“Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” laments King Henry IV in his famous soliloquy from the play that shares his name. Paralyzed with exhaustion, he watches wearily over his sleeping nation. Last weekend, the king delivered his speech vertically from an infirmary bed, immobilized by an explosion. A comrade comes up to him, gently reminding the sick actor it is time to go on and asking if he remembers his lines. On the pillow next to his head sits a crown fashioned out of barbed wire instead of gold, and an ensemble of war-wounded actors around him wears dirty uniforms as if they were courtly silk. The king performs the scene to its end, and the show continues as he lies on the edge of the stage, punctuating prose with shallow coughs for the rest of the night.

King’s Crown Shakespeare Troupe performed a production of “Henry IV” from Nov. 17 to Nov. 19 at the Austin E. Quigley Black Box Theatre. The troupe tells the story as a meta-theatrical Shakespearian production staged by soldiers in World War I. Audiences watched characters from the Great War lead uprisings against King Henry IV, a tavern gang’s bawdy pursuits, and the eventual ascension of Prince Hal to the throne as Henry V. While the text has been condensed to fit two plays into one, almost all of it is the original Shakespeare. In the moments in between scenes, however, the soldiers drop their roles. They move sets, speak in modern language, and remind the audience they know this is a performance just as much as we do.

The show is most successful when highlighting this framing device, and it was a pleasure to follow characters as they slip in and out of their assigned roles. In particular, director Jim, played by Luke Gardiner, CC ’24, is a constantly discernible presence, casting his comrades in between scenes and following along with a script in hand. When he becomes distraught in the second act, curled up on the ground as a shell of the energetic creative he was at the beginning of the show, the lines between the grief-stricken character he is playing and the tragedy of the war around him blur powerfully. The more insistent he becomes that the show must be performed, the more the audience understands how the division between personal and performance has become confused, for actors and spectators alike to actors and spectators alike. The emotional core of “Henry IV” lies outside of its Shakespearian text, as the characters who are performing are even more powerful than their courtly counterparts.

This ensemble of soldiers and actors are on stage for the entire length of the production, acting as if they were audience members crouched on the ground or peeking out from behind crates at the rear of the theater as they watch their compatriots perform. The cast of the meta-theatrical play performs the roles of actors, spectators, directors, and stagehands. Every scene is punctuated by an actor’s snap, jolting us in and out of the world of Henry IV’s court and establishing a boundary between the two stories as soldiers frantically create new sets by rearranging wooden crates and shout hurried directions. The transitions between scenes, despite only being a minute or two long, become vital themselves. We get glimpses into the soldiers' lives through their hurried exclamations, and we marvel at the type of people who would choose to play pretend even in war-torn uniforms and with bandages over their eyes.

The ensemble moves as one during these transitions, and their choreographed chaotic movements are only one part of their continuously seamless physicality. The ensemble, made up of individuals, acts as a unit—a “band of brothers,” as Shakespeare writes. One has to imagine it’s second nature for a company of soldiers to do so. All salutes are done in perfect synchronization, characters give out piggyback rides, and the king even uses one cast member as a step up to his throne. The ensemble is the constant presence that ties the entire show together.

While the first act is all fun and games, after intermission it becomes increasingly hard for the characters to continue their play-acting. At the close of Part One, the entire company celebrates intermission when suddenly, red lights begin to flash and an explosion booms from around them. The shift is instantaneous: As the actors all silently run offstage toward the crisis, a somberness falls over the audience. No one is sure whether or not to clap. In one deft movement, the production undercuts the joy of performance and grounds the show in consequence, completely recasting everything we’ve seen. It suddenly seems silly that we were so happy that we finished Part One. In the light of the real world, play-acting becomes trivial.

Part Two begins with a nurse wheeling out the body of the soldier playing Hal, whose neck is coated in blood as he wordlessly lies in pain. Suddenly, his rival Henry Hotspur’s death before intermission does not seem like such a source of entertainment. It is a bold choice to kill off one of the main characters, but Hal is easily replaced by another actor when the meta-show begins again, a constant reminder of reality intruding on the world of the play. Falstaff, played by Morgan Johns, GS ’25, resists the director as he insists that they have to finish. In a confusing bit of blocking from certain angles, Jim appears to hit the actor playing Falstaff in the name of continuing the show. This production asks us what about art and theater is crucial even in the face of atrocity, and the more of real-world consequences we see, the harder it becomes to justify.

This war-era weight to the show works well for the traditional readings of “Henry IV”; the second part is largely about diminishing the levity and themes featured in Part One, reflected in the change of set from casual crates to tipped and rearranged infirmary beds. An apt example is found in Shakespeare’s infamous Falstaff, Prince Hal’s lewd friend who represents the off-color world of the tavern. The second part reduces his role to frivolity in the face of Henry IV’s illness and real uprisings in much the same way that the explosion does to the World War I cast. In this production, however, Falstaff is received much more earnestly in Part One than in most other versions. The scenes that were condensed are almost entirely the ones from the tavern, and there are several characters that garner more laughs than Falstaff does. He is Shakespeare’s primary comic relief, and to reduce his comedy reduces his importance as a character. However, there is at least one drunk Falstaff scene in Part Two that reads exactly the way it was intended—out of place in a serious moment—allowing viewers to get the full force of the original text.

Like any amateur Shakespeare, a few of the characters suffered from a lack of enunciation, although this may in part be a consequence of the lack of mics in the black box theater. The end of Part One features a wonderful fight scene performed in a shadowbox: Two actors hold up a sheet with light projected behind, and differing sizes of soldiers pretend to lock swords behind it. With all of the yelling in the background, however, we can barely hear the dialogue taking place in front of the sheet, including an important exchange with the king about counterfeits. Although the production could have benefited from a more robust sound design, it does not ultimately affect our understanding of the main themes of the show. Other design elements, like disheveled costumes and dirty pallets for a set, all work toward creating a cohesive visual of war. In general, these choices felt intentional and polished, and the sound quality represented an exception.

While KCST’s production might not be an ideal traditional introduction to Shakespeare’s “Henry IV,” it stands out as a creative reimagining that adds much to the original text. “Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” King Henry IV says. But we know that the heads with the helmets are the heaviest.