Race Roughan is the Artistic Director of Headlong theatre company, who tour new plays and fresh stagings of classics around the country. But the suggestion that she sink her teeth into Henry V came from Shakespeare’s Globe in London, where the resulting co-production has just enjoyed a critically acclaimed run at their indoor Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, winning rave reviews.

“I was interested in whiteness and nationalism, and I had another play entirely in mind,” admits Race Roughan. But the more she looked at Henry V, the more obvious it became that it had plenty to say about not only whiteness and nationalism, but also imperialism, immigration, Brexit, Royalism, and our country’s status as an international power (or not). 

The story of Henry V leading British troops to a stunning, unlikely victory over the French, the play has often been subject to critical interpretations, from Nicholas Hytner’s Iraq war-era 2003 version to a bleak recent production at the Donmar starring Kit Harrington. Yet it is older, more triumphantly nationalistic outings that still loom largest in many audiences’ minds: the Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh films, for instance, taken as stirring portraits of national pride.

“Henry V has been used and co-opted, through various points in history, as a piece of nationalist propaganda,” says Race Roughan. Reading it, she felt like she had “unearthed an origins story of the creation of Englishness. I felt like this story needs to be held accountable for its contribution to the ideology of Englishness, with all its toxicity.”

Not that she’s committed an act of vandalism on a classic. “I don’t think Shakespeare wrote a piece of propaganda; I also don’t think he wrote a searing criticism. I think he’s written something very smartly ambiguous. And what me and the team set out to do was to turn the dial up on the bit of the play that is often turned down.”

Running at just two hours long, this is a pared-back and pitch-black Henry V, a psychological thriller where the human cost of an expansionist war, conducted to burnish the male ego, is laid bare. Audiences have been so surprised by the play’s brutality that Race Roughan has even been asked if she wrote certain lines. “No no no, Henry really does threaten to rape the women and murder the babies, that’s in the play! It’s just quite often cut out, or done in a way that doesn’t land.”

Rather than a noble hero, their Henry is a dangerously capricious leader: one minute, full of anxious self-doubt; the next, spurred by a near-psychotic temper into cruel practical jokes and merciless vengeance. And Oliver Johnstone is sensational in the part: he has a watchable charisma, both vulnerable and terrifying.

This Henry has the self-questioning interiority of a Hamlet – his famous “once more unto the breach” speech is delivered inwards, as if trying to spur himself to action rather than his troops. Yet he also possesses the manipulative zeal of a Richard III: not a statesmanlike king, but one of Shakespeare’s arch villains.