✭✭✭✩✩

by Mike Bartlett, directed by Joel Greenberg

Studio 180, CAA Theatre, Toronto

February 15-March 4, 2018

Kate: “So coronation day itself is just

The ancient costumes worn, and lines to learn,

A slice of theatre, that’s played for fun?”

Studio 180 is currently giving Mike Bartlett’s “future history play” King Charles III its Canadian premiere.  The play is both a satire and a tragedy that imagines what Prince Charles’s reign would be like once he ascends to the throne after his mother's death.  The acting from the high-powered cast, many of whom have ties to the Shaw Festival, is impeccable with a magnificent performance of the title role by David Schurmann.  However, the pacing of director Joel Greenberg is lugubrious and does not reflect the quicksilver cleverness of Bartlett’s dialogue.  Yet, those who might appreciate the titillation of seeing some of Canada’s finest actors portray key members the present royal family will certainly not want to miss this production.

The action begins in the immediate aftermath of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral when the royals are in a sombre mood.  Charles is in a conflicted state of mind.  He mourns his mother’s death yet he is exasperated that he should become king only now when he is elderly and no longer has the vitality he once had.  When he is given the chance to show that he does still have some vitality left, it leads to disastrous results.

When Tristan Evans (Gray Powell), the Labour Prime Minister, comes for his first audience with the new King, Charles brings up a bill to sign into law that was passed by Parliament in his mother’s reign restricting freedom of the press.  Charles doesn’t believe in restricting freedom of the press and, after a suggestion from the Tory Leader of the Opposition Mark Stevens (Patrick Galligan), withholds his symbolic but still necessary signature from the bill.

As explained by Walter Bagehot in The English Constitution (1867), a central text for British monarchs quoted in the play, the sovereign in a constitutional monarchy has “the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn” but not the right to make policy or show favour to one side or the other.  Charles’s refusal to sign the legislation leads to a constitutional crisis which Evans feels can only be solved by legislating away the need for the sovereign’s signature at all.  Influenced again by Mark Stevens, Charles takes an even more disastrous action that leads the country to the brink of civil war.

The main difficulty for many people will be in accepting the premise of the action.  First, it seems improbable that Charles in only his first week as monarch would take an action that would so easily lead to the enmity of Parliament and of the people in general.  As Bartlett has a character point out, Charles’s mother signed numerous pieces of legislation that people knew she privately disapproved of because she knew the restrictions placed on her as British monarch.  After having observed his mother in action in over 60 successful years, why would he want to upset the archaic system that even allows him a position at all?

Second, Bartlett chooses the peculiar coincidence that there is still a bill left over from his mother reign for him to sign.  For Charles to withhold his signature and demand a renewal of discussion for a bill over which mother would have already exercised her constitutional rights, seems improbable because it not only stirs up controversy for no good reason but because is it disrespectful to his mother’s judgment.  While the rest of the action proceeds logically and is managed well, it is hard to get past the dodgy premise that sets everything off. 

The cleverest aspect of the play is that Bartlett has written it in blank verse.  Not only that, but numerous scenes and individual lines are direct reminiscences of scenes and lines in Shakespeare.  Kate pushing William to get up his courage to oust his father reminds us of Lady Macbeth urging her reluctant husband onwards.  Prince Harry’s dalliance with the lowlife of London reminds us of Prince Hal’s similar dalliance in Henry IV, Part 1.  His treatment of his female companion Jess (Jessica Greenberg) recalls the ending of Henry IV, Part 2.  Charles’s mediation beginning “What am I?” is the equivalent of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”.  The whole framework of the play is itself a modern re-imagining of Richard II.  As for Bartlett’s rather utilitarian verse, it is amusing in itself to hear contemporary words like “Brexit”, “Botox”, “Burger King” and “Doritos” dignified by their placement in lines of iambic pentameter.   

The rather implausible premise is not so important once we realize that Bartlett’s play is both an examination of an archaic relic of the past that contributes to Britain’s sense of identity and a satire on the very fragility of an identity that must depend on a family with powerful titles but no actual power.  Bartlett’s use of Shakespearean references only highlight the contrast between the lofty personalities and high stakes in Shakespeare’s plays and the middling personalities and low stakes of the present royals. 

The main problem with Studio 180’s production is that director Joel Greenberg seems not to realize this aspect of satire at all.  Even lines that are clearly meant to be funny, such as Camilla’s forgetting to include Wales as part of Great Britain, Greenberg has delivered as if they were dead serious.  Bartlett’s use of the ghost of Diana in the same manner as the witches in Macbeth has to be humorous if only for the sake of the contrast, yet again Greenberg treats this in earnest.

Worst of all, Greenberg, best known for his direction of contemporary plays written in prose, has all of Bartlett’s blank verse verse spoken at exactly the same pace throughout the entire play, seeming not to realize that verse can be spoken at different speeds just as prose can.  The result is that Bartlett’s cleverness has to struggle under the mind-numbing metronomic recitation of the verse that Greenberg encourages.  A consequence of the unwavering plod of the speeches is the unwavering plod of Greenberg’s pacing within scenes and between scenes.  It may be that he is attempting to give the play an air of stateliness but he succeeds in lending only the sensation of tedium.  Only the final two scenes of the play have the spark of tension that should have been present from the beginning.

This is really a great pity since the acting of the entire cast is of the highest calibre.  David Schurmann is an excellent Charles.  The multiple layers Schurmann brings out in Charles’s character reveal the role as one of the richest in modern historical drama.  Schurmann is wonderfully able to project mixed emotions.  He takes Charles on an emotional journey from muted elation and annoyance to the hubris of self-importance heading inevitably to a conclusion of rage, despair and abandonment.  It is a great performance and some may wish to see the play for its sake alone.

Yet all the others also excel.  Jeff Meadows makes William’s conflict between filial duty to his father and fealty to the crown come alive and carefully traces the shift of a man happy to lie low into an agent of change.  Shannon Taylor shows us a revolutionary Kate not content merely to be considered a fashion plate but actively providing input as William’s future queen in royal decision making.

Wade Bogert-O’Brien is well cast as a Prince Harry whose is suffering from a loss of purpose.  Bartlett has revised his play, which premiered in 2014, for this production to include developments that have happened in recent years.  Therefore, we learn, again pointing to the play’s humorous side, that Harry’s marriage with Meghan Markle lasted only six months.  Clad in a hoodie the Prince is trying to experience what more there is in the world, and he happens to find an anti-monarchist Jess (a perky but sensitive Jessica Greenberg), who is willing to show him the kind of freedom from formality that the lowlife offers.  Bogert-O’Brien lends Harry such a feeling of discontent that even when Harry claims he is happy, we feel it’s not quite true.

Gray Powell makes a forceful, no-nonsense Prime Minister and Patrick Galligan a weaselly Tory leader, which makes it all the more unlikely that Charles would follow the Tory’s advice.  Some will feel that Bartlett lets Camilla off lightly by lending her a general if ineffective concern that Rosemary Dunsmore depicts well.  Amy Rutherford is persuasive in several roles, most importantly as the sympathetic but oracular Ghost of Diana. 

One technical feature of the production that makes the play a less than ideal experience is the use of miking.  The CAA Theatre (formerly the Panasonic Theatre) has only 700 seats.  That is quite similar to the 759 seats of the Wyndham’s Theatre in London’s West End where the play transferred after its success at the Almeida.  The West End production did not use mics.  Why should the Toronto production?  Mics dull rather than heighten the live theatre experience because we hear the sound homogenized via loudspeakers rather than directly from the actor’s mouth.  In the many times when the sound engineers failed to switch on the mics in time, it was quite clear that the actors, used to speaking unamplified in venues larger than the CAA, could have been heard just as well and more effectively without the mics.  After all, the Festival Theatre at the Shaw, that happily does without mics for plays, has 856 seats.

Seeing current members of royal family portrayed on stage in a pseudo-Shakespearean history play should be a mischievous pleasure.  If only Greenberg had allowed that pleasure to come through, the play with all its fine performances would have been the kind of audacious experience so lauded in London and New York.  If only Greenberg had not chosen to direct the play in an unvaryingly glacial pace, the actions would feel drained of tension and excitement.  Fans of the Shaw Festival and especially of David Schurmann will no doubt want to see its current and former members on stage in Toronto.  The rest of the general public will likely wonder how a play that sadly comes across as so dull in Toronto could have been acclaimed as “unstoppably entertaining” by The Times of London or “flat-out brilliant” by the New York Times.      

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Jeff Meadows as William, Shannon Taylor as Kate, Rosemary Dunsmore as Camilla and David Schurmann as King Charles; Patrick Galligan as Mark Stevens, David Schurmann as King Charles and Gray Powell as Tristan Evans; Wade Bogert-O’Brien as Harry, David Schurmann as King Charles and Jeff Meadows as William. ©2018 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.