King Charles III
at the Music Box Theatre
Tim Pigott-Smith (center) and the cast of King Charles III.
If you’ll
excuse the British-ism — and if you’re at all interested in this show, I think
you will — Mike Bartlett’s new play King Charles
III is absolutely bloody fantastic.
It’s the best time I’ve had in a theater in longer than I can
remember — possibly years — and it couldn’t be smarter, or more audacious, or
better-acted, if it tried.
There are
no words to express the daring it takes, these days, to write a play in
Shakespearean blank verse — iambic pentameter, all: if you’re ever less than
completely entranced by the play (which I doubt) and count the syllables,
you’ll never note a fault in the rhythm.
But the daring it takes to write a play in Shakespearean blank verse
about the current royal family of England, deigning to explore, in a probing
way, the relationships such a position might engender (not like, say, Peter
Morgan’s lovely but hagiographic The
Audience) — and to do it exceedingly well — this leaves a critic beyond
wordlessness and more into the realm of a worshipper.
It seems so
very natural that Mr. Bartlett would choose to make his brilliant exploration
of power and those who wield it a “future history play” dealing with the
eternally patient Charles taking up the crown of the United Kingdom. It allows him to explore with reality and
depth of feeling characters who are in one sense imaginary and one sense real,
which could, in some circles, be a very accurate descriptor for the royal
family itself. Indeed, in the play, the
very legitimacy of the throne is challenged, for we follow not only the House
of Windsor and the scuttling, competitive climbers who call Buckingham Palace
home but the protestors, wearing Guy Fawkes masks, who congregate outside that
palace when Charles’s early reign goes horribly wrong.
Yes, something is rotten in the
State of England, though the stakes may seem low at first. In one perfect iambic phrase, our hero,
played by the astonishingly perfect Tim Pigott-Smith, intones, “My life has
been a ling’ring for the throne.” (Put
that up there next to Marlowe’s “Is this the face that launched a thousand
ships?,” by the way.) His challenge, it
seems, is to reconcile his genuine desire to do good for his country with the
reality that his family is rapidly becoming irrelevant in the public eye — the
readers of the Daily Mail may read
with interest, nay, fascination, of the doings of the younger generation of
royals, but Charles and Camilla (Margot Leicester) aren’t exactly breaking
news. But, as it turns out, that isn’t
all the new king has on his plate, for when he refuses to sign a new bill
limiting the power of the press in the wake of the News of the World scandal, rendering it technically unpassed, he
ignites a constitutional crisis.
Suddenly the Prime Minister (Adam James), once merely an uncooperative
stablemate, is an enemy in the ranks.
Harry (Richard Goulding), once comfortable playing the “buffoon” for the
good of the family, has taken up with a radical protestor (Tafline Steen), and
thinks he’s in love. And William (Oliver
Chris) and Kate (Lydia Wilson), who before waited just as patiently for the throne
as the new paterfamilias, turn to scheming, and, eventually, treachery. Before Charles has even been crowned, the burden of a king lies heavy.
If I compare this play to Shakespeare,
it isn’t just because it’s so transcendently good, nor is it just because it
comes off not as a style parody, but almost a new Elizabethan drama the world
is lucky to see for the first time. It’s
because the director Rupert Goold, working with the same cast he directing in
London, succeeds in shepherding a troupe of extraordinary players with the same
dexterity Shakespeare once might have. Mr.
Pigott-Smith takes on Charles with all the professionalism and seriousness he
might use for Lear. Mr. Chris, who at
this very theater three years ago played a masterpiece of comic posh idiocy in One Man, Two Guvnors, acquits himself so
well in drama it’s shocking to realize 2012 Oliver Chris and 2015 Oliver Chris
are the same person, or even in the same family. And Ms. Wilson, as Kate, the Lady Macbeth of
this play, is like a goddess of the theater descended to Earth, so perfectly
does she portray the appearance-savvy traitor whose eventual loathsome betrayal
is so much fun to watch I’m almost shivering describing it here. These actors (and the rest of the cast, too,
is marvelous) sink their teeth into these parts with such abandon because not
only is the language beautiful, as it would be in a Shakespeare play, but they
can engage with the characters, understand their motivations, because they
understand the world they live in. So
does the audience. Thanks to Mr.
Bartlett, we now know how it felt to be groundlings at the Globe firsthand.
In thirty or forty years, we’ll be
quoting the “GPS soliloquy” or mentioning the “kebab vendor scene” offhand by
name the way we’d mention the gravedigger scene or “To be or not to be.” They may not have exactly the staying power
of Shakespeare — by its very nature this play is not exactly timeless — but they
are for our times what Shakespeare’s writing was for his. Perfect language. Perfect acting. Perfect staging. Long live the king.
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