Edward II at the RSC’s Swan Theatre – review

If it feels like a while since Daniel Evans performed on a major stage outside the odd Sondheim turn, then it’s not really much of a surprise. He’s had a few theatres to run and is currently sharing artistic director responsibilities for the Royal Shakespeare Company with Tamara Harvey. He’s been a bit busy.

Somehow, though, he’s managed to carve time out of his hectic schedule co-helming one of our great theatrical institutions to return to boards he trod early in his professional career – acting in Stratford-upon-Avon. And he’s taken the bold decision to do so not in one of the major roles by the company’s house writer, but in one of Will’s contemporaries’ lesser-performed plays, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II.

A landmark play in its time (the time being about 1592), Edward II still has the power to shock and horrify more than 400 years later, with its themes of forbidden love, anti-gay hysteria and brutal suppression of anything outside societal norms. Indeed, there are more than enough modern resonances to make it pretty uncomfortable viewing, even leaving aside this production’s graphic violence and monochromatic grimness.

Evans himself is thrillingly at home in the title role, wrapping his Welsh vowels around Marlowe’s blank verse with obvious relish and passion, eliciting sympathy for his boyish infatuation with the hated Piers Gaveston (Eloka Ivo), whose casual arrogance in the face of England’s nobility paves the way to disaster all round. Theirs is a believable, if fatefully fault-ridden, relationship and drives the breathless melodrama to its barbaric conclusion in 100 flat-out, uninterrupted minutes.

RSC debutant Daniel Raggett directs with more functionality than flair, although much of the visual imagery brings to mind echoes of everything from Rembrandt to All Quiet on the Western Front. Leslie Travers has designed a predominantly black-and-white set, with a retractable floor to reveal a mudpit for Edward’s later incarceration, with stark and unhelpfully murky lighting by Tim Lutkin.

Darkness, in fact, is the overriding principle, both in the presentation and the delivery, and too much of the upstage action takes place in a half-lit gloom, rendering parts of the production impenetrable and unappealing. Among the rebellious courtiers, Emilio Doorgasingh’s Pembroke strikes a suitably noble note, while Henry Pettigrew makes a valiant attempt at making sense of the king’s vacillating brother Kent.

Many of the supporting cast feel pretty much interchangeable, with Ruta Gedmintas leavening the out-of-control testosterone as the sole female on stage, Edward’s queen Isabella. It all gets a bit shouty and angsty at times, reinforced by Tommy Reilly’s filmic underscore, which is sombrely atmospheric but rarely leaves room for any light and shade.

And if you’re of a nervous disposition, then the explicit denouement may just prove a red-hot poker too far – although one can’t help suspecting that the dangerously reckless playwright himself would have revelled in it.