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The temptation is to see Christopher Marlowe’s brutal history play as a commentary on homophobia. After all, it is about a king who loses his throne thanks to loving a male courtier. The other nobles, disturbed by Edward’s devotion to Piers Gaveston, close rank. From that point on, Gaveston’s days are numbered, as are those of the king.
But it is more complicated than that. Daniel Raggett’s urgent, brooding production highlights the dilemma from the start. The old king is dead and lying in state. The audience are invited to process around the coffin, with its extravagant silver crucifix caught in the beams of Tim Lutkin’s austere lighting. The live score by Tommy Reilly is reverent and sombre.
The mood only darkens as the nobles gather around the coffin, all gold braid and military medals. This is the establishment at its most regimented.
Such discipline makes the first sight of Gaveston all the more arresting. Appearing high above the mourners amid a dazzling string of lights and a blast of techno, he holds forth in an all-male bath house, flirting with his bare-torsoed companions. Played by Eloka Ivo, he symbolises freedom, disruption and disorder. He is the dangerous opposite of courtly formality.
It is this, rather than his sexuality in itself, that provokes consternation. As far as the nobles are concerned, the king can snog whom he likes. They would prefer it to be Isabella, his queen, played haughtily by Ruta Gedmintas, a mirror to Gaveston in stature and attire, but that is not really the issue. What bothers them is a breach of protocol. Anything that pulls the monarch’s attention away from matters of state is a threat they must respond to. Raggett presents them as reasonable diplomats not reactionary zealots.
This is something Edward never grasps. Leading from the front, the RSC’s co-artistic director, Daniel Evans, plays the king with impetuousness, a sore loser irritated not to get his own way but lacking the wit to do much about it. He is too besotted with Gaveston to understand anyone else’s point of view.
In truth, he is out of his depth with both parties. Gaveston has a wild sexual energy at odds with Edward’s buttoned-up decorum, while the nobles have political power he is incapable of mastering. His flaw is bad governance. “Commend me to my son and bid him rule better than I,” he says in a rare moment of self-awareness.
His downfall exposes the illusory nature of authority. Only if everyone agrees to believe can a leader remain in control. When faith dissipates, so too does power. By the end, when we find Edward stumbling into the wastewater of Leslie Travers’s unforgiving set, this king literally has no clothes. Meanwhile his son assumes power despite being still a boy.
Only in the grisly manner of Edward’s death, involving a red-hot poker shoved inside him, do we see homophobia cruelly at play. What hits home most forcefully in Raggett’s production, performed without interval for added intensity, is a clash of values, the orthodox reacting against the untamed, the forces of order punishing the violators.
