Edward II

by Christopher Marlowe

seen at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 12 March 2019

Nick Bagnall directs Tom Stuart as King Edward II, Katie West as Queen Isabella, Jonathan Livingstone as Young Mortimer, and Beru Tessema as Piers Gaveston, with a supporting company of seven taking the other parts, in Christopher Marlowe's play about the disastrous career of the king who fatefully places a selfish desire for personal pleasure above the recognised responsibilities of a medieval ruler.

Marlowe, often seen as a histrionic, not to say bombastic, playwright in contrast to the more nuanced Shakespeare, is well served in the candlelit intimacy of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, where the lyrical aspects of his language can be appreciated as much as the dramatic turns of the plot. In particular, the intense, and intensely physical, relationship between Edward and Gaveston is expressed by high-flown but not insincere poetry, which has a more personal resonance in the smaller acting space of this theatre.

Even though this allows for some measure of sympathy for two friends or lovers against the world, the world keeps crashing in, not only in the form of the noblemen's disquiet and eventual outrage at Edward's misguided favouritism (they are more exercised by the fact that Gaveston is an upstart, than that the king has a 'minion'), but also in the pettiness and spite both Edward and Gaveston show when their wills are crossed. Furthermore, though Queen Isabella eventually plots against her husband, she is not initially manipulative or antipathetic; rather she is downcast at being removed from her husband's personal favour, and overjoyed to have temporarily repaired the situation. She is driven to disloyalty by Edward's own reckless willingness to embroil the kingdom in civil strife.

These shifts of loyalty and treachery are well presented here as regal wilfulness and incompetence lead to the total breakdown of the social order, signalled both by the increasing brutality of the noblemen, and by Edward's taking up with the two Spensers (father Richard Bremmer and son Colin Ryan), here portrayed as social climbing chancers. Even though the confined space of the stage cannot allow for the full sweep of seige and battle, this hardly matters as the crucial scenes are a series of close confrontations and arguments between the principal movers and shakers. In contrast, the space is ideal for portraying the gradual degradation and gruesome murder of the king, fortunately (for the audience) depicted in the gloom of only one lit candle.

Tom Stuart portrays the vanity and the insecurity of the king enhanced by a sumptuous robe to begin with - but also initially with bare feet subtly indicating a sort of self-regarding sensuality; he does at least have soft boots when venturing out of doors - but finally wearing only a stained white smock. Cunningly, the regal dress under the cloth-of-gold has always been white, and the young Prince Edward (also Colin Ryan) is similarly in white when invested with royal power, even though it takes a massive effort (of largely teenage petulance) on his part to overcome the baneful influence of Young Mortimer and his mother Queen Isabella, who by now is no longer the put-upon victim, but rather a cynical player in the political vacuum crated by Edward's incarceration and death.

It was, I think, a mistake to have Colin Ryan play both his parts with the same accent. It suited the upstart Young Spenser, but not the young King Edward III; Katie West's accent, though not so pronounced, was also not particularly suitable for a French princess and Queen when all the rest of the nobility spoke in more standard forms. Marlowe's verse is perhaps not so amenable to regional variation as Shakespeare's since it is inherently more learned, but in any case it would have been more sensible to have the new king sharply differentiated in voice as well as costume from the other part taken by the same actor.

It's fascinating and instructive to see a 'history' play from Shakespeare's time not by Shakespeare himself; and the resonances with the more well known Richard II - also a portrait of a self-absorbed and therefore disastrous king - are made very plain in this fine production.