by William Shakespeare.
[Starring] The Elizabethan Theatre Company
See columns 3 and 4 and 'Television Diary' on page 15

'Into a thousand parts divide one man...'
The scene: England and France
With very little money, and using the barest minimum of setting and the most elementary Elizabethan costumes, a dozen to a score of young men and women, mostly from Oxford and Cambridge, set out last summer to play Shakespeare wherever they could find an audience and a place to play in. Sometimes it was an inn yard, sometimes a cottage garden or the bail of an ancient house (the kind of conditions which Shakespeare's own company met on their tours), sometimes a Town Hall or an ordinary theatre. Despite many imperfections, the soundness of the principles on which they were working and their own vitality and talent created a great impression - particularly during the Edinburgh Festival.
Now the Company has been re-formed and re-equipped by the generous sponsorship of the London Mask Theatre, Dartington Hall, and the Arts Council. New recruits have been brought in, not only from the Universities but from the dramatic schools and the ranks of young enthusiasts already in the theatre.
This production of Henry V is the first of their new season, and is presented in television between its opening week at Canterbury and its appearance at the St. Ives Festival. Although in ninety minutes it is only possible to present a skeleton of the play, which lasts in the theatre for three hours, this appearance is a great opportunity for the Company. One of the great difficulties that pioneers in the field of Elizabethan production have to face is that it is so difficult to find any building in which the essential conditions of Elizabethan playing can be fulfilled. Perhaps the most important of these conditions, a close intimacy between audience and actor, television can certainly offer.
It is our hope, too, that we may find it possible on the screen to give tome impression of the flowing movement in an open space on which an Elizabethan play depends for its effect. Television is often at its best, I believe, when it is least concerned with the physical surroundings in which the action is placed, and this again is of the essence of Elizabethan dramatic method. where the words and the body of the actor were made to do the work. This then should be thought of not so much as a television production of Henry V, but as an attempt to show on the television screen the work that is being done by a group of young actors who are trying to return to the essentials of Elizabethan playing. (Michael Macowan)