The Times
March 9, 2001
By Daniel Rosenthal

Christopher Marlowe's brutal, lusty dramas have long been unjustly neglected - until now

The film Shakespeare in Love did wonders for Christopher Marlowe's public profile. Rupert Everett's languid cameo as Marlowe in 1998's multiple Oscar-winner, dispensing invaluable plot advice to the blocked Bard, was the first contact that millions will have had with this daring playwright and poet, whose "hobbies" allegedly included espionage and atheism. Born within a few months of Shakespeare in 1564, Marlowe died 23 years before him, murdered in a Deptford tavern aged 29, and was destined to lie for ever in his contemporary's artistic shadow. In his seven plays, Marlowe pioneered the dramatic use of iambic pentameter and challenged Elizabethan views on morality, sexuality, religion and politics. The rise and fall of over-ambitious heroes and anti-heroes in Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine the Great and The Jew of Malta can shock, move and amuse with Shakespearean force, albeit via much cruder methods: soaring language and violent action, which prompted George Bernard Shaw to label Marlowe as "the true Elizabethan blank-verse beast".

This week, theatregoers have a rare chance to judge Marlowe’s "beastliness" for themselves, as Joseph Fiennes switches from talking to Marlowe in Shakespeare in Love, to playing the king in Marlowe's Edward II at the Crucible, Sheffield. Another starry Marlowe revival is in development: Natural Nylon Theatre, recently launched by Jude Law and his fellow BritPack actors, has announced that its first West End play will be Doctor Faustus, with Law in the title role.

The prospect of two star-led Marlowe performances is exceptional because in the past decade there have been more novels, non-fiction studies, plays and film scripts written about his life than there have been major productions of his work.

Marlowe's homosexuality, arrest for blasphemy, "spying" missions and violent death have been explored in Anthony Burgess's A Dead Man in Deptford (1994), Charles Nicholl's The Reckoning (1994), Robert De Maria's To Be a King (1999) and Peter Whelan's play The School of Night (1992), named after the secret society to which Marlowe belonged), and his off-stage activities are sure to dominate the Marlowe biopic currently being developed by Natural Nylon, to be directed by John Maybury.

By contrast Britain's leading theatre companies have staged little of his work. The National has not tackled him since Albert Finney starred in Tamburlaine the Great in 1976; the Royal Exchange, Manchester, has staged two Marlowes in its 25-year history, and the RSC has mounted just seven full-scale Marlowes since 1961. Does such limited exposure mean audiences will steer clear of the unfamiliar Edward II, and does it constitute unjust neglect of a theatrical genius? "Commercially, I wouldn't have been able to stage Edward II unless Joseph Fiennes or an equally popular actor were in it," says Michael Grandage, whose Sheffield production is his second Marlowe in 18 months, after The Jew of Malta at the Almeida.

"Without Joe, we would have been looking at playing to perhaps 50 per cent capacity; with him we've had the Crucible’s best ever advance booking for a classical work."

Fiennes fans will see a complex historical tragedy in which English barons depose the king, outraged by his neglect of his kingdom and queen, Isabella, in favour of a hedonistic existence with his low-born lover, Piers Gaveston. This gay love story, the inspiration for Derek Jarman's moving, modern-dress film of Edward II in 1991, forms the core of what Grandage regards as "clearly the best of Marlowe's plays, because actors and audience can go on a more complex and satisfying journey than in his other work. Tamburlaine is a big rant, a very blunt instrument, and so is The Jew of Malta. Edward II has moments of pure poetry and refined characterisation."

He feels "genuinely bemused" as to why Marlowe's plays are so seldom performed. "Everybody in theatre is looking for a play that's about sticking pokers up someone's a and offending people deeply. Well Edward II is such a play! Written 400 years ago by a master playwright, it's as subversive and contemporary as anything being written now."

Marlowe has an equally passionate advocate in Terry Hands, who as artistic director of the RSC from 1986-90 produced The Jew of Malta, Doctor Faustus and Edward II (starring Simon Russell Beale), before going on to direct an exhilarating Tamburlaine in 1992, with Antony Sher as the bloodthirsty, all-conquering tyrant.

"There's no real excuse for the National not to do Marlowe," says Hands. "If you merge the two parts of Tamburlaine into one, it's every bit as good as Richard III, possibly even better. Of course Marlowe is not in the same class as Shakespeare, but that's because he didn't live long enough. If Shakespeare had died at 29 we would have a very different view of his abilities."

Marlowe's characters curse their enemies in rhetoric dismissed by T.S. Eliot as "pretty simple huffle-snuffle bombast", and this aggressive imagery, says Hands, makes greater demands of actors than Shakespeare's language. "It's a driven, young man's, pot-boiling style, heavily reliant on verbs; Shakespeare’s poetry is more lyrical."

According to playwright Peter Whelan, this "one note-ism" in the verse combines with the plays' discomfiting content (farcical murders in The Jew of Malta; a colossal body-count in Tamburlaine) to leave some directors and critics "slightly repelled" by Marlowe. "Marlowe can make audiences feel quite uncomfortable," Whelan argues.

But he too feels that Marlowe deserves to be restored to a more central position in the British stage. Perhaps what the playwright needs, given his small oeuvre, is for some wealthy benefactor or institution to subsidise the kind of concentrated exposure that the RSC's eight-play cycle is currently providing for Shakespeare's histories. After This England, how about This Marlowe?

Edward II is in preview at the Crucible, Sheffield, and runs until March 31 (0114 249 6000)