King Edward II

In the third offering of the current Shakespeare-Marlowe Festival, Marlowe's "King Edward II," Director George Hamlin has chosen to present not a poetry reading, but a play. His readers really act--they stride martially on and off the stage, gesture and turn to each other, sprawl about the reading stands, and altogether give us something like a full production. The result is a throughly exciting performance of a great neglected drama.

Much of the excitement, of course, springs from the play, and not the production. In many ways it is Marlowe's maturest piece of writing; certainly it is his most interesting piece of stagecraft. For the play moves becautifully through the complicated tragedy of the weak king Edward, employing a large--though never bulky--cast of scoundrel lords and scurrilous peasantry. Indeed, in its pageant and scheme, the play resembles nothing so much as Shakespeare's own "Richard II." Edward, like Richard, is a king devoted more to his own pleasures than to ruling, and while England goes noisily to hell, he frolics with his minions. The rhetoric of the play, unlike that of "Richard," is never memorable, rarely even moving. But it has its own level and carries the plot with certain dignity.

And happily, the Loeb reading does credit to the drama. John Lithgow as Edward does admirably in a difficult role, and dominates the evening. His Edward is perfectly true to Marlowe's--sensitive, sometimes indecisive, but consciously royal. Lithgow's diction, like everyone's, is almost perfect, though he stumbles too often in a few of his lines. But his voice covers the range between rage and self-pity easily, and his movements are the most effective in the show. His best moment--and the play's--is the death scene, where he communicates fully the terror of his murder. He does justice to a scene which, said Charles Lamb, "moves pity and terror beyond any scene, ancient and modern, with which I am acquainted."

Complementing Lithgow's performance is that of Madeline Adams as his queen. Miss Adam's sorrowful Isabella speaks her lines, among the best in the play, with control and polish. She and Janet Leslie, Edward's niece, make wonderfully feminine contrast with the angry lords who battle Edward.

Two other principals, John Ross as the Younger Mortimer and Paul Schmidt as Gaveston, maintain the quality of acting. Ross, especially, uses his voice to advantage and suggests the energy and temper of a Hot-spur in his court and battle scenes. Gaveston, Edward's favorite, begins slowly, but comes to life in his dialogues with Edward and in his dealings with the disapproving nobility. Like the other principals, he depends on more than vocal pitch to show his character, and punctuates his speeches skillfully with breaths and stops.

The minor characters, however, are either very good or very bad. Philip Heckscher is excellent in his two small parts, as are Arthur Friedman and Peter Weil as Lancaster and Warwick. They shout too much sometimes, but they pace their dialogues briskly and well. Mark Bramhall, Michael Sargent, and David Evett also play with distinction. Other minor characters tend to forget their blocking or to overact.

In some respects the production occasionally drags. The first half of the play, which is full of battles and intrigues, moves very well; but the second half, where the soliloquies and quieter moments are introduced, begins too slowly and never regains its earlier momentum until Edward's death scene. The lighting is less effective than it might have been and is at one of two points puzzling. Music, however, is used to good advantage in the pageant scenes, and Hamlin's blocking almost provides the action itself.

The Loeb people advertise their Festival by asking rather brashly, "Can you afford to miss these masterpieces of your culture?" In the case of Edward II," at least, we hardly can.