Remaking, Redoing or Doing: The Case of Shakespeare's Henry V

International audienceI The status of the play In theory the theatre is not concerned by remakes. Plays are written, performed, and if successful, revived in new productions. There is no finished article that can be remade. The play-text, which is about the nearest thing we get to a finished article, can be reworked but, in the case of Shakespeare, the text itself can hardly be said to have a definitive status in any case and may exist in several versions, none of which can be considered definitive. It is possible to speak of the first performance of a play and its original production, but after that, plays lead their own lives and evolve over time and space in accordance with the evolution of trends in acting and performance styles which themselves evolve in accordance with the cultural tastes of audiences over the ages. Although it is clear that one production may well influence later productions, this phenomenon has until recently (in theatrical terms: the past hundred years or so) been restricted by the simple fact that virtually all theatrical productions left nothing behind, except for a few words in a newspaper review in most cases. Even in the case of the most famous English dramatist there is little evidence left for us to decide how his plays were first performed. For centuries, what audiences actually saw on stage was not what the First Folio would have led us to expect, but a rather strange beast. Shakespeare was rewritten: many lines taken out, some added, new characters, music, dance and spectacle provided and frequently a happy ending put in for good measure. In fact, it is only over the past hundred years that audiences have been given the text more or less in its entirety without the additional dialogue, music, dance etc. it had picked up along the way. At the precise moment that theatre-goers were given the chance to hear (more or less) the whole text, technology was about to become involved too, leading to the play-text being adapted in different ways for the radio, television and of course, cinema. Once it became possible to capture a performance on tape or film, thinking about theatre could begin to change as performances became accessible to more and more people. Scholars gradually started to look at plays as theatre, as performance and not (or not only) as literature. Rather paradoxically, it was thanks to other media that the theatre could be studied as theatre. As we shall see, this is just one of the many paradoxes in the link between the stage and the screen. II Shakespeare and the cinema The relationship between Shakespeare and the movies got off to an early start with many silent films based on the plays. "Silent Shakespeare films can even be seen as th