William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's plays – as you like them

Best Shakespeare productions: what's your favourite Henry V?

Michael Billington's triumphant kings include Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh and Alan Howard. Which versions of the play have you enjoyed the most?

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Kenneth Branagh as an anti-heroic Henry V
Anti-hero … Kenneth Branagh as Henry V. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

No Shakespeare play provides, for a British audience, a more perfect mirror of the times. The famous Olivier film (1944) is unashamedly triumphalist. Kenneth Branagh on stage (1984) and screen (1989) gave us a more troubled, anti-heroic Henry. Nicholas Hytner kicked off his National Theatre tenure in 2003 with a fine production, starring Adrian Lester, that reflected the Iraq war and current debates about nationhood. For me the production that best caught the play's ambivalence about war and blend of rhetoric and realism was Terry Hands's for the RSC in 1975.

At a time when Britain was riven by economic and industrial strife, it became a play about a leader wracked by self-doubt who emerges triumphant from a national crisis. Starting in drab rehearsal clothes, the production acquired visual colour as it swept along and Alan Howard, initially introspective but eventually allowing his voice to soar like a trumpet, was no Hooray Henry but a perfect figure of the times: a modest man willing himself to victory against the odds.

• What's your favourite version of Henry V? Let us know in the comments thread below