Michael Grandage has created a tremendous Don Carlos. In the past
five years, as associate director of Sheffield Theatres, he has
made a visit to the city essential for anyone who wants to see
the best of the British stage: never has the Crucible seemed so
well-named. In this, his valedictory production, he is at the
top of his powers.
No director takes an audience so directly to the heart of a play.
Schiller's 1788 drama has always been a revered Enlightenment
text, but its plot is a twisted, doubling-back-on-itself matter,
involving the tyrannical King Philip II of Spain and the Netherlands;
his son, Don Carlos - in love with the stepmother to whom he was
once betrothed; and the idealistic Marquis of Posa, determined
to liberate Philip's oppressed peoples. Here it's made to seem
intricate, rather than awkwardly knotted; fired by intimate as
well as political feeling.
Christopher Oram's design is, as always in a Grandage production,
crucial. It's transparent, never intrusive but, together with
Paule Constable's crepuscular lighting, it steers the story, clarifying
and deepening, without ever merely duplicating the dialogue. This
is a production which drives without interruption from scene to
scene but in which some moments are underlined: spotlit, and intensified
by Adam Cork's ecclesiastical music.
The ponderous pressure of the Church is established before the
play opens, as a huge silver censer swings across the darkened
stage. Terror takes on a physical form as Peter Eyre's Grand Inquisitor
looms above the stage like a giant wasp, a hallucinogenic figure
who might have buzzed down from a Mardi Gras float. The repression
of the Court seeps from every perfectly judged movement of Claire
Price's sad, poised Queen and her ladies-in-waiting: starchy,
conventional Una Stubbs and the conniving, desperate Charlotte
Randle. When they first come forward out of shadowy depths they
glide like automata, each snap of a fan and swish of a skirt contributing
to a complicated formal dance.
There are fiery soap operatics in here: watch Randle's face as
she slowly realises that her lust is unrequited. Mike Poulton's
fine new translation echoes, without labouring, 21st-century arguments
about terror, despotism and individual liberty. But it's the pinpoint
characterisation that's most impressive. It's not only Richard
Coyle's affecting Don Carlos who's troubled. Derek Jacobi's
King Philip is equally disturbed: an autocrat whose ferocity feeds
on sycophancy but who can rise to magnanimity when challenged.
Jacobi gives one of the most subtle and commanding performances
of his career.
