Abstract
We all know of the dedicated motivation of Sam Wanamaker to the Globe project (and the continuing commitment of his daughter, Zoe, to maintaining its profile), so it seems particularly ungrateful to complain about the theatre named after him. But the problem remains – for all the constant reminders that the early moderns went to ‘hear’ a play, rather than ‘see’ it – if you are in the cheap seats at the Wanamaker, you’ve had it. The ‘point of view’ from the second gallery, closest to the stage, involves very little ‘view’, offering pretty well nothing at all in terms of seeing actors, action, or staging. While we have to accept that the Wanamaker’s limitations are the result of its fidelity to a Jacobean design, it is difficult to believe that the Jacobeans, occupying these seats, didn’t care about seeing actors’ faces, positions, or gestures.
Marlowe, Shakespeare, and their contemporaries offered us scripts as yet unparalleled, but their staging was pretty awful. Authenticity is not always an end in itself, and the wish to partake in the experience of play-going in a replica Jacobean playhouse is more than outweighed by a wish to see the actual play. For the reviewer, this theatre raises serious problems as the limited access to the production itself – what is happening on stage – constrains the scope of commentary. It is not dissimilar to being asked to review a new crime thriller without access to every other chapter. Even worse, the constant neck-arching and peering through the flames of various proximate candelabra serve to irritate the reviewer to the point at which he or she is as concerned with the process of watching as the production itself. Negative feelings towards this Edward II are clearly as much to do with the infuriating process of trying to see what was happening as symptomatic of the shortcomings of the production itself. This is an issue of which the reviewer and reader need to be aware.
Perhaps most conspicuous (from the elevation of the second gallery, at least) was the patterned floor-cloth which faithfully reproduced the unique Cosmati pavement of Westminster Abbey. The iconic pavement (which, incidentally, allows us to place precisely the setting of Holbein’s The Ambassadors) was installed in 1268, just 29 years before Edward I was entombed in the Abbey. The opening of this production with an interpolated requiem for the dead king, supine on a bier placed on this pavement, served to locate the setting precisely in terms of space and time and offered us a glimpse of a redoubtable medieval court founded on ritual, religious hierarchy, and institutional convention – all the more shocking that it should collapse when confronted by the return of Gaveston (Beru Tessema).
Entering the space from the audience, Gaveston’s reading of his letter coincided with the opening lines uttered in synch by Edward himself (Tom Stuart) – a sign of their mutuality and the concealment of their conspiracy to overrule Gaveston’s banishment. Brash, loose-limbed and iconoclastic, the tetchy Gaveston assaulted Colin Ryan’s feeble Bishop of Coventry, assuming his mitre and herding him about the stage with his own crozier, the paraphernalia of ecclesiastical ritual being used to humiliate and brutalise religious dominion. Richard Bremmer’s imposing Archbishop of Canterbury reasserted the authority of Rome and so triggered the conflict of human desire and divine power.
This underlying conflict informed much of the subsequent staging. Barons appeared in cloaks and swords (design was by Jessica Worrall), while Edward’s various minions wore loose-fitting smocks and less formal attire. Aristocratic gesture was almost clichéd – sweeping cloaks, kneeling in fealty, and stiffly bowing – and contrasted with the humanity of Edward’s canoodling embrace or petulant anger. At one point, Edward removed his monk’s black cowl and cassock to reveal a simple white smock in a gesture which replaced Papal authority with a Christ-like humility. Elsewhere a seated Spenser Junior (Ryan again) opened a modest satchel and took out Edward’s crown which he dusted with his sleeve – the trappings of Divine Right subjected to loving spit and polish.
As if to reinforce this division between ritualised authority and human sincerity, Bremmer’s Spenser Senior was played as a faithful retainer, unkempt, scruffy, a rough diamond. As Edward welcomed the ‘old man’, he turned to Spenser Junior, ‘Thy father, Spenser?’ (3.1.43). Spenser Junior reluctantly acknowledged his bedraggled parent with an embarrassedly muttered ‘True’. But thereafter Spenser Senior was at Edward’s side, a stalwart defender of his King.
Running in parallel to the King’s various love affairs is the developing intrigue of the Mortimer Junior and Isabella plot. Jonathan Livingstone’s performance was strongly spoken but often verged on caricature, his sinister soliloquy beginning ‘The Prince I rule; the Queen do I command…’ (5.4.46) was delivered to the audience with more than a dash of pantomime villain. Katie West’s screeching Isabella was by turns childishly enthusiastic or sulky, and there was little complexity in her turning from Edward to Mortimer.
The play’s most lyrical poetry is saved for Edward’s decline, and the simplicity of staging served the text well here. Edward’s reflections on kingship are touchingly unadorned and Stuart delivered them without the frequent petulance he had voiced earlier: ‘what are kings, when regiment is gone, / But perfect shadows in a sunshine day’ (5.1.26–7). His subsequent torture – being dunked in a large tub of puddle water and being forced to wear what looked like a scold’s bridle – cast him as a figure of sympathy; his torturers, obscured by long hoods and hidden in the half-light, never really engaged our antipathy. His gruesome execution was also a triumph of uncomplicated staging. In near-blackout, he was stripped naked and lay prostrate as Lightborn rammed the poker into him from upstage. Although the doubling of Gaveston with Lightborn may have been significant (both roles were taken by Tessema), so little was made of Lightborn’s role (he remained in a long black hood and his immediate murder was cut) that very little was realised by it.
There followed the rather perfunctory coda (the play’s fault, not the production’s) of Edward III’s grief (Ryan again), arrest of his mother, and the execution of Mortimer, the new king laying Mortimer’s severed head next to the head of his own father’s naked corpse. Marlowe’s Edward II is, theatrically, a rare beast; a fine production of Edward II, as this mediocre one demonstrated, is rarer still.