When I heard the Queen, my lords, was dead and Charles was indeed to take the throne (I had always figured he’d abdicate in favor of William), I felt a twinge of déjà vu all over again because I remembered a certain play from a while back…
In the mid 2010s, the play to celebrate in London was Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III, a self-described “future history play” about imagined events after Charles ascends to the throne. Of course, the play now is completely dated as surely as Mr. Bartlett knew it would one day be and yet, reading the text for the first time this week, there are still elements that struck me as interesting or maybe not and now here’s this blog post.
I knew, and this had been a big deal about the West End and Broadway productions, that the play was written in blank verse—iambic pentameter at that! But when I cracked open the book, I was surprised to see what looked like a fully formed (on-the-surface, at least) Shakespearean text. The play is five acts long, with the scenes divided as “3.3,” “3.4,” etc. as if it were pre-edited by Stephen Greenblatt. It even has a ghost (Diana) and it could conceivably look right alongside plays like Henry V and Richard III.
"Shakespeare pastiche" was in vogue for a moment or two. I recall reading a novel a few years ago now, Arthur Phillips’ The Tragedy of Arthur. It was about the discovery of a “lost” Shakespeare play. At the end of the novel, the author published a full play in the same iambic pentameter and proved quite the good forger to most academics. But, in Arthur, Phillips was trying to emulate Elizabethan speech within that poetic framework. King Charles III is entirely in our modern vernacular, but it is still ratcheted into the Shakespearean meter. Rather than do the harder work necessary, Bartlett has many “’tweens” for “between” that fit the meter, but surely fall off the tongue like broken shards of glass.
I am not suggesting I have powers Mr. Bartlett doesn’t possess. I have published poetry and have attempted everything from a Petrarchan sonnet to haiku. And I have no talent for iambic pentameter. But I didn’t write this play. Mr. Bartlett was the one to see this through. The verse could have been significantly better—though his decision to have Harry speak in prose is the right one.
As for the story, Charles ascends the throne only to have his first action be to sign a fully-voted-upon bill that would restrict the rights of the press. The Prime Minister assumes Charles would be on his side (especially given the press’ responsibility for Diana’s death), but Charles is troubled by the bill and refuses to sign it, which angers both parties as the monarch is not supposed to have an opinion on politics. Charles dissolves the Parliament before they can pass the bill or restrict his power and he goes into sort of a stupor, placing a tank outside Buckingham Palace and watching London go up in flames.
I’ll admit I’m not well-versed in British politics, but restricting the press is a bad thing, right? Well, Charles (in the play) wants to protect that freedom. That would normally make him the hero in my eyes and, yet everyone ends up hating him for it. And the playwright doesn’t seem to care for Charles. It’s hard to find something to root for in this play.
You kind of root for Harry, who asks to be a commoner and tries to run off with a young lady who’s embroiled in a sex scandal. There was a big deal made in the pre-Broadway press that Harry’s character not only leaves the royal family but marries someone of a different race. My guess is the creative team simply cast an Anglo-African actress because the text does not specify her race (unless there is some implied racism in the play I can’t spot). Still, Bartlett got prophetic points in some people’s eyes for his prediction Harry would not marry someone who was fully Caucasian.
But, in case you were wondering, he got everything else factually wrong (including the flat, one-dimensional portrayals of Camilla and Kate), but predicting the future is not the point.
What is good about the play? Well, it really is a bloody great idea for a play: an Elizabethan history play taking up where the second Elizabeth left off? Wonderful! But, here's the thing about great ideas:
A few years ago, I read the synopsis for Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play, a sprawling portrayal of three societies mounting pageants about the death of Jesus—pre-Renaissance Britons, Hitlerite Bavarians, and late twentieth-century Midwesterners. It was the best synopsis for a play I’ve ever read. When I read it (the synopsis), I had a visceral, gut-level reaction, hungering to read it. When the play arrived at my doorstep, I found another bloody great idea for a play squandered by the author not going deep enough once she had the great idea-- she didn't root out the problems the play was supposed to solve, she didn't wrestle the alligator to the ground and come up with something uncanny, different, strange, awesome.
My playwriting teacher Gladden Schrock had a rule: when anybody tells you to read a new play, read an old one. I get what he means now.
King Charles III is a bloody great idea for a play. I just wish it were a bloody great play. I wish there were more bloody great plays!!!
Oh, and, long live the King.
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