Daniel Raggett’s production in the Swan Theatre is as short, sharp and fiery as a red hot poker up the butt. Raggett has reduced the normal three-hour running time of Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy of a gay king to just over ninety pulsating minutes, and in the process has done the playwright several huge favours. Instead of sprawling with inter-courtier debate, this production feels like a train hurtling to hell. It’s reduced to cause and effect, not exactly Elizabethan Tiktok, but picking up lessons of brevity and allusion from the world of microvideos, and putting them to powerful and effective work.
Effective, because Marlowe, left to his own devices, doesn’t do depth all that well. His language occasionally soars skyward with radiant poetry, but his characters stay stuck to the ground. They are who they are. They don’t change or develop, and they don’t peel away psychological layers. They’re like chess pieces: once you know what their abilities are, you know them. His plays are like Shakespeare with the contradictions, subtleties and kaleidoscopic meanings left out. Some productions try and manufacture depth where there is none to be had, and end up as thick and endlessly chewable as fatty meat. This one is as trim, petite and perfectly cooked as a minute steak.
There’s also something of real historic significance about this Edward II. After discussion with the Head of Research for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, it seems this may be the first time an Artistic Director of the RSC has played a leading role in one of their productions. The last time an actor-manager took to the stage of this theatre was Frank Benson in the first decade of the twentieth century (Benson was so fond of acting in The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor that his Stratford repertoire came to be known as The Merry Shrews of Venice - but I digress). In taking the lead role, Daniel Evans is doing no more than Michelle Terry at the Globe, but his pioneering step is typical of the refreshing approach adopted by him and co-Artistic Director Tamara Harvey since they took up the reins a year ago. Evans’ Edward has neither the camp foppishness of some past renditions of the role (where the repeated refrain of ‘My Gaveston’ can almost start to sound like John Inman in Are You Being Served? looking for some indigestion tablets), nor does he give in to the protracted philosophising of the imprisoned royal. Instead Evans has perceived the links between Marlowe’s Edward and Shakespeare’s Richard the Second (written as little as one year apart). He is animated, indignant, proud and tragically naive. In his and Raggett’s vision, the play is not about a man unfit to be king on account of his sexuality, but about a country unable to accept a gay king who, in every other respect, is a perfectly acceptable figurehead.
The clash between court and queer is most obvious in Leslie Travers’ bold, thickly-outlined costumes. While the conventional, anti-gay dignitaries wear ceremonial military attire, black shoes buffed to perfection and chests pumped with rows of medals, the gay contingency is dressed down in loose casuals. In fact when we first meet Piers Gaveston and his allies Spencer and Baldock, they are in a locker room wearing nothing but white towels barely clinging to their hips, and gazing down in amusement on the stiffly uniformed advisors standing vigil around the bier of the recently-deceased Edward the First. Eloka Ivo as Gaveston is the perfect antagonist for these defenders of white, English supremacy. Charming, blunt, black and gay, he represents everything they detest. And if he had been any more buff they would have had to rename him Pecs Gaveston. At times, watching this production felt not unlike wandering into the men’s changing room at a Mr Universe contest. The relaxed, confident physicality of Gaveston and his mates is set off perfectly by the fidgety discomfort of the courtiers. In fact the first thing Evan Milton’s Lancaster does is pick nervously at his own testicles while desperately searching for a packet of fags in his pocket after the royal funeral. The contrast is literally black and white, and none the worse for that.
Talking of cigarettes, smoking features heavily in both this production and the Hamlet currently showing in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre next door, and the actors seem – as is permitted by law – to be using real, rather than stage, cigarettes. I don’t know if the company is aware, but the smell permeates the auditorium very quickly, and it feels like sitting in a pub twenty years ago, breathing in someone else’s lung cancer. If they could switch to fake fags, I for one would be grateful.
Even before the play starts there is a minor coup de theatre in this production: the audience has the option to process around the funeral bier of Edward the First. It is decorated to resemble not that of a medieval king but of our own recently departed Queen Elizabeth (and the regal names surrounding it on the floor list every monarch since Edward up to the present day, leaving no doubt where or when this production is set). The sight of members of the public shuffling past the coffin, with respectful, uniformed guards surrounding it, instantly recalls those astonishing TV images of the vast queues paying respects to our own late Queen. It’s a powerful image. The point it’s trying to make, both here and in the main action of the play, is that our own society still works to exclude minorities from positions of power. Even today we have only one openly gay professional footballer in this country. And the first (and only) member of the Royal Family to come out with a publicly acknowledged same-sex relationship is the current Lord Mountbatten (who, fun fact, won Season Three of The Traitors US). Edward the Second, in Raggett’s and Evans’ hands, is a reminder that we still have a long way to go. And this is underlined in grisly detail by the way both Gaveston and Edward die: Gaveston in a violent and classically-orchestrated ‘gay-bashing’ attack, and Edward in a manner cruelly calculated to simulate and pervert gay sex.
The brevity of this production is an advantage not only because it makes the action fast and snappy. It also serves the thinness of Marlowe’s language. When Edward says to his wife, ‘Fawn not on me, foul strumpet!’, that is all he has to say. When the murderer Lightborn has finished his task, he simply announces, ‘’Tis done’. The succinct crispness of the editing enables these characters to display naked determination untrammelled by sophistication, and that feels perfectly in tune with Marlowe at his best.
In a few months, the RSC is bringing back Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s goriest play. This Edward II is a fitting warm-up. It’s wild, visceral, action-packed and visually stunning. It reminds us, for those who still doubt it, that Marlowe was most certainly not Shakespeare. But in our supposedly integrated 21st-century society, it makes clear that the corridors of power in the body politic still stand ready to reject an unwelcome splinter of difference with blood, pus and scheming prejudice.