The Observer
Sunday March 18, 2001
By Susannah Clapp

At Sheffield, Michael Grandage is taking more of a chance with his star, staging Joseph Fiennes in Marlowe's rarely performed Edward II. Anyone who squeezes into the Crucible just to see Fiennes won't be disappointed. His portrayal of the king, famous for dying with a red-hot poker rammed up his bottom, is at first light, quick and sardonic, later, reflective and self-absorbed.

But this isn't a star-heavy occasion. The triumph of the evening belongs to no single actor, though James D'Arcy flounces alluringly as Gaveston and Lloyd Owen is a commanding, cruel Mortimer. As the murderer, who kisses his victim before dispatching him, Jamie Sives is mesmeric.

It's the director who deserves the crown, for making this rarely performed play so clear and so swift, as absorbing as a political thriller. Edward II, often compared unfavourably with Richard II as a portrait of a weak king, is laden neither with beautiful lines nor with inspiriting sentiments; it's stuffed with betrayers and with savourless verse.

Grandage illuminates it and gives it drive by presenting us with a clash between old and new, youth and age, with cronyism and corruption on both sides. He's greatly helped by Christopher Oram's terrific design, an apparently plain expanse of dark flagstones with a (much and gruesomely used) drain in the middle. It's a space which can be shrunk by Tim Mitchell's masterly lighting to a dank, dripping cell, a space which leads into an apparently infinite region of swirling smoke and clangour - both battle and hell.

And it's a perfect, pitiless arena for a struggle. You see this when Edward's band of boys, with golden shorts and tousled hair, are confronted in mid-cavort by a dark circle of accoutred men, the sixteenth-century equivalents of suits. 'What?' demands Edward of his tacit accusers, breaking off for a moment from snogging Gaveston, and spreading his arms in an insolent shrug. The heartlessness of hedonism meets the brutality of political thuggery; the clash can be - a Grandage revelation, this - funny as well as frightening.