Financial Times (London)
March 16, 2001
By Alastair Macaulay

What is about Marlowe's Edward II that people keep turning to it? Everyone sane agrees that it was the inferior model for Shakespeare's Richard II, and that nobody in the play is likeable. And yet it is Edward II, not Richard II, that has prompted the Derek Jarman movie, the Eddie Izzard stage performance, the David Bintley ballet. The difference must be that Edward II was a Bad King because he had homosexual favourites, and that his death - impaled by red-hot poker - is gruesomely unique in the annals of both drama and of English monarchs. Still, these distinguishing factors are not rewarding. Edward II was not a medieval Oscar Wilde or a monarchic Caravaggio or a gay Edward VIII. Yet still the role pulls them in: now it serves to bring Joseph Fiennes back to the stage after a four-year absence.

These Fiennes brothers: they mean to be amphibians of acting, triumphing both on stage and on screen. And it adds to the whole fun of British theatre that they aren't greatly alike. Where Ralph is classical, beautiful, passive, Joseph is immediate, sensual, intense. And when Joseph first emerged as a stage actor in the mid 1990s, he looked to be more versatile than his elder brother. Last year, we had Ralph as Richard II; now we have Joseph as Edward II. Compare and contrast! Row upon row of schoolgirls gaze adoringly - Shakespeare in Love comes to Sheffield - and take stoically the inconvenient fact that he enthusiastically snogs three different men.

But the stage is a magnifying glass, and glaringly it exposes the limitations of both Fiennes brothers. By 1996, Fiennes J. had already become barnacled all over by mannerisms. I welcomed his film roles just because they relaxed him and refreshed his talent, which is genuine. For the first four acts of Edward II, however, he seems more mannered and more limited than ever. He has a small head, but it seems too heavy for him; he seldom holds it upright. It's astounding how often he tilts it on one side (usually the left), but his preference is to hang it forward, so that he can give smouldering glances under his brows. (He also favours the eyes-lowered look.) This may in turn help to explain his worst problem of all, which is his voice. So throaty that you keep hoping he will cough and clear it, (a good many words are inaudible), he compounds its constriction by applying a rapid-quivering vibrato. This tortured sound is the Flayed By Feeling technique, chiefly favoured by verism! o operatic tenors of the pre-Car uso generation and usually, as here, ludicrous.

Finally, however, he forces some real pathos from the role. "But what are kings, when regiment is gone/ But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?" Ralph's Richard never spoke so poignantly, so vulnerably, as this. It comes too late, but it is more than most Edward IIs achieve. Still, in Michael Grandage's production, Fiennes J. is almost trumped by Lloyd Owen as the younger Mortimer, whose startlingly reverberant bass voice and good stance are just what the Crucible needs. The production is fluent and fair - though there is too much actorly meandering about the stage and some actors (James d'Arcy as Gaveston) gesture too many times per sentence.