Set in 1788, as the King slips into madness surrounded by his hapless doctors and squabbling ministers, this play by Alan Bennett explores themes of madness, isolation, politics and medicine.
The play is slow starting, setting up a good impression from the beginning of the court routine. Quiet yet happy, the King is presented as a loyal husband and contented king, enjoying his popular nickname of ‘Farmer George’. Jonathan Tilley plays George III very well, with his bumbling colloquialisms (“what, what” and “eh, eh?”) at the end of his sentences. But it is when the symptoms start to affect the King that Jonathan really comes into his own, with a sterling performance of a man rendered helpless and confused by the growing disorder of his mind and agony of his body. This is a great performance, with the pain and suffering etched on the actor's face and limbs. The moments of mental and physical collapse are captivating.
Yet, this is not just a play about one man. George is not just an ill man but an incapacitated King, and the play shows how his ministers and courtiers react to the situation. Philip Aspin is very good as the dry, unsympathetic Pitt, leader of the Tory government. His only concern is for how the King's madness will affect government. Others jump at the chance to snatch power from the monarch and the Tories. The radical, king-hating leader of the Whig opposition, Fox, is very well played by Tim Aldersley, who schemes with the Prince of Wales to set him up as the Prince Regent and put the Whigs in power.
Both sides try and control the situation with the King’s doctors, who are some of the funniest characters in the play. The trio of doctors Baker, Warren and Pepys are hilarious in their obsessions over their pet diagnoses and their inability to come to agreement even over the name of the King’s disease - though Warren can also be chillingly cruel, almost displaying pleasure at the prospect of blistering the King as part of his treatment. Despite the serious subjects broached here, the play is often very funny, with Alan Bennett’s sharp wit bringing great laughs from the audience.
The rest of the relatively large cast is excellent, with many good performances (even from one character who barely speaks, but is still able to engender laughs just with his expression). Will Cudmore's direction is superb, with a minimalist set used well to create the sense of the Georgian court. The cast could have seemed too big for such an intimate portrait, yet there is never any sense of the stage being overcrowded or the cast being underused.
Overall, I was impressed with this brilliant character study of one man’s illness, framed by an equally brilliant study of one of the most important periods in British political history. Highly recommended.
Interview with Will Cudmore (director) and Jonathan Tilley (George III)
Michael Hawkes: Why did you choose to do this play? What first attracted you to it?
Will Cudmore: I was in the Oxford Union library looking for something to read, didn’t get as far as Stoppard (which is where I usually stop), picked it up, and I’d seen the film - as most people have at some point - and I was reading through, and I wanted to do a play at the Playhouse and it seemed like a good choice, so I went with it, and I managed to recruit Becky and Chris [Producers]. And it’s quite a lengthy application process at the Playhouse, and a lot of competition, so we were very lucky to get the job.
MH: And Jonathan, what attracted you to the play.
Jonathan Tilley: I’d worked with Will before a couple of times, and he contacted me, and he asked me to audition. I didn’t know the play, I’d seen the film a long time ago, but I’d forgotten it completely. But I read the play and thought it was brilliant. And so I came in.
MH: How did you find playing the character of George III?
JT: The first thing to do was to get the character of the king as he is when he’s well, which was interesting and good fun; then that has to break down as he descends into his illness. It was a great challenge starting from that point and leading into his madness.
WC: And of course, he’s quite eccentric to begin with.
MH: As most kings are.
WC: As the play says, it’s an odd job. I remember the earlier discussions when we were talking about what the king actually feels, how little of our emotion he actually undergoes, the idea of being lonely or hungry, he’s got everything there for him, he doesn’t think about things like that. I think that’s partly why it’s such a distressing situation for him, to be in this situation, to be ill, to have all the stuff around him break down and be taken away. It’s certainly a challenge.
MH: With the direction, how easy was it to get into the period and capture the history?
WC: I did some background reading and it’s something that interests me anyway, so it wasn’t too much of a chore. I read the books that Bennett said he'd read before writing the play. I thought that was the most useful way of preparing. And he brings in a lot of information very subtly that - if you hadn’t read the books he’d read - you’d miss on stage.
MH: Which books are they?
WC: A book by a mother and son team of doctors called Richard Hunter and Ida MacAlpine called 'George III and the Mad Business'. They were the people who first suggested in the 1960s that he might have actually had porphyria, a blood disorder with bizarre symptoms. As Bennett also writes in his introduction - everything in the play actually happened. It's all from accounts from the time. A major source for the account of the King's illness is the journal of Greville [a page, played by Jamie Coreth in our production]. From this eal historical document Hunter and MacAlpine pieced together a good case for porphyria being the King's real problem. Although more recent thinking is apparently that it was madness after all!
MH: It is an historical play, set in the past, but does it have anything important to say to us now?
WC: Politically, I think. Whilst the King was ill, the opportunistic opposition used the Prince to eject Pitt. Today I think human misery really is used as a political tool, in a way that’s very unpleasant. I think the great coup for Bennett in this play is that the King is the character with whom our sympathies lie. It’s quite a thing to pull off, to make a Hanoverian monarch like George III a sympathetic character that we’re all rooting for. I think we saw tonight [the first night] that the audience by the end are really on his side. Also it has a lot to say about what it is to be lonely and isolated - even when you’re a King.
JT: Well, it’s an extreme example - he was the King and therefore surrounded, but even so, his character is cut off from the people he knows and loves and he’s maltreated, and that kind of thing is sort of universal situation.
MH: What’s been your best experience in putting on the show?
WC: This is my 14th play since I came to Oxford. It's been great working with all the actors to bring it come together. The best experience of the show so far has to have been the audience tonight [the first night] - getting that wonderful reaction. Because however well you think things have gone in rehearsal, it’s only when you hear the response of the crowd that you really know how well you've done. The laughter in the second half especially was really heartening. To think - you know - that it just worked, well, you worry about these things, with a theatre this size. I was really pleased.
The play is slow starting, setting up a good impression from the beginning of the court routine. Quiet yet happy, the King is presented as a loyal husband and contented king, enjoying his popular nickname of ‘Farmer George’. Jonathan Tilley plays George III very well, with his bumbling colloquialisms (“what, what” and “eh, eh?”) at the end of his sentences. But it is when the symptoms start to affect the King that Jonathan really comes into his own, with a sterling performance of a man rendered helpless and confused by the growing disorder of his mind and agony of his body. This is a great performance, with the pain and suffering etched on the actor's face and limbs. The moments of mental and physical collapse are captivating.
Yet, this is not just a play about one man. George is not just an ill man but an incapacitated King, and the play shows how his ministers and courtiers react to the situation. Philip Aspin is very good as the dry, unsympathetic Pitt, leader of the Tory government. His only concern is for how the King's madness will affect government. Others jump at the chance to snatch power from the monarch and the Tories. The radical, king-hating leader of the Whig opposition, Fox, is very well played by Tim Aldersley, who schemes with the Prince of Wales to set him up as the Prince Regent and put the Whigs in power.
Both sides try and control the situation with the King’s doctors, who are some of the funniest characters in the play. The trio of doctors Baker, Warren and Pepys are hilarious in their obsessions over their pet diagnoses and their inability to come to agreement even over the name of the King’s disease - though Warren can also be chillingly cruel, almost displaying pleasure at the prospect of blistering the King as part of his treatment. Despite the serious subjects broached here, the play is often very funny, with Alan Bennett’s sharp wit bringing great laughs from the audience.
The rest of the relatively large cast is excellent, with many good performances (even from one character who barely speaks, but is still able to engender laughs just with his expression). Will Cudmore's direction is superb, with a minimalist set used well to create the sense of the Georgian court. The cast could have seemed too big for such an intimate portrait, yet there is never any sense of the stage being overcrowded or the cast being underused.
Overall, I was impressed with this brilliant character study of one man’s illness, framed by an equally brilliant study of one of the most important periods in British political history. Highly recommended.
Interview with Will Cudmore (director) and Jonathan Tilley (George III)
Michael Hawkes: Why did you choose to do this play? What first attracted you to it?
Will Cudmore: I was in the Oxford Union library looking for something to read, didn’t get as far as Stoppard (which is where I usually stop), picked it up, and I’d seen the film - as most people have at some point - and I was reading through, and I wanted to do a play at the Playhouse and it seemed like a good choice, so I went with it, and I managed to recruit Becky and Chris [Producers]. And it’s quite a lengthy application process at the Playhouse, and a lot of competition, so we were very lucky to get the job.
MH: And Jonathan, what attracted you to the play.
Jonathan Tilley: I’d worked with Will before a couple of times, and he contacted me, and he asked me to audition. I didn’t know the play, I’d seen the film a long time ago, but I’d forgotten it completely. But I read the play and thought it was brilliant. And so I came in.
MH: How did you find playing the character of George III?
JT: The first thing to do was to get the character of the king as he is when he’s well, which was interesting and good fun; then that has to break down as he descends into his illness. It was a great challenge starting from that point and leading into his madness.
WC: And of course, he’s quite eccentric to begin with.
MH: As most kings are.
WC: As the play says, it’s an odd job. I remember the earlier discussions when we were talking about what the king actually feels, how little of our emotion he actually undergoes, the idea of being lonely or hungry, he’s got everything there for him, he doesn’t think about things like that. I think that’s partly why it’s such a distressing situation for him, to be in this situation, to be ill, to have all the stuff around him break down and be taken away. It’s certainly a challenge.
MH: With the direction, how easy was it to get into the period and capture the history?
WC: I did some background reading and it’s something that interests me anyway, so it wasn’t too much of a chore. I read the books that Bennett said he'd read before writing the play. I thought that was the most useful way of preparing. And he brings in a lot of information very subtly that - if you hadn’t read the books he’d read - you’d miss on stage.
MH: Which books are they?
WC: A book by a mother and son team of doctors called Richard Hunter and Ida MacAlpine called 'George III and the Mad Business'. They were the people who first suggested in the 1960s that he might have actually had porphyria, a blood disorder with bizarre symptoms. As Bennett also writes in his introduction - everything in the play actually happened. It's all from accounts from the time. A major source for the account of the King's illness is the journal of Greville [a page, played by Jamie Coreth in our production]. From this eal historical document Hunter and MacAlpine pieced together a good case for porphyria being the King's real problem. Although more recent thinking is apparently that it was madness after all!
MH: It is an historical play, set in the past, but does it have anything important to say to us now?
WC: Politically, I think. Whilst the King was ill, the opportunistic opposition used the Prince to eject Pitt. Today I think human misery really is used as a political tool, in a way that’s very unpleasant. I think the great coup for Bennett in this play is that the King is the character with whom our sympathies lie. It’s quite a thing to pull off, to make a Hanoverian monarch like George III a sympathetic character that we’re all rooting for. I think we saw tonight [the first night] that the audience by the end are really on his side. Also it has a lot to say about what it is to be lonely and isolated - even when you’re a King.
JT: Well, it’s an extreme example - he was the King and therefore surrounded, but even so, his character is cut off from the people he knows and loves and he’s maltreated, and that kind of thing is sort of universal situation.
MH: What’s been your best experience in putting on the show?
WC: This is my 14th play since I came to Oxford. It's been great working with all the actors to bring it come together. The best experience of the show so far has to have been the audience tonight [the first night] - getting that wonderful reaction. Because however well you think things have gone in rehearsal, it’s only when you hear the response of the crowd that you really know how well you've done. The laughter in the second half especially was really heartening. To think - you know - that it just worked, well, you worry about these things, with a theatre this size. I was really pleased.