Missing the point of a great English tragedy
Edward II Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Globe ★★★
Let’s get something straight… Edward II is not simply a play about homosexuality. Although Marlowe’s most frequently performed work puts the Plantagenet king’s relationship with arriviste lover Gaveston at its emotional heart, this is really about the conflict between public duty and private desire, played out over a wide political landscape.
Nick Bagnall’s new production achieves this sense of scale despite the snug confines of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Various nobles plotting against the King hold forth from every available space within the auditorium, which gives an urgency and adds a terrific sense of pace to the proceedings before the play slows down in its final act when we witness Edward’s long lamentations as he prepares to die.
However, I felt that Bagnall misses one of the play’s main themes: social class. Gaveston is not ostracised on account of his sexuality (and it is probably right that same-sex love in 16th century England – when Marlowe was writing – was less troubling an issue than in later centuries), but because he challenges the status quo. Here, the array of accents among the cast rather stymies the idea of a nobility closing ranks to oust a groundling. Thus, Old Mortimer’s words “See what a scornful look that peasant casts” do not ring true.
The performances are variable. Several odd dramatic choices (a lisping John of Hainault, an overtly preening Earl of Lancaster) disempower the idea that the courtiers are a genuine threat to the king, that the future of a whole kingdom is at stake.
I did, however, admire Katie West’s Queen Isabella, her querulous voice suggesting anger at the humiliating position her husband put her in, but developing a core of steel as she tries to protect her family. There is good work, too, from Polly Frame as the conflicted Earl of Kent and Annette Badland in three roles, most memorably as the hard-as-nails Mortimer Senior, who is so unsympathetic to the king’s peccadillos.
Tom Stuart’s Edward, all Rupert Everett pouts and floppy limbs, was effective in the first half as we see a man distracted by lust and made depressed by royal protocol. But as we approached those closing scenes and the approach of that dreaded hot poker, I never got a sense of the tragic victim. Rather, this was a king who had been thwarted by his own petulance.
Until April 20. Tickets: 020 7401 9919; shakespeareglobe.com