Cheerful Charlie plays Tricky Dicky . . . and ends up in Monty Python
CHARLES Edwards is always a pleasure to watch on stage but can he convince us he is Richard II? Is dear old dependable Charlie not perhaps too agreeable a chap for this part?
Richard surely needs to start pitiless and end pitiable. That, by way of political intrigue, murders and banishments, is quite some transformation.
Simon Godwin’s production at the touristy Globe is on the light side. I t seeks l aughs and generally receives them from an audience of groundlings who naturally love being involved in the show — not least when the Queen’s gardener refers to people standing by the open-air stage as ‘noisome weeds’.
The Globe, under soon-to-depart artistic director Dominic Dromgoole, has cheerfully embraced its Elizabethan audience-immer- sion function. But what about Charlie Edwards’s king? He struck me more as one of life’s Michael Palins than as a vicious, possibly camp monarch in the era of divinely appointed rulers.
The Palin resemblance was reinforced in a couple of scenes when the squabbles between noblemen became distinctly Monty Pythonish — the throwing down of gauntlets is l i ke something from the Knights Who Say ‘Ni’, for goodness sake.
William Chubb makes an excellent Duke of York, the man appointed caretaker while Richard is abroad. John of Gaunt is played by William Gaunt (no relation, the programme assures us).
Gaunty! One of our ripest old thesps gives the ‘sceptr’d isle’ speech the full-gravy treatment, rolling the words round his chops like a wine writer tasting vintage port.
Not all of the casting is quite so successful. Richard Katz is overstretched in three roles, Anneika Rose makes a flimsy Queen and Bushy, Bagot and Green could be trainee British Airways cabin crew rather than murderous curs.
‘Our scene is altered from a serious thing,’ the usurper Bolingbroke says when, amid some cheery larks, he is implored by Mr Chubb’s York and Sarah Woodward’s Duchess to show clemency to their son. The Globe audience honked away happily.
Just a few minutes later Richard met his fate, and I fear there wasn’t a damp eye in the house.