This show is King Lear if Lear was on sugar-daddy dating sites and had a loudly professed interest in “natural breasts”. It’s Succession in Tudorbethan costume. It’s any backstabby reality show – but real. It’s Game of Thrones with kirtles instead of wolf skins. It’s Wolf Hall in a fever dream and polyester. It’s the three-part HBO documentary Ren Faire, a total trip that confirms the feeling that if America didn’t exist, television executives would have to invent it.
The Texas Renaissance Festival, which runs for six weeks and brings in half a million visitors and several million dollars a year – is approaching its half centenary. Its founder George Coulam – known as “the King” among his employees, even when he’s nowhere around – is now 86 and looking to retire and enjoy himself for what he believes to be the last nine years of his life. Ideally he would like “to be screwed to death” by “a female companion … I’d like a nice thin lady between 30 and 50 years old”. Failing that, there’s Switzerland where, for $25,000, “they’ll kill ya!”.
His heir apparent is Jeff Baldwin, a former actor who has been with the faire for half its lifetime, is executor of the King’s will and was recently promoted to general manager. “We need to keep the magic alive.” His rival is another long-serving courtier Louie Migliaccio, who comes from a family of businessmen and entrepreneurs and longs to take the faire to the next level. He dreams of introducing technology, making the experience more immersive, holding festivals around the country and starting a Ren Faire university and is getting the hard cash together to make a bid for the business. In episode two, a third competitor enters the fray. The power struggle between them is by turns hilarious and heartbreaking.
So too – albeit with some sharper intakes of breath – is the King’s search for a queen and the struggle it entails between his romantic side (“That’s the highest glory, being in love … You’ll be together even in heaven”) and, well, all his other sides, which are irascible at best, brutally unfeeling and unfair at worst. George’s former best friends recall being abruptly fired after 35 years, with no explanation, as his hunger to control everything about the faire – and the town he has incorporated round it, to rid himself of as much state and county interference as possible – grew. And that’s before we consider Leonard, which is what he calls his penis. A panning shot of George’s bookshelf reveals a battered collection of self-help books about relationships and guides to erectile dysfunction treatments. “If you get a shot every week you can have an erection till you die”, he tells us. It is possible to find someone’s honesty endearing and yet recoil at the same time.
Director Lance Oppenheim leans into the aura of fantasy the renaissance faire creates and depends on – shots are lush and the camerawork frequently woozy. But the emotional focus is always sharp. Underneath the overt narrative about who will get custody of George’s moneymaking and/or magical creation, Ren Faire is the story of human need. There are those who run towards the world of re-enactments because they love a good day out, sure. But there are far more – especially among those who then devote themselves to one and to its capricious chief – who are running away from something and using it to fill a void they carry with them. And when loyalty is betrayed, when subjects are suddenly cast out, the shock is great and the pain is real. What would be an unbearably claustrophobic world to some is the greatest comfort to others. It is awful to see people stripped of it. “I thought if I was true … ” says one, before letting the sentence trail away.
What a documentary. What a country.
• Ren Faire aired on Sky Documentaries and is on Now.
