We included this performance in our Malthouse subscription
on the basis that it would be an update on Christopher Marlowe’s 16th century play
(reputed to be the greatest non- Shakespearean Elizabethan drama).
However the only things the two plays seem to share is the
five principal dramatis personae and
the characterisation of the relationship between the King and Piers
Gaveston (also a married man with at least one child) as actively homosexual.
Marlowe’s
5 Act drama was attentive to history (based on Hollinshed’s Chronicles) except
on the homosexuality matter, an idea gayfully taken up in the 20th
century. Edward had 4 children with his
wife Isabella as well as another child he acknowledged as his, so it seems more
likely that the relationship was as serious historians suggest, one of adopted
brotherhood, like David and Jonathan.
The
Malthouse play has Edward's eldest son, the young prince, as a 10 year old with Gaveston. (Gaveston actually died before Prince
Edward was born.)
Queen Isabella, called
the she-wolf of France, was not the retiring and wimpish lady portrayed in the new play—highly political, she survived
the successive executions of Gaveston (1312), the King (1327), and her lover Roger de
Mortimer (1330). Mortimer had been put in
the Tower of London in 1322, but escaped to France, where he was joined by Isabella.
They led a successful invasion and
rebellion, and the King was deposed. Mortimer allegedly arranged his murder. For three years, Mortimer was a de
facto ruler of England before being himself overthrown by Edward III. While none of this is reflected in the play,
Mortimer is portrayed as a likeable political rascal, House of Cards style, (which you may very well think he was but he couldn’t
possibly comment).
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| Malthouse flyer |
Malthouse aptly sums up the play plot as that “Edward II is a leader who fails
to lead – a king who loses everything because of his addiction to another man. Newly crowned and convinced he’s invincible,
he flaunts his affair and in doing so, affronts the nation…Anthony Weigh’s new
play...leaves the Elizabethan language behind, to meld the lust and
politics of the 14th and 21st centuries to dizzying effect.”
The set of the play is a collation of Edwardian “items”, as
in a museum, curated by young Prince Edward. The play grips attention for its uninterrupted
100 or so minutes, and as historical fiction makes its self-designed points of
homosexual tragedy.
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| Edward and Gaveston, with the Director Matt Lutton (smh) |
