Kings of War by William Shakespeare and Toneelgroep Amsterdam (review)

Less than one week before the election that would usher in Donald Trump as president, Toneelgroep Amsterdam presented Ivo van Hove's Kings of War, a conflation of Shakespeare's Henry V, Henry VI, Parts 1–3, and Richard III, at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House. Nasr's Henry was every inch a king, not personally interested in the trappings of royalty as much as in what he could do as a leader: as soon as he was crowned, he locked the crown away in a glass case and got to the business of winning a war in France. Kings of War was not even the director's first conflation of a Shakespearean political cycle to interrogate the effects of leadership on a citizenry represented by the audience: in 2012, his Roman Tragedies (a conflation of Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra) brought the audience onto the stage of the BAM Opera House alongside the actors.