There was a ripple of nervous laughter as the hired assassin coyly refused to divulge exactly how he would murder King Edward II. We know the story of England’s most brutal and infamous regicide, but director Daniel Raggett delivers a shock to the system in the playing of his execution at the climax of this exhilarating production that kept me rivetted for all its 100 minutes.
In a split stage, while the newly acknowledged boy king Edward III sits in golden splendour above, his deposed father languishes in a cesspit below to await his unmaker. The action is in the play, but it is the setting and the direction that emphasises how humiliatingly as well as horrifically the mighty has fallen.
RSC Co-Artistic Director Daniel Evans, looking uncannily like Patrick Stewart of a certain starship, plays a king whose passionate love for another man overwhelms the little judgement that he has. Reckless and impulsive, intolerant of contradiction, incapable of compromise, Evans is explosive when opposed.
Unlike Shakespeare’s Richard II, written 20 years later, this king carries no trace of effeminacy, but rather openly celebrates his homosexuality with his beefcake buddies, leaping like a young lover into the arms of his beloved Gaveston, played with haughty assumption by Eloka Ivo.
But it is not their ‘wanton’ relationship that outrages the gold-braided nobles—for this is in modern dress—so much as their difference in class, Gaveston being described as a peasant, upstart, ignoble vassal and basely born—like Marlowe himself.
It is at the moment of Gaveston’s torture and murder, also a riveting moment of theatre, that the mood of this political thriller changes dramatically.
Edward, heedless of the interests of the country, becomes an object of pity, playing with the multi-jewelled crown "for just a while longer" while dressed in a filthy, bloody vest.
Enzo Cilenti, a steely-eyed, resolute Mortimer, acting for the common good, turns hard-hearted schemer and villain, while Ruta Gedmintas as Queen Isabella switches from the loving, tragic, wronged wife to become his partner in crime and in bed.
An excellent supporting cast includes Evan Milton as Lancaster, Geoffrey Lumb a fiery Warwick and Henry Pettigrew and Emilio Doorgasingh as Kent and a noble Pembroke, both torn in conscience between the rebels and loyalty to the crown.
Stavros Demetraki and Kwaku Mills are Gaveston’s credible hangers-on—on the make certainly, but who might be simply regarded as enterprising individuals if advantaged by a posher pedigree. Jacob James Beswick is a slyly ingratiating murderer, and a remarkably assured Joel Tennant plays the young Prince Edward.
At the start of the show, designer Leslie Travers has theatregoers traverse a red carpet on stage around the draped catafalque of Edward II’s father, Edward I Longshanks, when they can admire the crown, silver orb and sceptre representing the magnificence of kingship. No such transitory pomp for his successor.