Sunday Times
March 18, 2001
By John Peter

Joseph Fiennes's Edward II highlights Marlowe's grasp of sex, politics and power, says John Peter

This was the first time I have seen an audience in a regional theatre give a standing ovation to a classical play. What is more, the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield (seating capacity 980) was packed to the rafters, and about 98% were people aged between 16 and 26. Also, though some may have come to see Joseph Fiennes in the lead, this was not a popular Shakespeare but Edward II, one of Christopher Marlowe's less well-known plays.

This was not a press night, either. The Crucible has a new project called Young Gatekeepers. Its young members spread the news about live theatre among their age group and help to organise a performance especially for them, with tickets at £5. So much for the theatre as a dying art form.

Actually, Edward II could hardly be more topical. It is a play about love and politics, about the destructive power of sex and the mesmerising sexuality of power. Edward I disapproved of his son and heir's relationship with Piers Gaveston, a relatively lowly born young man of Gascon origin, and exiled him from England. As the play opens, the old king is dead, and his son immediately calls his friend and lover back to his side. Gaveston is made Earl of Cornwall, lord high chamberlain, chief secretary of state. When the Bishop of Coventry protests, he is insulted, brutally manhandled and stripped of his post, which goes to Gaveston.

These are not merely titles. A medieval earl (we are in 1307) would become the owner of huge estates, overlord of powerful vassals; he could raise armies and influence policy. Marlowe's audience would have known all this; a modern director needs to find a way of signalling it. One slight flaw in Michael Grandage's masterful production is that the rough, modernish clothes make everyone look much the same. The way the earls of Lancaster and Warwick are dressed, they would not get further than the palace precincts. One thing they all resent about Gaveston is his flashy lifestyle. Young Mortimer (a thrillingly authoritative performance by Lloyd Owen) even treats you to a vitriolic description of his expensive new wardrobe, yet Gaveston goes on wearing the same shabby-smart, butch-boy-about-town gear all the time. Clothes are signifiers that speak their own clear language; here, a misplaced classless near-uniformity weakens Marlowe's political argument.

Of course politics, though crucial, have a secondary role in the play. The real Gaveston was a brave and able soldier and a capable administrator, but Marlowe was interested in him as a sinister angel of love: attractive, greedy and dangerous. This is a play about the fatal weakness of public power when it is undermined by uncontrollable private passion. In this sense, to quote Arthur Miller in a different context, Edward II is about the politics of the soul.

James D'Arcy, making his stage debut, plays Gaveston with an easy, athletic assurance and confident masculinity. He is a young leopard, all body, alertness and sensuality. I think D'Arcy is in two minds about whether Gaveston really loves Edward - but so is Marlowe. This relationship is one where passion and love are interchangeable. Edward's tragedy is that, over and above being his sexual slave, he believes that Gaveston loves him.

Even if you did not know the play, you would sense, right from the start, that it will come down to a choice between love and power, and what that choice would be. Card-carrying existentialists would recognise Edward at once: he is a free self in internal exile, alone with his own values and unaided by handy moral road signs.

What is brilliant about the 28-year-old Marlowe is that he is not carried away into taking sides; and Joseph Fiennes, at much the same age, understands this perfectly. The matinée idol looks are shaded over by sinister instincts. Fiennes's Edward is handsome, ruthless, vengeful, quick-tempered, almost unstable. His natural dignity is pricked and slashed by a sense of frivolity that is, to him, like an escape. His body movements are elegant, sometimes playful, never effeminate.

Fiennes's problem is his voice: it can sound bruised under pressure, and he sometimes rushes his lines. This is partly Marlowe's fault. He is a wily dramatist of action, but as a dramatic poet, a writer who can make poetry work as action as well as ornament, he had quite some way to go. He has a lot of flabby, padded lines. Fiennes leaps over them, as if in a hurry to get to the good bits. At first I thought it was going to be a lightweight performance, but Fiennes is playing a long game. His Edward is a lightweight man who gains substance in suffering. The free self liberates itself into imprisonment. Edward still cannot understand why he fell (another of Marlowe's uncanny insights), but he sheds his superficiality.

The end is brutal and shocking. Jamie Sives is a scary, boyishly ingratiating murderer, and he gives Edward a true Judas kiss. Forbidden love is debased by being mimed as a sickening, murderous coitus. Marlowe's objectivity is so complete that the words pity and terror almost lose their meaning. It is because Grandage recognises this that he reveals him as such an uncomfortably modern spirit