Felicité du Jeu - Actor

Early in 2003 Felicité du Jeu took her fate into her own hands, and, instead of sitting around waiting for someone to offer her a part, she wrote to Nicholas Hytner asking for an audition. She had heard that Hytner was planning to direct Henry V at the National Theatre and, being half French herself and fluent in both French and English (a requirement for an actor playing the French Princess, Katherine) she knew she stood a chance. She got an audition, and the part. Her subsequent performance tempered the very masculine and often aggressively macho posturing of the male characters, and emphasised the vulnerability of all civilians during conflict, as well as stressing the civilised nature of the country about to be occupied (and possibly brutalised) by the English army.

In a situation when Britain was actually in the process of using force to invade another ancient civilisation (Iraq) this proved a telling reference. When in the final act Henry is seeking to woo her to make a political alliance between her country and his, and she asks him rhetorically whether it is possible that she could ever love the enemy of France, the audience understood the deep feelings of ambivalence that she expressed. The final act of the play was not performed, as it often is, as a comedy; instead the action surrounding Katherine’s proposed marriage to a man who has just humiliated her father, the King of France, and been indirectly responsible for the death of her brother, the Dauphin, and many of the young men of France, appeared almost grotesque.

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