more for the appreciation of Shakespeare than a whole year’s teaching by our most enlightened teachers.

FO begin with, the picture transports us to Elizabethan London, and we float across the Thames and enter the newly-erected Globe Theatre. We see the gathering of the audience, the preparation of the actors, and early scenes of the play acted in the exuberant style of that day under conditions that were so familiar to the poet himself. Then the hampering confines of the Globe dissolve and + + «+ with imagin’d wing our swift scene flies In motion of no less celerity Than that of thought

to the vasty fields of France and to the French Court. Not a France that is mere earth, but a France of the medieval romances, of knights of chivalry, depicted as the exquisite illuminations of some precious manuscript of Froissart’s Chronicles would depict them, in colours of unreal loveliness-in other words, a France conjured up by the imagination of Shakespeare as it peopled the pages of Holinshed’s Chronicles. We see the exhausted English soldiery waiting through the night for the expected doom; we see the confident flower of French chivalry wishing for the dawn anticipating their triumph. We see

the most terrific charge of the knights, and the deadly patience of the English archers. And then, after an agony of suspense, we are given an illuminating flash of military tactics by which we see how it came about that the. English won the Battle of Agincourt. Last, we see the exquisitely fantastic love-making of Henry and Katharine. And through it all we are feasted with pictures that are so beautiful in their colour and composition that it is with pain that we see them pass away; and

we wonder how all that loveliness can be shut up in a tin container ‘till the next night’s showing. It is difficult to praise too highly: the men who have given us this feast-the producer, historical research workers, the artists and actors, the photographers, and William Walton for his splendidly fitting music. To see a film su¢h as this is to undergo an experience which cannot but stir one’s spirits to’ high endeavour and tune one’s feelings to "the gentle touch of beauty.