King Charles III

Wyndhams Theatre
London WC2

3/5

The Queen as head of the royal family has recently been a focus of dramatic interest. Now it is the turn of the putative heir Charles, in a Mike Bartlett play, King Charles III, directed by Rupert Goold at Wyndhams theatre.

The action begins with the funeral of Elizabeth and the ensuing accession to the throne of Charles. Having languished in the shadows of his mother’s longevity it is time now for Charles to impose his own imprimatur on to the role of monarch. Within weeks he has provoked a constitutional crisis. 

In refusing to give royal assent to a government Bill restricting press freedom, events escalate out of control leading Charles to invoke the royal prerogative and arbitrarily dissolve Parliament. 

The beleaguered King Charles retreats to Buckingham Palace surrounded by his loyal household guards with a tank on the front lawn.

In a deliberate reference to Shakespearean form, Bartlett presents this play in iambic pentameter and incorporates themes and dramatic devices closely associated with the Bard. 

The ghost of Diana wafts corporeally through the set recalling earlier royal betrayals. In the relationship of William and Kate there are echoes of Lord and Lady Macbeth. There are inescapable comparisons with Henry IV Part One as an infatuated Prince Harry cascades chaotically through the social whirl of London in pursuit of anarchic art student Jess.

As King long in waiting, Prince Charles has struggled to find self-definition. As a continuous focus of media interest his life and character has been subject to third-party fabrication — the diffident school child, the young fogey, adulterous husband, conflicted capitalist. 

Tim Pigott-Smith captures perfectly Charles’s physical and social idiosyncrasies but these external manifestations only hint at the man beneath. Charles in essence presents a convenient tabula rasa which Bartlett fully exploits.

Technically the show is very well staged and presented and with effective musical direction by Belinda Sykes and accomplished playing by Anna — Helena McLean.

The actors all perform effectively. Richard Goulding as the frenetic Harry is given licence, and takes full opportunistic advantage, to scamper and frolic and shamelessly scene steal. Oliver Chris is convincing as the more constrained William and Lydia Wilson is superb as she morphs seamlessly from Mrs Cambridge into Lady Macbeth.

The weakness at the heart of this play is the unlikely proposition that Charles would take the country into constitutional crisis on such flimsy grounds. Essentially the royal family is little more than a soap opera and if we have to have a Shakespearean reference, how about Much Ado About Nothing.