No hystery mere: writer/director Tom Mallan’s purpose is to take the most powerful story in royal English history – Henry of Monmouth’s growth from a frivolous delinquent into the greatest of Kings – as written by the greatest of playwrights, and turn it inside out. In Mallan’s version, the transformance of Hal the Wastrel into King Henry V was a tragedy, not a heroic romance, and he tells it not from the plains of Agincourt but from the cavernous Boarshead Tavern, where whores and drunkards cavort with the Prince of Wales. Except – they’re not whores and drunkards, but human beings, resolved to squeeze such joy and love as they can against the bitter cold and sea of endless civil war that is 14^th-century England. [Read more...]