EDWARD II

and

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

Both at Botanic Gardens, Glasgow

Both until July 28

Reviewed by Mark Brown

Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II is a play that is rarely performed on our stages. It is a mark of the ambition of the Bard in the Botanics mini-festival of Shakespeare and, on occasion, his contemporaries, that it is being presented in the Kibble Palace glasshouse in an adaptation by the festival’s artistic director Gordon Barr.

In the drama (which was first printed in 1594) England is plunged into civil war by the outraged response of sections of the gentry (led by Mortimer, Earl of Lancaster) to the love of King Edward for his favourite Piers Gaveston. To say that the very clear sexual implications of the play were controversial in the theocratic England of the late 16th-century would be a huge understatement.

Even today, when the First Minister of Scotland leads a Pride parade in one part of the UK while gay rights have not been realised in another (Northern Ireland), the piece carries a powerful political charge.

From the outset, in which a smiling Gaveston swaggers into the auditorium, dressed in a white T-shirt and leather jacket, like James Dean, the production foregrounds the play’s sexual dimension. The 50s theme is smart, being modern and stylish, but also reflecting on a time when male homosexuality in Britain was still a criminal offence.

Smiling at his recall to England by the newly crowned Edward II, Charlie Clee imbues his excellent Gaveston with a reckless confidence that reflects, not only the power of the King’s title, but also the exhilarations of love. For his part, Edward (Laurie Scott, the epitome of the fearless, besotted lover) embraces his “minion”, kissing him openly and passionately in front of his Queen, Isabella (the fine Esme Bayley), the disgusted Mortimer (a viciously implacable Andy Clark) and the assembled nobility (for which we, the audience, stand in).

Barr has adapted and reduced Marlowe’s text, cutting the number of characters from more than 30 to just four. Still, however, we are left with a substantial play that runs to more than two-and-a-quarter hours.

Although the production’s sympathies lie unambiguously with the gay lovers, who are beset by hateful plots, political manoeuvres and, ultimately, war, there is space for mixed emotions. Isabella’s anguish is not merely at the homosexuality of her husband. A Queen and a political player she may be, but Bayley plays her, as she is, as a human being suffering the unbearable pain of rejection by her lover.

Impressive though Barr’s work on the text is, he cannot give the play the kind of rhythm and momentum that he achieved with his recent version of Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra. The to-ing and fro-ing of the conflict in Marlowe’s drama give it a somewhat repetitive structure, like the swinging back-and-forth of a pendulum.

Nevertheless, this is an admirable staging of an important play, which uses mid-20th-century popular music poignantly and does not flinch in its powerful representation of one of the most brutal and appalling murders in all of world theatre.

Meanwhile, over on Bard In The Botanics’ outdoor stage, Jennifer Dick directs Shakespeare’s dark-edged sex war comedy Much Ado Nothing. It is, glad to say, a better production than the director’s disappointing Romeo & Juliet earlier in this summer’s festival.

There is a greater sense of purpose and direction here, as Adam Donaldson’s misogynistic bachelor Benedick and Nicole Cooper’s equally combative Beatrice lock horns with a pleasing gusto. There is also a genuinely sinister aspect to the play’s darker plotline, in which “the bastard” Don John (an understated, scowling Darren Brownlie) tricks the Florentine lord Claudio into believing that his betrothed, Hero (daughter of the feminised governor of Messina, Leonata), has been unfaithful to him.

These two plotlines (in which the people of court seek to trick the warring Benedick and Beatrice into falling in love with each other, and Hero is the victim of a sexist calumny) are the yin and yang of the play. Dick’s production grasps this nicely, and creates a well-paced balance between the two.

There’s a tremendous comic addition, too, in the sub-plot in which Keystone Cops precursor Dogberry (Brownlie, again, this time on dynamically hilarious form) and his night watchmen apprehend Don John’s right-hand man Borachio. Dogberry (to whose malapropisms this production adds ludicrous pronunciations) is more concerned that he has been verbally abused (called, he says, “an airse”, no less!) than about the plot against Hero’s honour.

Although the Dogberry scenes are very funny, they also expose the flaw in director Dick’s relocation of the play from a Renaissance Italian court to a Victorian circus. The appearance of Leonata, not as a blue-blooded governor, but as a circus ringmistress makes little narrative sense, but is jolly enough visually.

However, Dogberry’s doubling up as a circus strongman and the local constable stretches one’s credulity. The arrest of Borachio by red-nosed, baggy-trousered clowns is more distracting still. One can’t help but feel that real cops would have been more humorous.

If this staging is hampered somewhat by its shoehorning of the play into an ill-fitting concept, it is also, like the Romeo & Juliet before it, held back somewhat by uneven casting. Brownlie, Cooper and Donaldson impress. However, Linda Duncan McLaughlin’s Leonata does not convince, particularly in her moment of deluded rage at the innocent Hero.

A curiously conceived and imperfect Much Ado, then, but one with enough comic energy and dark skulduggery to keep a summer audience entertained.