RSC Edward II review - Breathtaking production needlessly marred on Stratford stage

Christopher Marlowe’s controversial Edward II is a violent play. It is very, very ‘male’, with only one female role, that of the king’s scheming wife, Isabella of France (Ruta Gedmintas).

The play’s homoerotic themes have been much discussed, and while there is a good deal of man-on-man love, it is hardly mentioned in the text. Rather, the conflict that surrounds Edward (Daniel Evans) is really about power and status.

The play is brutally, blindingly binary throughout: on the one side are the barons, noblemen who resent the way their king showers gifts and privileges on an upstart commoner, the king’s beautiful lover Piers Gaveston (Eloka Ivo). The barons are the most powerful men in the country, resplendent here in their stiff modern-day uniforms. They shout, strut and swagger in testosterone-fuelled fury at a king who in all respects, save his status, they consider their inferior. For them, murder is merely a tool, useful and effective. Contrasting this on the king’s side are the lovers and the court, decadent and narcissistic. Under Daniel Raggett’s direction they embrace, twist and turn with a flamboyant and unapologetic eroticism. There is little sense of the world beyond it.

Gaveston of course dies, bloodily, and so in the end does the king in a scene for which the play has become infamous, sodomised with a red-hot poker while imprisoned in a sewer. The scene is viscerally staged; but while it is obvious what is happening, the direction does not overplay the torture. Indeed, it is the indignities heaped upon the king that are so moving. His naked and abused body when it is carried out of the filth is one of many beautifully tragic visions in a production that is as much a feast for the eyes as it is for the ears.

The performance begins with the audience invited to pay their respects to the dead king Edward I in full state mourning. The tiled stage is then laid bare for the power play to take place. Later it will slide away to reveal beneath it the king’s sewer, complete with a deep pool of filthy water and foul stains. The metaphor is obvious.

The performances are muscular throughout, though marred in some cases by lines spoken too quickly and too much shouting. To an extent, the barons are largely indistinguishable from each other, which to my mind is a characteristic of the play rather than a fault of the production. All eyes are on the king. Daniel Evans’s performance is wide ranging and acute in its emotional force. His archrival and his wife’s lover, Mortimer (Enzo Cilenti), is a would-be dictator and a singularly malevolent force throughout.

For some reason the actors are amplified, which is a pity because the Swan Theatre was designed for this to be unnecessary. It also means that microphone wires are visible, even on the king’s almost naked body towards the end. It was a clumsy faux pas that marred an otherwise terrifying scene.

Fast-paced and breathtaking throughout, Edward II runs without a break for almost two hours, but feels like half that length.

Until April 5. Visit rsc.org.uk or call 01789 331111 to book.