Tapestry of Violence

Games are the wars of boys, and wars are the games of men. This is the central motif of an arrestingly unorthodox production of Henry V, which opened the American Shakespeare Festival Theater season last week at Stratford, Conn.

Director Michael Kahn puts the sig nature of his determined intent on the play from the outset. An improvisatory prologue serves as a metaphor for the work. In sweatshirts, football jerseys and dungarees, members of the cast drib ble a basketball, wrestle, somersault and shadowbox. Someone pumps back and forth on a child's swing. The seat of that swing will later serve as Harry of Monmouth's throne. The rising intensity of sticks beaten rapidly together, a rhythmic tapestry of violence, suggests a neighborhood gang rumble. One knows in one's slightly chilled bones that this war is not going to be fought on the dap pled green fields of Eton but on the harsh black asphalt of a city playground.

Whenever Shakespeare is presented in unaccustomed form, the question arises as to whether geriatric pills of restorative gimmickry have been administered, or whether the timely has retrieved the timeless. Kahn does not distrust the text. He simply looks into it with the sardonic eyes of a Brecht. The result is a play about war, heroism and patriotism colored in the mock-ironic hues of a generation that cannot believe in war, heroism and patriotism. In that light, valor may appear as cruelty and national honor as parochial vanity.

At its best, this approach is explicit and visual. A bishop's red robes billow out on crinoline hoops, a cartoon of gluttony, indicating that the church would feed on men's lives to fatten its authority. The foot soldier who delivers the tenderly piteous speech that includes "I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle" is a Negro, suggesting that the king rules by exploitive oppression. When the list of the French dead is read, each dead man rises with a blood-splotched white mask to stand at the footlights in a solid phalanx facing the audience.

In a strenuously imaginative production some experiments must fail. Director Kahn has the leaders of France actually speak French while a man and a woman translate into microphones and loudspeakers simultaneously, in U.N. fashion. The effect is clever but distracting. On the other hand, a sense of the seeming invulnerability of the French forces is aptly conveyed by having them outfitted like hockey goalies. Initially, this creates the illusion of invincible force, but later it is revealed as the symbol of futile totalitarianism.

The ultimate strength of Henry V has to rest with the man who plays the king. It is not an enviable task, for the role will always be haunted with the ghost of Olivier and the undying memory of that shivering heraldic cry, "God for Harry! England and Saint George!" Len Cariou lacks that hortatory magic of voice and presence. He is manly, straightforward and appealing, someone whom troops would always follow into the next town but scarcely into that cauldron of death and glory which is what Shakespeare meant by immortalizing Agincourt on St. Crispin's day.

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