Edward II’s love for Piers Gaveston is not what loses him his throne and life in Christopher Marlowe’s 1591 double tragedy (I’ll come back to that “double”). The king’s homosexuality is defended, though not approved, by one of his stoutest enemies, here spoken by his side-changing brother, Kent: “The mightiest kings have had their minions… [also] the wisest men.” What rouses Edward’s nobles to fury is his squandering of the country’s wealth on his lover while common people suffer, foreign foes defeat English armies, and their own rights are trampled on.
Edward’s obsession with Gaveston, in Daniel Evans’s intense but patchy performance, is an unquenchable addiction. Everything is an irritant that is not his lover. When Gaveston is absent, Edward paces restlessly, eyes searching for the longed-for one’s arrival. Arrived, Eloka Ivo’s self-centred Gaveston is leapt upon, wrapped into the king’s arms and legs, hungrily kissed, touched, held onto.
Chief among Edward’s opponents is Mortimer, portrayed by Enzo Cilenti as a rigid, scheming bureaucrat, highlighting his character’s counterpoint to the king. Yet Mortimer mirrors Edward in following to excess his own governing passion: lust for power. Not satisfied with having deposed the king, Mortimer orders him murdered (red-hot poker effectively managed by Jacob James Beswick’s callous Lightborn). Again, the stability of the state is threatened. Mortimer, too, must die. This is the play’s double tragedy.
Director Daniel Raggett’s RSC production conveys the main points of the action but emphasises spectacle (and snogging) at the expense of drama’s political intrigues (Ruta Gedmintas’s Queen Isabella, in particular, loses out). Key characters and scenes are slashed or jumbled together, making way for interpolated visuals: an audience procession around Edward I’s coffin; Gaveston’s murder and his long-present corpse. With the text reduced to a pretext for the images, poetry is mangled, lines gabbled or else drowned out by omnipresent sonic effects. Images and music offer wonderful moments but, like the passions of the tragic heroes, their rightness is marred by excess.
• Edward II is at the Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 5 April
