English Kings Killing Foreigners
Nina Bowers and Philip Arditti
Soho Theatre
Star rating: 3
Written and performed by Nina Bowers and Philip Arditti, this show is pleasingly original and has as many layers as an apple strudel although there’s nothing sweet about it. At one level it’s a critique of Henry V. At another it’s about a friendship between two actors both of whom see themselves as outsiders. It also explores immigration, colonialism and xenophobia. And it’s pretty funny. They pack a lot into 75 minutes.
Nina and Phil (they use their real names in order to shuffle the layers still further) meet outside the rehearsal room on the first day. He is to be Chorus while she is third soldier. They’re late and they can’t get in so there’s a lot of sparring and bantering. The scene in which he tries to teach her everything he learned at RADA is funny and Nina role-playing the director while Phil works on the Act 1 Chorus is well observed. Finally there’s some emergency recasting and they do the play of which we see fragments with a lot of asides.
So is Henry V a zenophobic play? Nina – mixed race and queer – argues that she does the St Crispin speech for her ancestors because they own it. Phil tries to sabotage her performance and we get a lot of contrary views about entitlement and possession. It’s effectively a deconstruction of the play for our times which manages to be both witty and thoughtful.
There’s a lot of theatrical in-house humour. The audition scene goes down well, as does the whole daftness of some directors. This Henry V is to be set in a Kebab shop in which the counter is swathed in St George flags. It’s the sort of humour which goes down very well on press night when most of the audience have theatre connections. I’m not so sure it would work quite so well with a less attuned audience. And the warm up prologue in which they pretend to audition for the Soho Theatre audience doesn’t add much.
