Adrian Lester - Actor Adrian Lester is a very busy actor but when Nicholas Hytner first approached him about playing Henry V in Hytner’s first production as Director of the National Theatre, Lester was initially ambivalent because he had only recently completed a year long world tour playing Hamlet in Peter Brook’s acclaimed production. He put his initial reservations down to having “itchy feet”, and always wanting different acting challenges but he was also aware of the danger of becoming pigeon-holed as a “Shakespearean” actor. He had already experienced the negative effect this can have following his high profile performance as Henry Burton in the film Primary Colors which, he believed, had led to him subsequently being overlooked for any film roles that weren’t based on “an Ivy League middle-class black guy who wears a tie and is really naïve and young and just listens.” Henry V is certainly young, sometimes naïve, and in this production he sometimes wears a tie, but seldom if ever does he just listen! The challenge of performing Henry V on the stage named after Laurence Olivier (the legendary actor who also played the role of Henry and was himself a star of stage and screen, and first director of the National Theatre), was ultimately enough to persuade Lester to take on the role. He was attracted by Hytner’s decision to do the play in modern dress – “all the ideas in my head about doublet and hose and swords flew out of the window” – and then by the extraordinary coincidence of rehearsing an ancient play about Britain going to war at the exact time when modern Britain was actually rehearsing for conflict in Iraq. |  | |
