Go to Trafalgar Square and there, looking down Whitehall, is Charles I, a few hundred yards from the place where he lost his head. Walk as far as Parliament and you'll find another statue to Oliver Cromwell, the man largely responsible for his decapitation. I've always found it rather refreshing that we can commemorate both these historical figures. We're all of us partly Roundheads and partly Cavaliers.
Perhaps in two or three hundred years' time, when playwrights are remembered in the way they should be, they will put up rival statues to Howard Barker and Howard Brenton to ensure they don't get muddled up. Barker is the curmudgeonly one who once wrote a play about the reign of Charles II. Brenton, the more user-friendly of the two, has written a new play about the trial and execution of Charles I, which has just opened at the Hampstead Theatre. I was interested rather than excited by this production, which I think deserves a larger space and a different director and designer to succeed fully.
Unlike Barker, Brenton writes historical dramas which are easily accessible; he's the only modern playwright who has written a really successful work for the big stage at Shakespeare's Globe, with a very enjoyable play about Ann Boleyn. He was responsible as translator and adaptor for the National Theatre's excellent revival of Danton's Death, another play which zeroes in on a moment of historical turmoil. His story of the two winter months leading up to the moment Charles Stuart had his head chopped off in Whitehall is an exploration of a key turning point in English history whose repercussions are still being worked through today. Every time we hear politicians argue about the 'sovereignty of parliament' there's a live echo of the debates of the 1640s.
But the story of how Parliament and its victorious army put Charles on trial and executed him is a hideously complex one, involving shifting alliances between groups including Levellers, Presbyterians and Independents. Brenton understandably looks for a storyline that will pit Charles against Oliver Cromwell, and follows the example of Schiller in Maria Stuart by inventing a fictitious meeting between his two protagonists. I found the first half of the play only intermittently exciting, and at moments I wished I was elsewhere. The second half, largely devoted to the trial, raises the temperature sharply and conveys a real sense of political fear and uncertainty. The moment when the death warrant is signed climaxes in a paroxysm of nervous laughter as Cromwell and the other leading Commissioners flick ink over each other to relieve the tension.
Mark Gatiss gives a commanding performance as Charles, a man incapable of any kind of compromise, who seems to be almost willing his executioners on by his intransigence. He is the only character wearing 17th century costume, and bestrides the tiny stage like a Van Dyck portrait come to life. Douglas Henshall as Cromwell has a more difficult task; the play starts in London without him, and his dominance over the anti-royalist factions emerges only slowly. Often he falls silent while others talk, emerging only towards the end as the central figure. To the last he believes that Charles can be persuaded into accepting a diminished constitutional role as monarch, but it's a forlorn hope.
This is inevitably a boys' play, with only two female parts. The wonderful Laura Rogers, a favourite of mine, has too little to do as the wife of the prosecuting attorney at Charles' treason trial, and much the same can be said of Abigail Cruttenden as Lady Anne Fairfax. There is strong acting throughout, notably from Gerald Kyd as the Leveller John Lilburne and Matthew Flynn as Thomas Harrison.
My main complaint is that director Howard Davies and his designer Ashley Martin-Davis have made some deliberately perverse decisions on how to stage the play. Remodelling the theatre into a narrow traverse with the audience watching from both sides doesn't work when every scene (and there are lots of them) requires a different set of furniture. At times the play seems to be set in a small furniture warehouse, with an endless procession of men shifting chairs and tables around. The smaller the stage and the shorter the scenes, the bigger the impact of scene-shifting. Directors like Declan Donnellan and Michael Grandage, who are used to working on small stages with an absolute minimum of scenery, don't make this kind of miscalculation.
Secondly, I have a big problem with the way the director and designer have put Charles in period costume but placed everyone else in 1950s shiny dark suits. Of course, the royal finery and lace helps point up the contrast between Charles and the other characters, but I'm still scratching my head over the reason why Cromwell and his mates are Brylcreemed up for the 1952 TUC conference. What could be a sweeping historical drama becomes reduced to a men-in-suits play that lacks any sense of period. The furniture is shabby and uncomfortable utility stuff, the telephones are black Bakelite, and lawyers tap away on old typewriters. It has a mid-20th century feel which jars with the protagonists' fervent religiosity and faith in God, and I can't image it has anything to do with the playwright's intentions. Howard Davies is a brilliant director in many ways, but I know from seeing his work at the National Theatre that he has a tendency to tinker around with period for no very clear reason.
While I acknowledge Edward Hall's achievement in commissioning this play as soon as he took over the Hampstead Theatre and began to lift it out of the doldrums, I can't help feeling that a more traditional production in period costume on a large stage like Shakespeare's Globe would serve the play much better. On this narrow platform it doesn't get a chance to breathe.
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