The Independent on Sunday
18 March 2001
By Brian Logan

In his most famous screen role, in Shakespeare in Love, Joseph Fiennes precipitated Christopher Marlowe's violent death. This week in Sheffield – by way of an apology, perhaps? – he's resuscitating the playwright's most maligned work, in cahoots with last year's hottest director, Michael Grandage. Grandage knows how to boot a classic from its bath-chair, as his award-winning As You Like It delightfully proved. He brings the same revitalising imagination to Edward II. In his hands, Edward's giddily irresponsible infatuation with Gaveston is starkly contrasted with the brutal realpolitik of his barons – and the king, traditionally a character with whom it's hard to sympathise, emerges with credit.

A former actor, who once played Gaveston to Ian McDiarmid's Edward, Grandage ensures the verse is crisp and lively. Its rhythm is never soporific; it sounds like speech. Innocuous passages are made vital: when, after Gaveston's reprieve, Edward makes peace with his noblemen, they're pulling faces behind his back.

Fiennes is a soulful actor – those big doe-eyes! – and is stronger at conjuring Edward's private than public face. Not that there's always a distinction: his affair with Gaveston can rarely have been this overt. "Witness", he instructs the queen, "how dear thou art to me" – then promptly snogs his lover. His barons gatecrash the pair enjoying a medieval Take That gig, at which gold-painted beefcakes gyrate on a tabletop. But, vulgar and dangerous though it is, the couple's tender, giggling, joyous romance is for real – or so we realise when Gaveston is condemned, and our hearts suddenly leap for Edward.

Marlowe's functional mid-play flurry of battles negotiated, Fiennes's king grows in stature as he plummets in status. Forced to relinquish his crown – which he clasps to his chest like a safety blanket – we see Edward grapple with what the surrender means: he never considered kingship until it threatened to desert him. But even squalid captivity can't conquer his capacity for love, which he dies seeking in the eyes of his assassin, Jamie Sives's louche Lightborne. That subversive innocence – he was ruled and sought to rule not by tradition but by the heart's whim – doomed him. Lloyd Owen's Mortimer is his bombastic opposite, and under him, sex explicitly replaces romance in the throne room.

The staging emphasises Edward's tragedy, which plays out on stone slabs above a sewer. Huge double doors loom upstage, shrouded in fog, and the production is beautifully lit. While his opponents are clad in grimy industrial apparel, Edward's stripy golden strides stress not only decadence but vivacity. Grandage choreographs heartstopping stage pictures, too. When Mortimer's murderous troops stumble upon the fugitive king in a monastery, Edward and friends are on their knees, in a tight hug, shrouded in monks' habits – looking for all the world like dressed-up boys at play in a world of angry grown-ups.