REVIEW: AFTER AGINCOURT by Peter Mottley at Lion and Unicorn Theatre 25 March - 5 April 2025
‘The horrors you can never forget’ ★★★★
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
From William Shakespeare’s Henry V
The reality is not what Henry V suggested. Old soldiers are too haunted by memories that will not go away to boast. War is hell, and it always has been. The only people to benefit are cynical leaders, who profit from the dreadful deaths of others, and who make up heroic myths to keep the poor bloody infantry in line. “I’m right behind you” the first world war general assures his soldiers in Blackadder. “About 40 miles behind” replies Blackadder, sotto voce.
After Agincourt offers a very simple premise, as many of the best theatrical ideas do. Pistol is a minor character in Shakespeare’s Henry V, where he is presented as a drunken foul-mouthed braggart, whom the Welsh soldier Fluellen humiliates, forcing him to eat a raw leak to escape a beating.
In this 75 minute monologue, Pistol goes home from the war, having seen things that no one should ever see, and having lost his friends, Falstaff, Nym and Bardolph, in France, and his wife, Mistress Nell Quickly, in England. Nell, he tells us, died of the pox, “an occupational hazard”, for like many women of the time, Nell partly earned her bread and his beer by selling her body. But where Shakespeare used him only as a foil for others, and is content to have him as a laughing stock, Peter Mottley makes him the centre of his play, and wants to understand him and make us care about him.
Henry V, before he was king, was a friend and drinking companion to them all. Shakespeare presents Henry’s decision to have Nym and Bardolph hanged for looting a church as a decisive and even heroic rejection of his tumultuous youth. Mottley’s Pistol sees it as a betrayal, and you can hardly blame him. Henry has already killed Falstaff by rejecting him – “I know you not, old man” – and now he hangs two more old friends who didn’t even mean to loot the church – they went in to pray, and then gave way to temptation, stealing a couple of trinkets that turned out to be almost valueless.
These were the friends of Henry’s youth. He had drunk with them, accepted their friendship, enjoyed their company, learned about life from them, and “he was not above giving Nell a good seeing to upstairs” either. Yet “he sat in his best armour and gave the order for two of his mates to have the life choked out of them.” He tells his soldiers “For he today who sheds his blood with me shall be my brother” and Pistol says bitterly: “Tell that to Bardolph and Nym.”
Those who benefit from war are not those who fight it. Henry V benefits. Vladimir Putin benefits. For Pistol, for the poor Russian soldiers sent to try to conquer Ukraine, there is nothing but misery, and either death or a legacy of terrible memories that never go away.
This is a tremendous play, full of dreadful images of war and sudden flashes of laugh-out-loud humour. At the centre of it, actor Gareth David Lloyd gives us a Pistol whom we believe in and whom we care about, with all his human failings, in a bar, drunk, trying unsuccessfully to drown his sorrows. Lloyd’s performance is magnificent. If I had to nitpick, I would say that he shouts a little bit too often and a little bit too loudly – sometimes, in this tiny theatre, it threatens to break the magic.
If you live within striking distance of Kentish Town, forget the glitzy and expensive west end for an evening - there is a moving, original, absorbing theatrical experience on your doorstep, and it will cost you a fraction of what the West End will set you back.
After Agincourt
The Lion & Unicorn Theatre until 5 April 2025
SHOW INFORMATION:
WRITTEN BY: Peter Mottley
DIRECTED BY: Paul Olding
OTHER CREATIVES: Gareth David-Lloyd (Pistol)
RUNNING TIME: 75 Mins (No Interval)
SOCIAL MEDIA: @TheCrookedBillets
