In a resonant staging of “Henry V”, war is murder in uniform

LIKE COWED apparatchiks, the courtiers listen and nod as the specious case for war is made. In “Henry V” it is the Archbishop of Canterbury who outlines the English claim to the throne of France that is the pretext for invasion. In a new, modern-dress production of Shakespeare’s play at the Donmar Warehouse in London, the flaky legal arguments and skewed history are presented in a slide-show, like the findings of a cooked-up intelligence dossier. The scene is darkly funny, as winking mendacity can be. But the results are deadly.