Kings of War, Barbican, theatre review: 'A coolly penetrating appraisal of political leadership'

The four-and-a-half hour compression of Shakespeare's Henry V, three Henry VI plays and Richard III is impressive

A scene from Kings of War at Barbican Theatre (Jan Versweyveld)

The red carpet is rolled out five times for coronation ceremonies during Kings of War. In between, the crown is stored in a glass-fronted drugs cabinet at the rear of the stage where it eventually shares shelf-space with murderous syringes. It's a typically sardonic and sinister touch in this four-and-a-half hour compression of Shakespeare's Henry V, three Henry VI plays and Richard III. A coolly penetrating appraisal of political leadership in an age of chronic media-manipulation, the modern-dress production is brilliantly directed by Ivo van Hove and performed in Dutch with English surtitles by Toneelgroep Amsterdam.

It's impossible not to think of Tony Blair and Iraq when Ramsey Nasr's Henry V decides to invade France on dubious legal grounds and attempts to package the rousing rhetoric of “Once more unto the breach...” for the consumption of television viewers. But if the camera is often an instrument for distortion, it is also a way of showing us what our leaders don't want to see in this adaptation, presented in a production that intercuts live action and video with seamless eloquence.

The setting by Jan Versweyveld is a sealed-off wartime bunker: radar, colour-coded phones, men in sharp suits cut off from the consequences of what they deterimine. Behind this, though, there's a maze of clinical white corridors down which the camera noses and eavesdrops, throwing close-up footage – of furtive conspiracies; murders by lethal injection; the English camp on the eve of battle: the proliferating dead; even a flock of unruly sheep when the beleaguered Henry VI yearns to be a “homely swain” – onto a video wall.

Nasr's Henry V is a smart, media-savvy operator who knows that politics is partly about performance. Portrayed by Eelco Smits as a pious, pyjama-clad dweeb, Henry VI is, by contrast, painfully sincere and disastrously at the mercy of scheming advisers. What makes Richard III, though, truly terrifying in Hans Kesting's superb performance is the mounting insanity that leaves him incapable of recognising the slightest distinction between real power and its dressing-up box appurtenances. We laugh at this knock-kneed overgrown school boy with the too-tight suit and the purple birthmark on his face and the ridiculous fantasies of picking up hotlines to world leaders (“Hello Barack”). But the mirth freezes in the throat when kingship exposes him as a certifiable monomaniac, so avid for the crown he impatiently stage-manages his own coronation and so deficient in any depth of selfhood he keeps checking his reflection in the mirror for validation.

The plays have been severely cut to suit the director's preoccupation with the top dogs and the voice of the people is rarely heard (there's no trace of Jack Cade's rebellion, say). But within its own terms, hauntingly underscored by a trombone quartet and counter-tenor voice, this marathon production is both mordant and mesmeric.

To May 1; 020 7638 8891