Reviews 2005
Reviews 2005
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by Christopher Marlowe, directed by Richard Monette
Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford
August 12-September 24, 2005
“Stratford’s First Marlowe”
In a move that has been long overdue, the Stratford Festival has for the first time staged a play in Stratford by Shakespeare’s great contemporary, Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593). (In 1956 the Festival toured Tyrone Guthrie’s production of Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine the Great” to Toronto and New York, but that production never played in Stratford.) Marlowe’s “Edward II” is often considered Marlowe’s finest play and had an obvious influence on Shakespeare’s history plays, particularly “Richard II”. What has probably kept “Edward II” off the boards at Stratford is its open presentation of homosexuality, though, in fact, the play, unlike Derek Jarman’s 1992 film, is more about politics than sex. While it is too bad we have had to wait so long, it is still a credit to the Festival that it has finally felt bold enough stage such an important work. The current Stratford production, while not flawless, is solid and straightforward enough that no one interested in Shakespeare and his contemporaries should miss it.
Edward II, like Richard II and Henry VI, is considered one of England’s “weak” kings. These are kings who placed private concerns above public duty and were either indecisive or capricious in their ruling. A prime topic for Elizabethans was when, if ever, rebellion against a king could be justified since a king was God’s representative on earth. For Marlowe, a member of an atheist society, the question became one more purely of power and how it affects those who have it and lust after it.
Upon the death of his father Edward I, Edward II (1284-1327) recalls his lover Piers Gaveston, whom his father had banished. Although Edward’s openly homosexual affair pleases no one at court, especially his wife Queen Isabella, Marlowe makes clear that what enrages the nobles is not the king’s sexuality (see Act 1, scene 4, lines 394ff.) but rather his elevation of a commoner to high titles and his neglect of kingly duties in defending England against attacks from France and Scotland.
Chief among Edward’s enemies is Young Mortimer, who plots first Gaveston’s downfall and then Edward’s. Marlowe forces us to ask which is worse--a ruler who neglects his duties for love, or a baron who lusts for power for its own sake. How different is Mortimer, who uses Isabella and her son to further his ambition from Gaveston, who uses Edward to further his? Marlowe engineers a shift in our sympathies, a technique that Shakespeare would use again many times over. While Edward exults in his power our sympathies lies with the opposing barons, but when Edward loses Gaveston and then his own power our sympathies shift to him.
As Edward II, David Snelgrove ably displays the huge range of his character’s emotions from joy and disdain to confusion, outrage, courage, humility and finally utter despair. His characterization would be much stronger if, rather than switching from emotion to emotion sequentially, he were to show their frequent intermingling. It doesn’t help that he shouts throughout the first two thirds of the play. Marlowe’s spare verse requires careful use of pause and emphasis to bring out its ironies. He is most powerful in Edward’s final scenes when torture has made him almost a living ghost.
Jamie Robinson shows Gaveston gleefully flouting convention, virtually daring the barons to unseat him, a low-born coward overconfident that Edward’s favour will protect him. What he misses is the mercenary aspect of Gaveston, who boasts from the start that he can “draw the pliant king which way I please”.
As Queen Isabella, Michelle Giroux delivers her lines so artificially that it’s hard to believe anything her character says. By the end of the play she’s taken on the walk and all-purpose hauteur of a fashion model rather than try for any deeper characterization. In contrast, Scott Wentworth as Young Mortimer gives a gripping performance as the arch-Machiavel of the play. From his cold rage at having his ambitions thwarted to his hubristic reveling in his success that he control Fortune’s wheel, Wentworth details how Mortimer’s nature metamorphoses from justified anger to outright evil.
Among the barons David Francis as Old Mortimer, James Blendick as Warwick and Raymond O’Neill as Pembroke all give solid performances. As Lancaster, however, Walter Borden’s overemphatic delivery undermines his credibility.
Casting an inexperienced actor like Glenn Davis II in the key role of Edward’s brother Edmund, Earl of Kent, is a mistake. He is a figure who first defends the flawed protagonist, abandons him and then returns to him and thus is central in the playwright’s direction of our sympathies toward the protagonist. Shakespeare would make much use of this figure not just in history plays but in tragedies. Think of Kent of “King Lear” or Enobarbus in “Antony and Cleopatra”. Since Davis can’t make sense of the verse we miss out on Edmund’s vital commentary on the action.
As Maltrevis and Gurney, Steve Cumyn and Brad Rudy are excellent as the jailers with lower class accents who come to sympathize with their mistreated royal prisoner. Casting James Blendick as Edward’s assassin Lightborn is a brilliant stroke. He appears a shambling old man whose profession happens to be murder. His conversation with his victim Edward is chilling because of its very objectivity. With this kind of assassin, Edward’s murder, already horrifying enough in itself, is committed without the sadism emphasized in other productions.
Richard Monette’s direction is admirably straightforward. Some make object to the amount of kissing and fondling between Edward and Gaveston and a short glimpse of a gay orgy. This is a case where less would be more. While Monette makes it clear that Edward is in love with Gaveston, he should make it much clearer whether Gaveston is actually in love with Edward or merely using him. Monette does not reveal that Isabella and Young Mortimer are having an affair until they are in France, thus missing the chance during their various encounters in England to show up their hypocrisy.
Michael Gianfrancesco's costumes combine elements of Edward's time and Marlowe's and clichéd modern black leather for Gaveston. Since Gianfrancesco’s set is so plain, it falls to Kevin Fraser to define the scenes with light. While he does create scenes of natural lighting, what is most memorable is the wide range of sudden expressionistic effects he uses to signal abrupt switches in mood in a play where the atmosphere is always volatile.
It has taken 53 seasons for Stratford to stage “Edward II”. Now that Monette has demonstrated how gripping the work can be on stage, let’s hope Stratford can rally itself to produce the play again, not to mention others by Marlowe, before another 53 years go by. Productions of works by Shakespeare’s contemporaries benefit not just the audience and the actors in understanding the context in which Shakespeare wrote but also in presenting us with world-views different from Shakespeare’s, ones that as in “Edward II” are much darker and less comforting and, for good or ill, much closer to our own.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: David Snelgrove as Edward II. ©David Hou.
2005-08-15
Edward II