King Henry V delivers his famous exhortation “Once more unto the breach” staring straight into the camera. Each line is slow and deliberate, the King reading from a paper at his desk – this is real “My fellow Americans” stuff. His speech concluded, he folds up his paper with a quiet dignity, before suddenly changing his mind and going ‘off script’. “Dishonour not your mothers,” becomes a wild, furious (and, dare I say it, unpresidential) rant, Henry practically foaming at the mouth as he threatens to leap through the television screen above the Festival Theatre stage.

Belgian theatre director Ivo van Hove’s Kings of War – an amalgamation of Shakespeare’s Henry V, Henry VI Parts 1–3 and Richard III (with snippets of Henry IV and VII to top and tail) – opened in New York in 2016 against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s election win, and commentators were quick to draw parallels. But Van Hove – whose six-hour Roman Tragedies, also with Toneelgroep Amsterdam, stunned the Adelaide Festival in 2014 – uses Shakespeare’s three kings to explore more universal ideas of leadership and power. Indeed, when Kings of War opened in London in 2015, The Guardian’s reviewer Lyn Gardner...