Scoutmaster Superstar

By RICHARD CORLISS

HENRY V by William Shakespeare

It has often been said that if Shakespeare were alive today he would be not a playwright but a film maker. Case in point: Henry V. With its sprawling dramatic structure, a dozen "locations," some 40 speaking parts and a huge, climactic battle scene, Henry V just about qualifies as Shakespeare's epic moviescript. SEE the lords of two great nations exchange nasty taunts and arm for Armageddon!

MARVEL at the spectacle of soldiery and swordsmanship in the decisive battle of Agincourt! THRILL as the victorious monarch woos and wins the fair Katharine -- in two languages! It is all here, and more (including some of the loveliest wordplay in English or French). No wonder the play's Chorus poor-mouths the restrictions of the stage and the absence of "things/ Which cannot in their huge and proper life/ Be here presented." And no wonder that the definitive Henry V is Laurence Olivier's 1945 film version.

For a movie script, a movie setting: a theater under the stars in Manhattan's Central Park. Since 1957, when a flatbed truck carrying Joseph Papp's touring Free Shakespeare Festival broke down near Belvedere Lake, Central Park has served as the backdrop, the chorus and occasionally the antagonist of the Bard's plays. So, as the storm clouds of war form on King Henry's brow, the summer sun sets abruptly, leaving audience and players in the dark. Henry addresses his troops before battle, and some low-flying aircraft provide martial rumblings. Henry and Katharine share their first kiss, and a police siren serendipitously whoops for joy. Is all the world a stage? Then Manhattan is a bustling sound stage.

For a movie set, a dashing movie star: Kevin Kline. Like the young Olivier, whom he eerily resembles, Kline has shuttled successfully between stage (The Pirates of Penzance) and screen (The Big Chill). Last summer in Central Park he portrayed Richard III as a passionate black comedian who got sexual shivers from doing ill. Henry V offers a subtler challenge. Taken at handsome face value, he is the noble conqueror of a contemptuous nation. Henry is also a bit of a prig: "The cold-bath king," Ralph Richardson called him, "the exaltation of all scoutmasters." Beneath the glamorous raiment one can also glimpse the wily casuist who accepts the flimsiest excuse for invading France and courts his future wife knowing he has already won her as a spoil of war. Perhaps following Olivier's lead, Kline plays Henry as a hero and allows the attentive spectator to listen for the rogue, not between Shakespeare's lines, but in them.

The same can be said for Wilford Leach's staging. His colorful pageant measures out the play's ironies in dollops, like sherbet between courses at a picnic banquet. The palace confrontations are suitably imposing; the low comedy is practically subterranean; the battle scenes raise enough smoke to earn an EPA sum mons; the final love duet clears the air and tickles the heart. Here Kline summons all his manly charm, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (a dark-eyed delight in The Human Comedy on and off Broadway) is the Katharine of a monarch's dreams. He plays the shy wooden soldier; she recedes, ever so graciously, from the advances of a velvet-tongued suitor. Their tryst brings the evening to savory fulfillment, and should encourage Producer Papp to invite them back next summer to play Hamlet and Ophelia, or anything else they want.