OnStage: Young actor in royal role

Some adolescent boys spend much of their imaginative energy on computer games, dodging and shooting at nasty characters. Starting as a preteen, Matthew Amendt fortified himself with Shakespeare.

The son of a drama teacher and an arts administrator, Amendt grew up in a small coal-mining town outside Pittsburgh. "When I was a baby, my mother would put me onstage as a prop," he said.

At 12, Amendt read "Henry V" in one of his mother's dusty collections of the Bard's complete works. He was smitten with its language and fascinated by its war-themed subject.

"Like Henry, I felt that I was being pulled in a lot of directions," he said. "I wasn't sure how or where I could make my contribution. The play, which is full of this staggering poetry, was a great lexicon for me when I was trying to discover the consequences of my choices."

Amendt, now in his mid-20s, gets to fulfill a personal dream, and to learn more about Henry from an adult perspective, when he plays the title character of the drama at the Guthrie Theater. Director Davis McCallum's production opens Wednesday in the Dowling Studio.

The play centers on the young warrior-king's invasion of France. Henry steers his men into the legendary Battle of Agincourt, leading by inspiration and Machiavellian manipulation. Unlike some other Shakepearean kings, he does not seem to have a clear moral compass.

"Is it prowar or antiwar, hero or monster? I don't know," said Amendt. "And, really, that's not for me to decide. I just need to play all the moments fully and, hopefully, unsentimentally, so that people can make their own decisions about him. If it's complicated, it's a good thing."

Two films, one play

"Henry V" has entered the popular imagination through two films -- a 1944 version starring Laurence Olivier in the title role and a 1989 one that starred Kenneth Branagh. Each served its time and place. Olivier's, which premiered toward the end of World War II, was a call to patriotic arms at a time when Britain had been devastated by Hitler's bombs. Branagh's Henry was splattered with mud and blood.

"It's a war play, but war is only the crucible, the context of the play -- not its central issue," said director McCallum. "It's really about how this one leader gets other people in the play to walk through brick walls for him. And that theme always resonates."

If the play, written in 1599, is timeless, it is because it continues to have contemporary correlates, said McCallum.

"There are things in the play that remind me of how the Bush administration ginned the country up for war in Iraq and Afghanistan," he said. "There are also things in the play that remind me of Obama's oratory, especially in that speech about race. But there is also [Obama's] decision to cut off part of his past at a moment when it was politically expedient. Henry does similar things."

This production of "Henry V" is built to travel. Co-produced by the Guthrie and the Acting Company of New York, it has a cast of 12, 11 of whom play the other 55 characters in the drama. The production will go on a five-month national tour to nearly three dozen venues after it closes at the Guthrie.

"Every actor onstage has to be able to transform onstage from English warrior into pristine French nobility," McCallum said. "We have to figure out a way to make the language conjure that imaginative world, rather than represent it onstage, which, I think, is how Shakespeare imagined it."

McCallum has been impressed with Amendt's gloss on Henry.

"I've never worked with an actor as young as Matthew who's such a black belt with the language," he said. "The fluidity, the precision and intelligence that he brings with everything he does -- he makes Henry, theatrically, winning."

For his part, Amendt said that he now understands Henry much more deeply, even if he passes no judgment on him.

"I've thought of Henry as an older brother, in the way that people we admire seem so formidable and inhuman in their admirable qualities," he said. "He's the kind of man who can make a best friend of a stranger and a stranger of a best friend. He's a beautiful politician in that he can bend the truth and mean it."

Rohan Preston • 612-673-4390