Review: ENGLISH KINGS KILLING FOREIGNERS, Soho Theatre

A biracial actor stands in the harsh glare of the spotlight, about to recite the St Crispin’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V, clad in a bulletproof vest. Her gaze defiant, she unfurls the flag of St George’s Cross.

English Kings Killing Foreigners is a play largely about probing the complexities of that image. Loosely inspired by Shakespeare veterans Nina Bowers and Philip Arditti’s experiences performing Henry V at the Globe, English Kings… is less concerned with working out exactly where Shakespeare’s play sits between colonial justification and plucky underdog narrative (spoiler: it tends toward the former), and more interested in teasing out why the English theatrical establishment feel the need to endlessly revive the play in the first place – and whether we should.

Both cast members play fictionalised versions of themselves and use their real first names, Nina a Canadian-St Lucian debut actor struggling to find her place in the canon, Phil a veteran of the stage steeped in RADA conservatism who’s just received his British citizenship. It’s a great choice to have them begin the play locked outside the rehearsal room, outsiders in more ways than one, their insecurities on full display.

But the tide of their respective attitudes begins to turn. Nina, stepping into the role of Henry in a production set in a kebab shop in the near future – this script is especially good at skewering a certain brand of well-meaning neoliberal Shakespeare revival – finds meaning in reclaiming the story for her Black, working class, and queer ancestors.

Phil, a Jewish man of Turkish descent, on the other hand, feels his defence of the play crumble when confronted with his relationship with Israeli genocide in Gaza, and with how Henry V replicates colonial dynamics still very much at play in the present day. Bowers deserves particular praise for her brief turn as an obnoxious, devil’s advocate-playing white male director, who invites Phil to replace every instance of ‘England’ in one of Henry’s speeches with ‘Israel’.

All of these tensions come to a head on the play-within-a-play’s opening night, where the St George’s Cross flown on St Crispin’s Day seems to become a character in its own right, by turns a weapon, an uncomfortable intrusion, a blanket wrapping a character in an uncomfortable embrace. Both cast members are intensely physical, and in their hands a struggle over who gets to decide the meaning of a Shakespeare play becomes something much larger, a battle for ownership of English identity and tradition.

With all its rich subtleties, the play is sometimes too self-consciously ‘based on a true story’. At one point, Bowers suddenly breaks the fourth wall to announce that the characters played by her and Arditti are fictional and do not reflect their own views, as though we’re incapable of noticing the blurred lines ourselves. There’s also a conceit where the audience play casting directors at Nina and Phil’s auditions to play Henry, with a few in the front row invited to offer ‘notes’ on their performances, which feels gimmicky and at odds with the darker comedic tone of the rest of the show.

English Kings… was first performed last year and the script’s lack of complacency or foregone conclusions means that it feels contemporary, even as the conversation about ‘diversity’ in theatre evolves. At times, Nina’s slogans can feel shallow instead of politically meaningful, and Phil’s outright rejection of Shakespeare’s text can feel restrictive and unimaginative. Both of these perspectives are flawed, and so Bowers and Arditti do not pretend to have all the answers to what to do about Henry V – it’s up for the audience, and all its myriad relationships with Englishness, to decide.

English Kings Killing Foreigners plays at Soho Theatre until 18 October