Soldiers of fortune

The young and the radical should be enthused and engrossed. But patriotic purists and conservative romantics will loathe what Nicholas Hytner, the new National Theatre director, has done to Henry V.

They may tolerate Hytner making the play a contemporary war drama, complete with real Jeeps careering onto a darkened stage, deafening machine-gun fire, and English and French monarchs amusingly waging a war of furious words on television screens.

They may, however, question the way in which the production raises doubts about the value or morality of Henry's victorious war-campaign. But then the pleasure of Hytner's beautifully acted production depends upon its subversive freshness and mocking satire.

Shakespeare scholars have long debated whether Henry V is a hymn to England's war glory and a heroic warrior king or a dark satire on warfare and a hypocritical monarch. Hytner's sympathies are more with the second position than the first. He follows in the theatrical footsteps of Michael Bogdanov's famous modern dress Henry V, with its critique of Lady Thatcher's Falkland's war campaign.

Adrian Lester's introverted, unsympathetic Henry, in a sharp double-breasted suit and shaven head, more warrior than monarch, presides over what is presumably a contemporary war cabinet. Penny Downie's Chorus, sounding like a cross between a condescending Newsnight compere and a literature don lecturing to fairly thick students, keeps urging us to use our imagination, while the atmospheric staging scarcely requires us to do so.

Tim Hatley's effective design consists of little more than a dark, panelled screen of opaque windows that folds back and away. Television is the ironic, distancing perspective through which war and the preparations for it are amusingly filtered. "Now all the youth of England are on fire," says Miss Downie, as the lights rise on a deserted Eastcheap pub where Corporal Nym glumly drinks alone.

The spirit of the dead Falstaff is raised on a huge TV screen before the low-lifers go off to fight viciously in war. Lester's Henry V rallies his troops and makes threats to the French by way of television. Ian Hogg's French monarch, with Adam Levy's wild Dauphin and assorted courtiers at his side, speaks from a gilded palace and retaliates in televisual kind. Happily and for once, these enemies of England are not represented as vain, effete fools.

Lester speaks the great calls to battle with business-like efficiency rather than passionate commitment. He rises to no great emotional heights at Agincourt or Harfleur. His Henry, characterised by emotional detachment, scant conscience and outbreaks of wild temper, convincingly embodies the brutal ruthlessness of a killing machine. No wonder he enthusiastically orders the killing of French prisoners.

True to this concept and to real history Hytner decodes the play's sentimental, happy ending. Here the French monarch looks demoralised and his daughter ( Felicite du Jeu) is forced into a marriage she dreads. This is a rare Henry V, convincingly revalued and redefined.

Booking to 1 July. Box office: 020 7452 3000.

Henry V