THIS hectic chronicle by Christopher Marlowe is regarded as an inferior precursor to Shakespeare’s Richard II: both plays deal with a weak king gaining spiritual stature as a dethroned prisoner, but the latter has always scored higher poetically, politically and emotionally. Undaunted, Shakespeare’s Globe now has Edward II running in repertory with Richard II in Timothy Walker’s all-male, Elizabethan-costumed production.
In its plot the play is a little monotonous, with a series of attempts by an indistinguishable bunch of shouty barons to prise Edward from his lover Gaveston that leads to civil war. Once Gaveston is killed, the sorry cycle repeats itself — to less effect — with Edward transferring his affections to a new ambitious favourite.
Marlowe’s Edward can be played as all mincing mood swings but Liam Brennan brings a statesman-like air to the role. At first he’s reckless in his infatuation, snogging Gerald Kyd’s swaggering Gaveston — cue some wolf-whistles from the Globe’s groundlings — in front of the nobles who resent this low-born new power player, and treating his wife Isabella with brusque disdain. But he also convinces as a battlefield leader.
It’s after Gaveston’s death that Brennan sometimes drifts into one-note despair, whether he is clinging needily to a sanctuary-giving friar or seeking comfort from his killer as a prisoner in soiled rags. What’s missing is the sense of the wavering emotions of a man who is constantly presented with the choice of holding on to supreme power or clinging to obsessive love.
It’s characteristic of a production eager not to descend into camp or melodramatic excess. But it can be a little bloodless. One actor capering about as a satyr during the wedding of Edward’s niece hardly captures his myopic hedonism. Edward’s hot poker-wielding assassin is a quiet professional who arrives at the dungeons as if he’s come to read the gas meter. Even Marlowe’s functional middle-section flurry of battles is played as a formal dance with mimed sword swings.
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If anything it’s the peers who seem the more volatile creatures. Here they almost act like petulant children, standing in a row scowling, greeting the twice-banished Gaveston with sarcastic contempt, and trading pre-battle bluster in song like two name-calling gangs in the playground. And while watching the I’m-the-king-of-the-castle strutting of Justin Shevlin as Edward’s rival Mortimer, you do wonder if there’s anyone mature enough to rule this England of cronyism and corruption — no wonder it’s Edward’s young son who gains the crown at the end.
The single-sex casting adds little to the play — Chu Omambala is a splendidly controlled but manly Isabella and makes the queen’s eventual treasonable plotting less understandable as an act of scorned-woman revenge. But it’s still a solid staging, even if it doesn’t fully capture the dark passions and loyalties that overthrow almost everyone by the end.
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