The Independent
19 March, 2001
By Paul Taylor

It seems like only yesterday that we were watching Michael Grandage play Piers Gaveston, Edward II's minion in Nicholas Hytner's staging of Marlowe's tragedy. In fact, it was 15 years ago and since then, Grandage has moved into award-winning direction. He now mounts his own lucid and powerful production of the play at the Crucible, and it's a measure of his clout that he has lured to Sheffield an actor as high-profile as Joseph Fiennes, who heads a cast almost indecently dense with top-notch talent.

In the role of the besotted monarch, Fiennes offers a compelling study of pensive, thumb-gnawing insecurity. It's as though where his self-esteem should be, there is a great hole that only the false love of a male flatterer can fill. When asked why he dotes on James D'Arcy's pretty-boy hunk of a Gaveston, Fiennes lets you hear the loneliness, rather than the arrogance, in Edward's reply: "Because he loves me more than all the world."

The play depicts a society that did not think in terms of identity politics or clear-cut sexual categories (the nobles mind less about Gaveston's inclinations than about the threat he poses as a greedy upstart). How a weak ruler could be exploited in this snake-pit of good-looking bisexual chancers is vividly brought home here. The crown, for example, becomes the joke-prize Edward pops on his minion's head after a camp beauty-contest-cum-muscle-show with a parade of living gold-painted cupids.

Hegel thought that tragedy was the clash between right and right. This production understands that, until the deposed king's suffering and death in the last act, Edward II is the grim and sometimes blackly comic clash between wrong and wrong. I've never seen the unscrupulousness of the nobles opposing Edward underlined so mordantly, and there are cleverly pointed visual resemblances here that hint at a parallel between the on-the-make career of Gaveston and the rise of Lloyd Owen's virile, splendidly spoken Mortimer in the queen's affections.

Played on a thrust stage of grey flagstones, the production has tremendous pace, fluently evoking, thanks to Tim Mitchell's superb lighting, a succession of different atmospheres. The horror and pathos of the hero's degradation and murder are almost unbearably well conveyed. The central gutter where Edward and Gaveston had given the Bishop of Coventry a rude dunking in the opening scene becomes the puddle where later the tortured monarch is impudently washed and shaved.

There are further telling echoes of the past, for what makes Edward's torture and murder especially upsetting is the way that his brief relationship with his killer, Lightborne, hideously travesties that he had enjoyed with Gaveston. A rent-boy psychopath, Jamie Sives' breathtakingly creepy Lightborne cruelly plays on the dependency and desperate need for comfort that persist, against his own better judgement, in Fiennes' moving Edward. Bristling with intelligence and flair, this is regional theatre that could teach the metropolis a thing or two.