The Stage Abroad: A Double Crown

One of the most difficult feats in acting is to play, in tandem, the rival roles created by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Two such matching pairs exist to test the sweep and sinew of an actor’s craft: Marlowe’s Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s Shylock, Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s Richard II. The last actor to play the two Jews on successive nights was Eric Porter at Stratford on Avon in 1965. Now, for the first time since 1903, the two kings are being doubled in repertory by an English actor named Ian McKellen, who has thus made himself the undoubted sensation of this year’s ever-popular Edinburgh Festival.

For present tastes, honed to instant violence, it is by no means obvious that Shakespeare outwrote Marlowe. McKellen’s Richard is Shakespeare’s, full-strength and without eccentricity, a prince refined down to holy innocence, so that London Critic Harold Hobson could write that “the ineffable presence of God himself enters into him.” In total contrast, his Marlovian Edward is a performance as hell-inspired as the red-hot poker that, at the conclusion, is used to murder the king by being rammed up his anus.

McKellen and Director Toby Robertson have confronted with stark candor the fact that Edward II is a play by a homosexual about a king who was a homosexual who indeed ruined himself for an infatuation. The sum is a better play about that too-fashionable subject than anything overt or covert recently on or off Broadway. It is sensuous, unpleasant, funny, guilt-obsessed —and intensely masculine.

Dripping with Muck. The play opens with Marlowe’s gaudy word-painting about the pleasures of boys and other toys, and with a searching kiss on the mouth by which Edward welcomes his favorite, Gaveston. It ends with a death scene in which Marlowe dredges the most profound pity up from the most nightmarish sensationalism: the deposed king dragged from the castle cesspool, half mad and dripping with muck, washed and soothed and kissed by his murderer in the lingering tender dialogue with which a frightened lover is put to sleep. Then smothered with a feather blanket, crushed beneath an upturned table. Then legs up, and the flaming retribution for pederasty, a cauterization evidenced by the chronicles Marlowe knew but made into a myth beyond history, as searing as an image by Hieronymus Bosch.

Yet Edward’s weakness is more than personality; it is politics. Disorder in the passions is mirrored by disorder in the state. Gaveston’s name tolls like a bell through Edward’s lines, but for Edward’s enemies the favorite is merely an instrument to hand; his death is simply an incident in the long war between king and barons. In tantrum at court, in victorious fury of battle, then defeated and bound, Edward is stalked by his encircling nobles. This play is about the state, the nature of the medieval constitution, and the Renaissance fascination with the limits of power. It was written for one highly politicized age; it resonates with considerable impact in another.

Marlowe is surprisingly modern. His paradigm of the unnatural is presented in raw pop colors—an Elizabethan comic book. The structures are rough-chopped. The energy springs from exaltation and terror: Marlowe’s discovery that man is alone. He mocks religion in the guise of popery, and he imagines the triumph of will defiant beyond limit. But he wakes in the night with the sweaty fear of death. And he sees that man makes all the moral rules there are, as he makes his own earth-bound hellfire.

Actor McKellen burns in that fire —thin, lips taut, gleaming with royalty and nerve. He has the mighty breath for the Marlowe line. He has the control to make the relentless rhythms a hammer of pulse. His Edward jumps and flickers, a petulant youth who grows in viciousness yet retains sympathy, who dies stripped to a rag and a whimper yet retains tragedy. It is a performance, paired with his Richard, that marks McKellen at 28 as an actor of potential greatness. Like most fine British players, he has been thoroughly schooled in a variety of roles, ranging from Shaw to West End sentimental comedies. The year after he graduated from Cambridge, where he studied to be a teacher, he was playing Henry V and Osborne’s Luther. His present pair of kings has won him an actor’s crown.