*****
After
five years of consistent excellence, this is Michael Grandage’s
farewell production as the Crucible’s artistic supremo.
Sheffield’s loss is London’s gain. If Grandage brings
half as much distinction to the same job at the Donmar, we’ll
be doing well.
Anyone who can leave you wishing that three hours of Schiller
was actually four or five, as he is doing now, could successfully
stage the Henry VI cycle backwards or even Timon of Athens forwards.
Not that Don Carlos need be a slog. With the right cast, atmosphere,
energy and tension, you can see why the play is still loved by
Schiller’s compatriots. Grandage has brought us all that,
starting with Derek Jacobi as the play’s most fascinating
character: not Carlos, Hamlet-like son of Philip II of Spain and
(one suspects) the youthful author’s self-portrait, but
the king himself. When he took the role in the RSC’s revival
of the play in 2000, John Woodvine managed to resemble the hard,
paranoid Stalin yet suggest the haunted, mangled man beneath.
I had expected Jacobi to give us the inner Philip, too, but wondered
if he had the hardness for the outer one. Well, no problem. When
this thin, grim figure promises to bring “terror”
to his and the Church’s enemies, his voicebox sounding as
if he gargles with iron filings, you believe him almost more than
when, sickened by the court’s intrigues and his own loneliness,
he betrays a hint of human yearning, a flicker of vulnerability.
He is the mesmerising centre of a production that brings clarity
to a plot which Schiller himself accused of over-complexity. You
always know that what is at stake is the soul of Spain. Who will
triumph? The courtiers who slither like black shades through the
vast doors and into the twilight of Christopher Oram’s vast,
bleak set, prime among them Ian Hogg’s Alba, scourge of
heresy in colonial Flanders, and a clerical sidekick equally hostile
to that “terrible disease, humanity”? Or could the
future belong to Richard Coyle’s warm,
sensitive Carlos and his inspirational friend, Elliot Cowan’s
Posa?
Schiller may identify with Carlos, but it is Posa who expresses
his views. Though the play is set in the 16th century, he is the
voice of Romantic idealism, so passionate in his faith in political
and intellectual freedom that he very nearly converts an impressed
Philip to republicanism. That is not only absurdly anachronistic
but troubling, since our generation has good reason to mistrust
men who ask us to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of an egalitarian
future. But at the time you are arrested, gripped, bounced into
belief.
And so you are with encounter after encounter: from those involving
Claire Price as the young queen whom Carlos adores, to the encounter
between Jacobi’s Philip and Peter Eyre as the Grand Inquisitor,
a looming, red-clad figure who would be terrifying even without
his splindly walking sticks, blindfold and overarching contempt.
The only worry is this: how will Sheffield fare after Grandage?
