Take a look at director Damien Ryan's directorial vision, and Anna Gardiner's set and costume designs for the 2014 production of Henry V.
Damien Ryan was inspired by the diary entries of a Vicar who ran a bomb shelter that became a makeshift theatre during the Luftwaffe Blitz of London in 1940–1941.
An extract:
26th March 1941. The Boys' Club began tonight with about 40 boys collected from the Tube and other shelters and from the neighbourhood. Think of that in wartime and in an evacuation area! I had the room crowded with people for the Shelter Theatre, and when the boys really got going, the people below got nervous. They thought it was the Blitz preluding the invasion. They have had a rough deal these boys who have missed so much proper school and who have spent so much time in Shelters.
A group of students had formed 'The Boy's Club' staging plays and cabaret song nights to raise the spirits of their fellow refugees while the waves of German bombers tore at the night and their darkened city for an interminable stretch of raids, 57 nights in a row at one stage.
Inspired by this and the many schools, libraries, low-level classrooms, storerooms and gymnasiums that were often frequent refuges in the early days of raids for students and families who had not left London, Ryan imagined our storytellers taking shelter in one of these spaces in the autumn of 1940 when surprise air raids were still happening by day, as well as night.
