For hardcore Marlovians
Lloyd Evans
Edward II Globe Calamity Jane Shaftesbray Vincent in Brixton Playhouse
Marlowe's Edward II is a fascinating play. Its themes and dramatic patterns are so close to Richard II (written two years later) that you can almost imagine Shakespeare sitting at the Globe, tutting and frowning and making notes for its improvement. Like Richard, Edward is a self-indulgent tyrant deposed by the nobility and murdered in prison. Shakespeare lifts whole scenes from Marlowe, expanding the characters' imaginative range, developing the language beyond recognition and adding an infinite measure of psychological subtlety. The fact is that Marlowe isn't a patch on Shakespeare; so it is with this production. The costumes, the musicians and the cast are the same as for Mark Rylance's Richard II (running concurrently until 27 September) but a key ingredient is missing. Rylance? Where are you? This show needs a star. Liam
Brennan is an efficient but unspectacular Edward. Gerald Kyd, as Piers Gaveston, is playing a character head over heels in love with himself, He seems a touch too well suited to the role.
Both productions are all-male affairs. In Richard lithe men camp it up beautifully
but there are no such frolics here. The French princess Isabella, Edward's lonely and thwarted wife, is played by Chu Omambala, a strapping six-footer wearing lipstick and a mauve wig. This is 'authenticity' — so instead of a forlorn princess abandoned by her king for another man we're watching a middleweight boxer in a Danny La Rue outfit. It's confusing and costs the production all kinds of expressive opportunities. And, anyway, I thought authenticity required females to be played by boys with unbroken voices. Big problem there, of course. To show a man embracing a 13-year-old would bring the Child Protection Squad in full body armour scrambling over the thatch and abseiling from the eaves.
This show will satisfy hardcore Marlovians only. As I departed, I felt that dread sense of relief that all theatre-lovers know and feel ashamed of a burden lifted, a quartering earned. Henceforth my
proud boast will be that I have seen Marlowe's Edward II. Will I see it again? I doubt it. As for Richard II, I can't wait.
Other critics have declared Calamity Jane staid and provincial. I disagree, Toyah
Willcox, who has the physique of a Soviet gymnast, throws herself into the part with boundless zest. She springs over tables, she vaults onto coaches, she dives into a blan ket and is tossed in the air. She delivers one song upside down with her legs wrapped around a beam. There's enough barn-dance energy in this show to keep it running well into September. Kellie Ryan, as Adelaide's star-struck maid, puts in a comic performance that is both affecting and hilarious.
Equally affecting is Clare Higgins in Vincent in Brixton. But that apart, I found
this show maddeningly dull. The accents are all over the place. Higgins and her daughter sound like the conveners of a Sloane Square reading group rather than a pair of hard-pressed Lambeth skivvies. Jochum Ten Haaf as Van Gogh has the Anglo-American twang of the modern Dutchman, an accent familiar to any English traveller from those challenging conversations with bumptious back-pack ers from Irrishterdim and 0o-tricht. But his speech is quite different from his sis
ter's who has been tutored to articulate a neutral pidgin unassailed by American vowel-quantities. These accents are a hun
dred years apart. In a further violation of linguistic sense, the sister, an ill-educated girl of 18, arrives fresh off the boat from Holland with a mastery of English that includes such flourishes as 'uneventful', 'finishing touches' and 'quite a handful'. She delivers these colloquialisms in a brogue as thick as curdled goats milk.
Does this matter? Certainly. Language is the engine of the stage and this banger needs the RAC. Most infuriating is Louis Cancelmi, an actor from Chicago, playing Sam, a decorator from Brixton. In the course of a single sentence his accent visits every capital in the Commonwealth without coming within a thousand miles of London. 'Oi feenk oil toik moy poypuh intew the gawdin.' It's not his fault. The producers must have realised. And to ask him to play a Cockney on the London stage, knowing that he is making a complete Berkshire hunt of himself, is both a discourtesy to the house and an injustice to him. Nor does it help that he is incapable of amplification. All around me I heard constant whispers as people repeated garbled lines to their companions. Mystifyingly, Vincent is thriving. I went on a rainy Monday and saw barely a bumless pew.
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