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Daniel Evans, centre, as the now King Edward II at the funeral of his father Edward I. Pictures: Helen Murray Edward II (and previews) The Royal Shakespeare Company Stratford-upon-Avon ***** It’s an exciting, transitional time for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Early this year they began gearing up for the impending 2025-26 season, and by stages, including recently, additions have been announced. Their (not surprisingly) acclaimed production of Titus Andronicus, with Simon Russell Beale particularly grisly in the title role, was a triumph for the current management, inveigling him back to his old stomping ground (“One of the finest streaks of Artistic programming this century” posted Whatsonstage, perhaps a fraction OTT). Still running (till 2nd August) is Somerset Maugham’s The Constant Wife, its title obviously inspired by Restoration Comedy, to which they have attracted another celebrity, Scottish-born Rose Leslie (Downton Abbey, and also Game of Thrones) – although this constant sell-seats harping on TV roles for publicity purposes could get tiresome. First up, still during the summer (15 August to 13 September), is Fat Ham – another modern (American) take on Hamlet (following this season’s music-gorged Hamlet Hail to the Thief, and Rupert Goold’s explosive staging of the play itself with newcomer Luke Thallon in the title role). The RSC’s third Stratford venue, The Other Place, will be saturated with good things, notably (9 October-6 Dec) a new Macbeth. A role in which the enterprising, appropriately Scots Sam Heughan will hope to take on (the 1950s), McKellen and Sher, while the ever-talented Lia Williams ~ now 60 – might draw strength from the first Lady Macbeth I ever saw (aged 10, at the Old Vic), the unforgettable, shivering Beatrix Lehmann. Other Shakespeare first. At times one has wondered whether the RSC is wandering a little, in search of audiences perhaps, from its true raison d’être, the Bard himself. Yet a glance at its splendidly laid out Archive pages reveals broadly the same careful planning. We have relished, recently, a female-headed King John (superb performance in a much-undervalued play), All’s Well, Pericles, Henry VI (all parts); last year Love’s Labour’s Lost. As the season shifts, this summer is packed: The Winter’s Tale takes off on Saturday 12 July (till 30 August), while The Two Gentlemen of Verona is poised to run from 4-31 August: a play that tended to get scant outings, and to a degree still is overlooked (only four stagings since 1970, and the last over 10 years ago - 2014). A welcome, then, for this fresh outing. Next up, the vile Measure for Measure, poised for a gruelling 47 performances (13 September-25 October). Sometimes Shakespeare offshoots are preferred: Hamlet (twice) as mentioned just now; an intriguing one-person, four-character exploration of Lady Macbeth, Juliet, Emilia (Othello) and Richard III (all the mesmerising Whitney White). Born With Teeth is a predictably gripping treatment of Shakespeare and the ill-fated Christopher Marlowe (at one point they shared lodgings in the East End), to be seen at one of London’s top theatre, Wyndham’s on Charing Cross Road (where Branagh’s King Lear fared rather unfortunately). There’s oodles more to buoy up the coming season. Many will head, children in tow, for the likely big hit, the adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG (in the tradition of Matilda, and The Boy in a Dress), which enjoys a vast run of over two months, spanning end November plus the whole of December and January. Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac is a sophisticated and alluring addition to the new season’s plans, with the gloriously mesmerising Adrian Lester as the haplessly lovelorn knight. Can he match the immortal Gérard Depardieu (still only 76, my exact contemporary)? Perhaps yes. At The Swan, 27 Sept to 15 Nov.
Things are not looking good for Eloka Ivo's Piers Gaveston Assuming the role in the main theatre of Henry V is the terrific, bracing, energised (and noble) Alfred Enoch, their acclaimed Pericles a season or two back, and now once again directed by Tamara Harvey, fifty percent of the Theatre’s current Artistic Direction: it should be riveting and spellbinding. Three or four decades ago, a number of trailblazing black actors given their chance to tread the boards at Stratford were, well, not always exactly top rank (in the way Lenny Henry was at the Birmingham Rep, or the great Willard White, opposite McKellen, for this very company). Nowadays, the RSC is riddled with talent, discovered or retrieved like gold nuggets by the casting team, time and again brilliant or superb; and so it will be this season (Enoch and Lester, for a start, both in the very top rank). It’s out of date even to say ‘black actors’, as if they’d just jetted in from Angola or Zimbabwe, or Trinidad with the cricketers. Just ‘actors’: English actors, and hugely gifted at that. Exemplars, and outstanding teachers/inspirers as well. Earlier this season, the company staged Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II¸ another exciting venture (a revival of the now recognised Edward III might be nice too). Not so very long ago, it was one of the roles that set in motion the young Russell Beale’s meteoric rise: his willingness to doff all his clothes and display a large bottom (and more) made him all the more memorable. One of the most interesting theories about Edward’s unpleasant ‘death’ at Berkeley Castle (his tomb is in nearby Gloucester Cathedral) is that he was not murdered at all, let alone by an uncomfortable red -hot poker, but (despite reported embalming and burial) was spirited away to a German monastery, as if protected from the ruthless Mortimers by his fourteen year old son and wife of 20 years, and lived out a useful life, dying much later. Most vivid, too, was Derek Jarman’s compelling film: bitter, erotic, convincing (the galvanising Steven Waddington full of pathos in the title role). The other unforgettable gaybashing sequence was Patrick McGoohan (in Braveheart) as a savage Edward I - that cruel, grating voice - hurling his son’s boyfriend from a tower window: those seconds ample explanation for the fey teenage prince’s blossoming homosexuality. Degenerate, in his father’s eyes. The first to be anointed Prince of Wales at Caernarvon – and ironically later to father - some would say - England’s greatest King. There were some stunning moments in Daniel Raggett’s RSC production, which I saw but for health reasons was frustratingly unable to write about at the time. Arguably the most staggering of all was static: an awed silence as royalty and nobles gathered in full uniform regalia round the royal standard covered bier (or catafalque) of Edward I, with huge cross predominating. The scene – incredibly moving - was patently copied from the Westminster Hall lying in state of the Queen Mother, or the Queen herself. The opening scene was repeated, with variants, at the end – a brilliant framing of the play – including Edward’s 14 year old successor (three boys alternating in the role: Freddie Beck, Joel Tennant, Zak Walker), much as the 14 year old James Wessex (Severn), Queen Elizabeth’s youngest grandchild, did for his grandmother. The doomed relationship with the briefly recalled Piers Gaveston – pretty obviously sexual here (important in Marlowe) – was less successful. Its awkwardness stemmed really from the fact that Daniel Evans’ hungry Edward (Evans’ first stage rule for around a decade, and immensely appealing) looked almost a foot shorter than Eloka Ivo’s rather towering Gaveston.
Daniel Evans, left, as Eward II and Eloka Ivo as Gaveston The latter, or at least the pairing, looked like a piece of ropy casting: the fact that it reflected the RSC’s obsession with (commitment to?) black, or black-on-white pairing actually added a complication, and irrelevance: was their king’s obsession with a man- (rather than boy-) friend of dark hue one of the reasons, in medieval times, the magnates and populace took against him? Better, perhaps, to make Ivo the King (he would have made an impression). Yet in one sense together they hit a mark: part, even much of the British resentment of Gaveston (de Gabaston: a Gascon, a haughty foreigner infiltrating the English hierarchy) was inbred xenophobia. Each, even Evans, to their credit, avoided the pastiche of presenting as unduly effeminate. Thus shrewdly (for an audience of our era) we were faced with a relationship between men, even strong men, not fey poofs. Yet there was much affection, and if Marlowe prescribes no public humping, the Queen (Isabella of France, the excellent and aptly characterful Ruta Gedmintas) is right to note, “He dotes upon the love of Gaveston…” (Edward was 16 when they met; Gaveston apparently the same). “He claps his cheeks and hangs about his neck, Smiles in his face and whispers in his ears". Quite rightly, Evans (whose countless predecessors in the role have included McKellen and John Hurt) and Ivo enact all that to the letter. Not surprisingly, there’s a sticky end, though few might have anticipated that the royal favourite and love-object should, after his third exile, just five years into the reign, end up headless on Blacklow Hill outside Warwick (where amid the foliage there is still a memorial to him). Often in this production the music (Tommy Reilly; at the outset, sad, languid brass) played a valuable role in evoking atmosphere. The aristocrats – Geoffrey Lumb’s later discredited Warwick, Emilio Doorgasingh’s lenient Pembroke, Evan Milton’s aggrandising, dominant Thomas of Lancaster (the power-wielding Arundel is ditched) - were well differentiated, and where needed forceful, not averse to plotting, as they must be if Marlowe’s play is to carry sufficient weight; as were Edward’s few allies, even if occasionally the blocking was dull and less well-judged. The playwright usefully introduces Edward’s brother Kent (Henry Pettigrew), who latterly separates from the King’s persecutors in an attempt to aid him: Edmund of Woodstock was son of Edward I and the King’s 16-years-younger royal half-brother. Edward’s three elder legitimate brothers had all died in boyhood, the likely successor dying aged just 10 in the year of Edward was born, leaving him the heir. However Kent pays for his support - ravaged by Mortimer (Cilenti; in the film, a malicious, awe-inspiring Nigel Terry), by now the Queen’s lover, who will in turn pay himself (as in the play’s full title, below) for his unfailing hubris as the boy Edward III assumes his maturity. Evans doubles his role as the RSC’s ‘co’-Artistic Director with the title role here, and – largely - to absorbing good effect, which helps the (already cut) play’s pacing. He does not make Edward a weed: far from it. He has, by driving himself, some mettle, some authority, some standing. Marlowe’s original cast is vast: he posits five clerics; here we make do with three (including the Chancellor, Baldock - Kwaku Mills); of the wrestling pro- and anti- Edward warlords - two (De)spensers, two Mortimers – here, one of each. The tussles between one side or another – medieval loyalties being notoriously fluid - culminate at Berkeley in the grotesque ‘Lightborn’ (Jacob James Beswick), who without a hint of the tenderness shown four generations earlier by Hubert to Prince Arthur (Shakespeare’s King John) despatches Edward with or without the fabled poker up the fundament – a brutal pastiche of sodomy. That has periodically been shown onstage – even graphically; but by no means always – understandably. Stunning, scorching, searing scarlet red lighting from Tim Lutkin, brilliantly positioned. If scene matched that moving (again, skilfully downlit) pair of funerals at start and finish for wonderful intensity, this did. Edward II (Marlowe’s, or his publisher’s, title: “The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the Tragical Fall of Proud Mortimer” enjoyed a wild flurry of productions in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, and even beyond. One of the Prospect Theatre Company’s claims to fame (originally 1969, so very soon after the 1967 Sexual Offences act) is that when subsequently televised it yielded the first ever gay kiss seen on TV: an ideal target for those of the Mrs. Whitehouse disposition. This RSC production at least confirmed that we live in a – one would argue – more mature age. Roderic Dunnett 06-25 |
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