Four Nights in Knaresborough (Leeds)

Four Nights in Knaresborough is a first play by a teacher from Reading, which presumably finds its place in the West Yorkshire Playhouse’s ‘True North’ season by virtue of its title.

Knaresborough, though you don’t need to know it, is a rather charming market town which stands high above the River Nidd in North Yorkshire (not West Yorkshire as the writer, Paul Webb, appears to think). Its main claim to fame is Mother Shipton, a latterday Nostradamus; but there is also a largely disregarded castle ruin up on the crag above the river. As Mr Webb has discovered, this was owned in 1170 by Hugh de Morville and it was to here, following the slaughter in Canterbury Cathedral of Thomas Becket, that Morville and his three co-assassins escaped and holed up for a year. So much is fact, and indeed it is the only fact in the play, the rest, since no record survives of their stay, is pure fiction.

Despite the attentions of armies of historians, not to mention
playwrights from Anouilh to T.S.Eliot, the murder of Becket remains an enigma, and it isn’t hard to see the attraction of examining the lives and motives of the four Knights who so disastrously over-interpreted Henry II’s yearning to be rid of the turbulent priest. What Mr Webb gives us is historical speculation for “the Pulp Fiction generation”, that is, it trades in its “forsooths” for a flurry of “f*ckwits” and in place of courtly love offers a Scots catamite who suggests he should “shag some sense into” the resident chatelaine. Nor does the pointlessly self-indulgent violence end with the language of the Knights: at one point, for no very clear reason, two of them
storm out of the castle to do some wholesale pillaging and, 29 corpses
later, drag back one supposedly dead body (why?), only for it to jump startlingly back to life in their midst and give rise to yet more mindless brutality.

Somewhere in the midst of this farrago of unrelated episodes there is a
little desultory discussion of Becket’s murder but there is much reference to the sexual couplings and jealousies within the quartet which is simply tedious. Dominic Mafham has a strong brooding presence as the thinker Traci and Steven Duffy‘s Brito is appropriately mercurial. Daniel Flynn as the host Morville is tortured with guilt and stands for minutes bare-arsed to the audience supposedly heating himself on the feeble gas flame which has to represent a roaring fire in the castle grate. Esther Hall displays a quietly dignified beauty, which says more about nobility than the four Knights could ever muster between them.

Gemma Bodinetz‘s direction is able to do little to rescue a play which has far too many words and far too little to say.

– by Ian Watson