An almighty bang shakes the stage of the Courtyard Theatre. Trapdoors fly open in all directions to release an invading army, with swords and ladders at the ready. "Once more unto the breach, dear friends!" The siege of Harfleur is under way. Jaw-jaw is over. Now it's war-war.

In fact, the jaw-jaw had provided a hugely satisfying start to Michael Boyd's appropriately irreverent new production of Henry V, the last stage on the RSC's two-year journey through Shakespeare's eight history plays. From the opening moments, words have us gripped. This is remarkable, since a huge torrent of them pour from the mouth of the Archbishop of Canterbury in a notoriously boring speech urging Henry's right to wage war on France. In a bravura performance, Geoffrey Freshwater mines rich comedy from this, climaxing with a delicious physical anachronism in the air-drawn inverted commas he places around "this Salic law" in a gesture that simultaneously contains an element of prelate-like blessing.

Over at the French court there is laughter, too, chiefly supplied in the absurd preenings of the Dauphin (John Mackay) and his gaudily-clad cronies, the Constable of France (Antony Bunsee) and the Duke of Orleans (Kieran Hill). I confess I had my doubts over Boyd's decision to have them suspended on trapezes above the stage, chiefly because of an ongoing worry that they might fall. But the device certainly has its value when it comes to the Dauphin's hilarious discourse on the pleasures of life in the saddle and, indeed, following the slaughter of Agincourt, when the defeated French "hang like roping icicles/Upon our houses' thatch".

The corpses do not, of course, include that of the petulant prince himself. He survives to flounce angrily from the scene when the victorious Hal (a beautifully spoken Geoffrey Streatfeild) is promised the hand of his sister Katherine (Alexia Healy) and succession to the throne of France by the defeated King Charles VI (Sandy Neilson). Hal's wooing of Katherine is superbly managed, suggesting for once that this is a union based on genuine love rather than an act of political expediency.

Such warmth has earlier been noticeably lacking in Hal's attitude to kingship and the world, so successfully has he put behind him the lessons learned from Falstaff and his Eastcheap associates. One suspects he could usefully pick up a tip or two from Jonathan Slinger's fiery Welshman Fluellen who, while a master of the art of war, is clearly a human being too.

(Until March 9, box office 0844 800 1110.)