SOURCE: Kane-Lavin, Anne. “Henry V.” Shakespeare Bulletin 21, no. 2 (spring-summer 2003): 19-20.

In the following review, Kane-Lavin praises the 2003 Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival staging of Henry V, directed by Terrence O'Brien. Kane-Lavin notes that the production demanded that the audience reconsider “war, its consequences, and its relatively short-lived benefits.”

When the Chorus—dressed officiously in long black coat, pants tucked into laced boots—crosses the stretch of field into the tent of the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival to bid the audience our “imaginary forces work,” we take her request to heart. No meaner stage could hold so splendid an array of characters and locales. Those seated on the semicircle of risers rimming the tent look past the straw-covered round of stage and out upon a meadow treed with hundred-year-old oaks and maples, the lawn disappearing over the embankments of the Hudson, the rugged highland escarpment rising in silhouette as the...