DON CARLOS
Taken from The Times
Written by Benedict Nightingale
Performance at Gielgud, London. February 4th 2005
Let's celebrate Derek Jacobi, an actor we may be overinclined to associate with the gentler roles: poor, stammering Alan Turing in Breaking the Code, Uncle Vanya, Richard II, or that weird friar who doubled as a medieval detective on TV.

But you only need to see Michael Grandage’s revival of Schiller’s Don Carlos to know that the seeming lightweight can outbox the heaviest. Has he given a grimmer, scarier, more powerful performance than as the hero’s father, Philip II of Spain? I don’t think so.

Grandage’s revival thrilled us last year in the ample acreage of the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, and I, for one, feared it would lose something when it was transferred to the smaller space behind the Gielgud’s proscenium arch. Not so. With Jacobi’s king balefully whispering, then growling as if he’s been gargling with iron filings, then snapping out syllables as if arrows were hitting steel, how could the production do anything but combine intimacy with epic force?

Naturally, he dominates his tenebrous court, with its yellow shafts of light, its cowled, serpentine monks, its bowing and scraping nobs, its thin-lipped ladies-in-waiting, its corrupt conventions and poisonous protocol and, at the end, a Grand Inquisitor like a giant red spider. He’s less successful at dominating his son, Richard Coyle’s Carlos, who resents not having met his father until he was 6 and then finding him signing death warrants. Carlos’s dream is of bringing sweetness, light and hope to auto-da-fe Madrid; his problem, that he’s in love with Claire Price’s radiant young Elizabeth, who happens to be his stepmother.

Even Schiller thought the story over-complex, and given the wicked intrigues of Ian Hogg’s Duke of Alba and the inspirational counter-plots of Elliot Cowan’s Marquis of Posa, maybe it is. But Grandage and his cast make the murky and long feel lucid and almost too short. And you always feel the stakes are high: Carlos’s future, Elizabeth’s fate, the prospects for the soul of Spain and its rebellious colony, Flanders.

Philip’s soul, too. It takes quite an actor, especially one who endowed by nature with less width and height than most of his supporting cast, to make you quiver at lines like: “The weapon God has placed in my hands is terror”. It takes a still finer one to make Schiller’s point, which is that Philip is just as trapped as the victims of his tyranny, and yearns for people he can trust to tell him the truth and maybe even release the suppressed affection he contemptuously dismisses as a girlish weakness.
Jacobi manages both, creating a fearsome portrait. The play has weaknesses. For instance, the 20th century taught us to beware romantic revolutionaries such as Posa, who is Schiller’s alter ego but seems a bit too keen on sacrifice now for the sake of earthly paradise to come. But who cares when we’re gripped, shaken and privileged to enjoy what is, I believe, a great performance?  

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