THEATRE / Thrust and Harry: Roberts Hanks reviews the Royal Shakespeare Company's Henry V, at Stratford

Presumably the last thing in anybody's mind when the RSC was working out its Stratford summer season was that Henry V would open the week after the Channel Tunnel, since for all the avowals of entente cordiale with which the play ends, it's not the one you'd pick to commemorate the forging of new ties with Europe. In Matthew Warchus's striking production, the brutality and ruthlessness of Henry's methods against the French aren't stinted, and seeing their over- civilised nobility - gorgeously dandified in Kandis Cook's costumes - against Henry's functional, grim army you have some idea of the shock that, say, Parma must have felt on meeting Arsenal.

This interpretation is hardly calculated to whip up patriotic fervour, though, and not just because of the reminders of the trenches in Tony Britton's dignified old soldier Chorus and the poppies beside the battlefield. Iain Glen's king comes across as a monk from one of the harsher military orders, a religious fanatic for whom country, ego and God are inextricably snarled up: so that when he mentions Harry, England and St George in the same breath it doesn't sound like persuasive rhetoric - just a natural inability to separate the concepts.

Warchus has bravely, or foolhardily, left the play more or less uncut, and at three and a half hours it's a slog - you realise how much slack there is in the post-Agincourt comedy, when Linal Haft's Fluellen degenerates into Selwyn Froggit with a Welsh accent.

But there are gains from seeing it whole: one is the Archbishop of Canterbury's pedantic exposition of why Salic law should not stand in the way of Henry's claim to the French throne, usually omitted on grounds of sheer tedium. Here, it doesn't suggest that the audience needs convincing of the justice of Henry's cause; rather, in his eagerness to hear Canterbury's opinion, Glen shows how badly Henry needs to convince himself that right is on his side. You can see how this obsessive might inspire his followers; at the same time, this Gott mit uns attitude is out of step with modern thinking.

Glen suffers from being too much on one note - all sinews and straining jaw, with tight smile or fierce, psychotic stare - but there's at any rate an impressive coherence, making his ruthlessness all of a piece with his flashes of gallantry. When, here, he pulls Pistol's sword across his French prisoner's throat, you realise that the lines you've just heard about a full voice issuing from an empty heart apply as much to the king as the captain. Even his primitive sense of humour - stage- managing the fight between Fluellen and Michael Williams - and his stiff-legged wooing of the French princess (an appealingly gauche Monica Dolan) chime in as the pleasures of someone who's set aside his taste for such things and isn't quite sure how to go about enjoying himself now.

There's less coherence in the rest of the acting; but one or two excellent performances - particularly Clive Wood's desperate Pistol and Joanna McCallum's motherly Mistress Quickly - make the wear and tear on the spine worthwhile.

'Henry V', at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, is sponsored by Allied-Lyons. Booking: 0789 295623

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