Daily Mail (London)
March 16, 2001
By Michael Coveney

Edward II (Sheffield Crucible) Verdict: Thrilling revival of Marlowe's melodious chronicle

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE'S Edward II is one of the great English chronicle plays about a king who lost his throne for love and died an agonising death at the hands of a homosexual killer.

It is like early Shakespeare crossed with Joe Orton, written in lovely, liquid verse that is unlike anything else in British theatre.

Political fortunes rise and fall, cronies are given high office, the lords are generally revolting.

And in Sheffield, Joseph Fiennes smoulders gracefully through the title role in a production by hot director Michael Grandage that prefers style, pace and energy over cheap sensationalism.

On Monday night, the audience was almost entirely aged between 16 and 26, part of a project to bring theatre deeper into the heart of the community.

There was an astonishing response. As Fiennes sauntered on for his curtain call, the audience literally roared its approval, and many of them leapt to their feet.

I have never seen such a thing in a regional theatre - a tribute, certainly, to Fiennes's star pulling power, but also to his intelligence and the cracked and sobbing quality of his voice, a characteristic he now has under perfect control, devoid of self-pity.

Edward is a peevish monarch and a shockingly modern figure. As with a more recent Edward, and Mrs Simpson, the state is sacrificed to a personal passion. This Edward's nemesis is Piers Gaveston.

Fiennes presents a brooding, sullen portrait of a man whose public life is about to be ruined in a private, self-induced crisis.

THIS was the play that made Ian McKellen's reputation in 1969. In 1986, the current director played Gaveston in a splendid revival at the Royal Exchange in Manchester.

Since then, Simon Russell Beale at the RSC and Eddie Izzard, no less, in Leicester, have tapped into the modern appeal of the play, and Derek Jarman made a memorable movie.

But none has illuminated its dark corners and restless, shifting poetry so beautifully as does Fiennes.

The rest of the cast is equally splendid, from Lloyd Owen, with his wonderfully rich baritone voice, as the scheming Mortimer, and Robert Demeger as a bustling Earl of Warwick; to Jo McInnes as the dismayed and betrayed Queen Isabella and Jamie Sives as the murderous Lightborne.

The Gaveston of James D'Arcy, and his successor as Edward's paramour, the Spencer of Ben Porter, both 'base upstarts', embody the play's homoerotic urgency without camping it up.