Spellbinding
clash with the dark forces of terror
This is Michael Grandage's last hurrah as associate director of
the Sheffield Crucible, a theatre he has transformed during his
five-year stewardship.
A regional rep better known for snooker tournaments than artistic
achievement became, under his sure-footed direction, one of the
most exciting theatrical destinations in Britain, with productions
of Shakespeare, in particular, that often made the RSC seem second-rate.
Recently, Grandage has been running the Crucible in tandem with
London's Donmar Warehouse, and it was perhaps unrealistic to expect
him to continue in two demanding jobs. But this magnificent Don
Carlos (1787) shows just how badly he will be missed in Sheffield.
In the past, I have struggled to understand why the German dramatist
Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) is so revered. I've yawned through
Maria Stuart, nodded off in Wallenstein and almost erased the
memory an earlier Don Carlos.
The first thing to be said about Grandage's production is that
it leaves no doubt you are watching a classic, a work which combines
the personal and the political in a manner that can truly be described
as Shakespearean.
The second is that it is vastly entertaining. In Mike Poulton's
fleet and vivid new translation, with 200 pages of text distilled
into three hours, the story of the tyrannical King Philip II of
Spain and his abused, love-tormented son, Don Carlos, has all
the deftly plotted twists and turns of a thriller. You lean forward
in your seat, desperate to discover what happens next.
The third great quality of both play and production is that they
strike powerful contemporary chords. Though Grandage sets the
action firmly in the 16th century, Schiller's portrait of state
tyranny working in concert with the murderous religious fundamentalism
of the Spanish Inquisition can't fail to echo today's post 9/11
world. As Philip declares, "The instrument God places in
my hands is terror."
It is Grandage's particular gift as a director to make the complex
clear. You never find yourself lost in the plot, and both characters
and dramatic themes emerge with a rare, illuminating power.
The production, atmospherically designed by Christopher Oram on
the Crucible's epic thrust stage, creates a world of darkness
and incense, rigid formality and malign mischief, the latter hatched
in God's name to the sounds of choral Mass.
The king has married his son's intended wife, and Don Carlos is
reduced to romantic despair and festering hatred. But then his
friend Posa arrives to reawaken his idealism, with dreams of saving
Spanish Flanders from Philip's tyranny, and ushering in a new
age of compassion and religious freedom. Posa plays a devious
game in the name of good, Philip plays an equally devious one
in the name of power, but it is the dark forces of the Inquisition
that hold all the cards.
Derek Jacobi is in magnificent form as the king:icy, commanding,
explosively violent. He physically flinches when his despised
son touches him, brutally beats up his wife when he suspects her
of infidelity. Yet monster though Philip is, Jacobi thrillingly
lays bare the loneliness and fear that undermine his absolute
power from within.
Richard Coyle brings an intensity and anguish
to the role of Don Carlos, a self-pitying teenager trapped in
a court of sexual, religious and paternal oppression who finally
claws his way to nobility, while Claire Price makes goodness radiant
as the unhappy queen. Peter Eyre is truly terrifying as the blind
Cardinal Grand Inquisitor, who believes human souls are merely
numbers, arriving like an infernal deus ex machina to bring misery
rather than reconciliation.
Elliot Cowan could usefully find more charisma in the key role
of Posa, Schiller's passionate spokesman for the values of the
18th-century Enlightenment, but, in all other respects, this is
an absolutely spellbinding production of a masterpiece.
