To sign, or not to sign. That is the question that hangs so urgently over the wavering title character of “King Charles III,” Mike Bartlett’s flat-out brilliant portrait of a monarchy in crisis, which blazed open on Sunday night at the Music Box Theater.
Any echoes you may infer regarding a certain Danish prince are entirely appropriate to this dazzlingly presumptuous drama, set in and around Buckingham Palace in a highly foreseeable future. True, as a product of the 20th century, the newly anointed King Charles — whom you probably know better as the current Prince of Wales — would seem to have more in common with T S. Eliot’s muddling J. Alfred Prufrock, who sadly recognized he was not “Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.”
Yet as portrayed …show more content…
From left, Richard Goulding as Prince Harry, Tim Pigott-Smith as Charles and Tafline Steen as Jess, a love interest of Harry’s, in Mike Bartlett’s “King Charles III” at the Music Box Theater. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
This proactive attitude takes the specific form of his refusal to sign a bill, already passed by Parliament, that would limit the rights of the press in invading personal privacy. You would think that Charles — whose first wife, Diana, was killed while fleeing paparazzi — would be sympathetic to such measures.
But a principle is at stake, he insists, as is his very essence. As he says, in a lovely example of Mr. Bartlett’s neo-Shakespearean style,
For if my name is given through routine
And not because it represents my …show more content…
But instead of being in thrall to a Falstaff, he falls in love with a socialist art student, Jess (Tafline Steen), and the wide-open world of commoners. In the meantime, Prince William and his sharp-witted, strong-willed wife, Kate, try their best to ensure the future of the throne that will eventually be theirs.
The attendant plots and counterplots are laid and hatched in a world in which a moss-covered past always coexists with a shiny present. This sensibility is richly yet efficiently conveyed by Tom Scutt’s ancient-looking, cathedral-like set and contemporary costumes; Jon Clark’s lighting, which shifts between phantasmal shadows and flashbulb brightness; and Jocelyn Pook’s ceremonial music.
The cast members — and they’re marvelous, to a one — deliver the script’s stately speech with such easy fluency that you forget they’re speaking in iambic pentameter. Playing people whose job is to maintain facades, these performers endow their characters with a canny self-awareness and a tellingly varied gift for balancing shell and
Any echoes you may infer regarding a certain Danish prince are entirely appropriate to this dazzlingly presumptuous drama, set in and around Buckingham Palace in a highly foreseeable future. True, as a product of the 20th century, the newly anointed King Charles — whom you probably know better as the current Prince of Wales — would seem to have more in common with T S. Eliot’s muddling J. Alfred Prufrock, who sadly recognized he was not “Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.”
Yet as portrayed …show more content…
From left, Richard Goulding as Prince Harry, Tim Pigott-Smith as Charles and Tafline Steen as Jess, a love interest of Harry’s, in Mike Bartlett’s “King Charles III” at the Music Box Theater. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
This proactive attitude takes the specific form of his refusal to sign a bill, already passed by Parliament, that would limit the rights of the press in invading personal privacy. You would think that Charles — whose first wife, Diana, was killed while fleeing paparazzi — would be sympathetic to such measures.
But a principle is at stake, he insists, as is his very essence. As he says, in a lovely example of Mr. Bartlett’s neo-Shakespearean style,
For if my name is given through routine
And not because it represents my …show more content…
But instead of being in thrall to a Falstaff, he falls in love with a socialist art student, Jess (Tafline Steen), and the wide-open world of commoners. In the meantime, Prince William and his sharp-witted, strong-willed wife, Kate, try their best to ensure the future of the throne that will eventually be theirs.
The attendant plots and counterplots are laid and hatched in a world in which a moss-covered past always coexists with a shiny present. This sensibility is richly yet efficiently conveyed by Tom Scutt’s ancient-looking, cathedral-like set and contemporary costumes; Jon Clark’s lighting, which shifts between phantasmal shadows and flashbulb brightness; and Jocelyn Pook’s ceremonial music.
The cast members — and they’re marvelous, to a one — deliver the script’s stately speech with such easy fluency that you forget they’re speaking in iambic pentameter. Playing people whose job is to maintain facades, these performers endow their characters with a canny self-awareness and a tellingly varied gift for balancing shell and