STRATFORD, CONN.--The new production of Henry V, as conceived and directed by Michael Kahn, never fails to hold the attention. It is, however, essentially a wilful distortion and cheapening of Shakespeare's play. Last season Kahn, with daring and imaginative updating, achieved the seemingly impossible by turning the inferior and (I thought) no-longer-viable Love's Labour's Lost into a dazzling success. Now, having been promoted by the Festival's top brass to the post of Artistic Director, the 30-year-old Kahn has applied the same daring and imaginative updating to a play that is simply not sufficiently malleable. He has, in effect, turned a silk purse into a sow's ear.

In a famous phrase, Keats quite rightly wrote of Shakespeare's "negative capability", by which he meant the playwright's ability to avoid putting his own personality and opinions into the mouths of his characters. But this "negative capability" was least in evidence in Henry V, in which Shakespeare set out to limn the unlimited glory of a national hero-conqueror, a model monarch. Yet Kahn has tried to make the play into a sardonic antiwar tract.

I suppose that in a year when the Vatican has officially deposed a host of saints on should not be surprised when someone tries to depose Britain's most religious and heroic king. But Shakespeare himself had already taken care of the deposition of a king in the first of the four-play series of which Henry V is properly the shining culmination. Richard II and the two Henry IV plays are markedly greater and more complex works, but Henry V--when allowed to do so--compensates through its ringing patriotism and its moral, legal, and divine certainty. The play is really nothing short of dramatized hagiography, and one should accept the fact or leave it alone.

Now Kahn is--like most sensible Americans--against war. He may even agree with the God-is-dead proponents. But Shakespeare and the sixteenth-century Elizabethans believed in war, just as had Henry V and his subjects in the early fifteenth century. The word "warlike" in Henry V is an adjective of praise, not of opprobrium. And the monarch, for "our kingdom's safety," repeatedly invokes God's participation in doing battle when the "cause [is] just and [the] quarrel honorable." For good or ill, Henry's goal is that of so many present-day politicians: law 'n' order.

In a program note, Kahn says: "The play is set on a stage which is a playground which is an arena which is a battlefield. The games of this play are the games of war, of conquest, of territory, of power, of betrayal, and of love--games played every day in the playground--and the space is transformed, as the playground is, into whatever or whatever the players want it to be." The trouble with this is that the Elizabethans did not regard these things as "games", as mere make-believe; these things were the very stuff of history and the very stuff of real life.

To justify his updating, Kahn points Shakespeare's "Fantastic innovation," and asserts that production today should similarly "surprise, delight and astonish our audience." But Shakespeare was not a revolutionary. His plays impressed the Globe Theatre's audiences not because they were particularly avant-garde but simply because they generally were better than those written by anybody else. Kahn also states that one must be "true to the play," but it seems to me that, in this production, he has done quite the opposite.

Unwilling to trust the play, Kahn has cut the text liberally, transposed lines, distributed the one-man Chorus speeches among four persons, imported dialogue from the end of 2 Henry IV (delivered over loudspeakers), and added lines of his own by way of scene descriptions. And there is a steady parade of gimmicks and odd bits of business, borrowed from such sources as the plays of Brecht, Genet's The Balcony, and the Living Theatre's Mysteries and Smaller Pieces. Kahn is, like Autolycus in The Winter's Tale, a 'snapper-up of unconsidered trifles." He has seen a lot of theatre, he is young, and he is eager to try out a lot of ideas for himself. The result is a patchwork of periods and styles just as much as the plastic-covered crazy-quilt robe that King Henry dons in his first scene. Even the costumes (executed by Jeanne Button) run from period Renaissance garb through World War I gear and World War II uniforms to a present-day sweatshirt with Ché Guevara's face on it. But make no mistake about it: Kahn is an extraordinarily ingenious director with a fertile imagination; taste and self-denial will surely come in due course.

In keeping, with Kahn's playground concept, Karl Eigsti has designed a large frame with a tall swing suspended at the stage-right side and a sort of jungle-gym at stage-left. Then there are some red mental barrels, used now to sit on, now to pound on, now to warm cold hands over.

Some twenty minutes or so before the play itself begins, members of the company gradually come on stage--dressed mostly in well-worn tee-shirts and dungarees--and use the area purely as a playground. These young people--about a fifth of them Negro--dribble and pass basketballs, throw Frisbees (unusually skillfully, too), play with hula-hoops, spar and wrestle, do gymnastics, shinny up and down the swing ropes, and hang by their heels from the top of the stage. Some of them make rhythms with a tambourine, rattle, triangle, maracus, and a pair of claves. Eventually there are some two dozen young people, and a crescendo of rhythmic pounding sounds as though we are soon to witness a gang "rumble" from West Side Story. Finally they lie on their backs, kicking their feet in the air and hissing. And the Prologue is delivered by several individuals, the group periodically interjecting its first phrase, "O for a Muse of fire," as a refrain.

Kahn then proceeds with his play. He has divided his text into twenty-one chunks. At the outset of each, one person strikes the claves and, in the manner of Brecht's "epic theatre," declaims a caption that purports to distill the ideological essence of the scene to follow. Thus we hear, for instance: "Scene 7: Siege of Harfleur; Propaganda of the Machine; The People Follow"; "Scene 11: Winter Continues; Discourses on War and Death; The Army Marches"; "Scene 15: Economic Lesson on the Battlefield"; "Scene 17: Exeter Tells the Lie of Noble Death."

In the scene in which the waging of war against the French is justified through an exegesis of the Salic Law (caption: "A Meeting of Hawks"), the Archbishop of Canterbury is a caricature. He is dressed in a yellow-buttoned red hooped skirt that achieves a diameter of some four or five feet, suggesting rapaciousness and gluttony, Kahn makes him somewhat forgetful, too, and has the black-garbed Bishop of Ely prompt him now and then.

When the trio of traitors--Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey--are sentenced to death, instead of being borne away to their doom they act out in pantomime (to the accompaniment of claves) their impalement on wooden poles by three guards, turning on their knees to the audience with hands upstretched and then collapsing to the ground. Fair enough--but then the whole silent mime is gone through twice more, which is just plain silly.

In several scenes, the main French characters are a foot taller than usual owing to the use of stilted boots. And they wear modified hockey outfits complete with shinguards--in a properly Gallic blue, be it said. I suppose all this is to emphasize the enormous odds facing the outnumbered British. When conversing with the British, the French speak English with a French accent. When the French talk among themselves, however, Kahn has provided them with a French translation of Shakespeare's text. While they spout French, a man and woman at the downstage extremities simultaneously speak the English version into microphones--as though broadcasting a United Nations caucus. This is utterly pointless, a good example of Kahn's gimmickry-for-the-sake-of-gimmickry. When Shakespeare wanted people inn his play to speak French--and he did on occasion--he wrote in French himself.

On the whole, the quality of elocution in this production is better than what the Festival has usually offered in the past. The main burden falls of course on the title role, taken here by Len Cariou, a newcomer to the Festival. Given the concept Kahn has foisted on him, he acquits himself surprisingly well. He is obviously a well-trained classical actor, and his performance at times suggests a young Alec Guinness. The Festival has made a lucky catch.

Understandably, Cariou is not a match for Sri Laurence Olivier, whose Henry V is the one Shakespearean role in which he is indisputably supreme. Carious does not quite have all the voice needed for the "Once more unto the breach" harangue, as magnificent a military pep-talk as anyone has ever trumpeted forth. What is curious is that the British soldiers vigorously hurl balls at the toy cardboard-and-paper castle and have to interrupt the attack to listen to Henry's oratory. Kahn's direction here undercuts the need for any spur to action.