After Agincourt is a searing one-man play written in the 1980s by Peter Mottley, revived with gut-wrenching intensity by actor Gareth David-Lloyd at this year’s Brighton Fringe 2025. Set seven years after the landmark 15th-century Battle of Agincourt in France, the play finds Shakespeare’s swaggering soldier Pistol slumped in the Boar’s Head Tavern, bitter, broken, and deep in his cups. What unfolds is an unflinching monologue that strips away patriotic glory to reveal the true cost of war: trauma, filth, fear, and loss.
Performed in raw, modern vernacular, Gareth David-Lloyd in character recounts his part in the campaigns at Harfleur and Agincourt — not as a hero, but as one of the many forgotten men trampled beneath the myth of King Henry V’s “happy few.” This is not Shakespeare’s gallant war cry. This is the mud-slick, blood-soaked underside – the brutal reality and cost of war. Relevant to any age.
This production marks the debut of theatre company The Crooked Billets, founded in 2024 by the aforementioned Gareth David-Lloyd, Felix Uff, and BAFTA-nominated director Paul Olding. David-Lloyd’s performance is electrifying. Holding the stage solo for over an hour with only a jug of ale and a loaf of bread for company, he channels grief, rage, camaraderie and gallows humour with poignant authenticity. His voice carries the ghosts of dead men. The effect is visceral and unforgettable. On a purely practical level, delivering an hour’s worth of faultless word-perfect dialogue was an impressive sight to behold.
Though The Rotunda tent isn’t ideal for this kind of drama — with outside laughter, synth music, and the occasional overzealous motorbike bleeding in — David-Lloyd never faltered. The audience remained utterly gripped, swept along by his every breath and brutal revelation. This was a truly sublime soliloquy. This actor really is going places with his art.
Mottley’s script is steeped in meticulous historical research, revealing how England’s much-mythologised victory was as much about luck and weather as it was about strategy. The play’s subtext is that the ‘glory’ gained by Henry V came through thousands of men trudging through sodden, ploughed fields, cutting down French troops while barely staying upright themselves.
Using Shakespeare’s Henry V as a framework, the play deftly explores themes of class, PTSD and the real human cost of war and achieves a highly emotional and captivating drama. Underscoring the narrative is Peter Mottley’s meticulous historical research which serves to sharpen the details of the time period and lay bare the grim realities of war. It is funny, tragic, furious, and ultimately deeply humane — a soldier’s-eye view that punctures the propaganda.
A transformative piece of theatre. I would gladly watch it again — and urge anyone with a heart, a brain, or a love of history to do the same.
