Bela Sei Bela Video || Best Record

Click & Close Ads Click & Close Ads play has grown in stature since its premiere at the Almeida in April. Now we’ve got over the titillating shock of seeing living royals presented on stage, we can see that the play offers a meditation on the inviolable solitude of monarchy and uses a dense tissue of Shakespearean references to acquire a tragic dimension. I still find the premise a touch dodgy: that within a few days of becoming king, Charles would be so naive as to refuse royal assent to a parliamentary bill restricting press freedom. But once we are past that hurdle, the play ingeniously explores the constitutional crisis that would result from Charles’s interventionism. Bartlett also goes beyond parodying Shakespearean verse to evoke memories of specific plays. Charles reflects on the clash between the private man and the public role in the manner of Shakespeare’s kings, ghostly predictions remind us of Hamlet and Macbeth, and there is even an allusion to Hal’s rejection of Falstaff on the threshold of his coronation. But the play transcends spot-the-bard jokiness to explore the unresolved contradictions of monarchy even in an age when it is largely ceremonial. Click & Close Ads Click & Close Ads Tim Pigott-Smith gives the performance of his distinguished career as Charles. He eschews mere impersonation to convey, in the first half, a tormented idealist struggling to come to terms with his new role. He then grows into a movingly tragic figure in his baffled rage at being outmanoeuvred by members of his own family and his realisation of the hollowness of the throne. Oliver Chris as the deceptively gauche William, Richard Goulding as a roistering Harry and Lydia Wilson as a secretly manipulative Kate also carry conviction, and Rupert Goold’s superb production, played on Tom Scutt’s empurpled dais, shows how memorable effects can be achieved through carefully choreographed grouping. The costumes are virtually all black and white – but there is nothing morally simplistic about a play that raises urgent issues about the monarchy’s future role in a country without a defined constitution.Click & Close Ads Click & Close Ads