Peter Viney's Blog

Tamburlaine
By Christopher Marlowe

Directed by Michael Boyd
Designed by Tom Piper
Music by James Jones

Royal Shakespeare Company
Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Saturday 27th October 2018, 13.00

CAST:
I’ve never seen a cast list this long, and I follow the RSC in ordering it by character, as actors double so much.
PART ONE:
Mycetes, King of Persia – Mark Hadfield
Cosroe, his brother – David Sturzaker
Meander, a Persian lord – James Tucker
Ortygius, a Persian lord – Ross Green
Ceneus, a Persian lord – Raj Bajaj
Menaphon, a Persian lord – James Clyde
Mycete’s Spy – Sam Pay

Tamburlaine, a Scythian shepherd – Jude Owusu
Techelles, his follower – David Rubin
Usumcasane, his follower – Riad Richie

Bajazeth, Emperor of the Turks – Sagar I M Arya
King of Fez – David Sturzaker
King of Morocco- James Clyde
King of Argier- Raj Bajaj
King of Arabia – Ralph Davis
King of Tunis -Ross Green

Soldan of Egypt – Mark Hadfield
Governor of Damascus – James Tucker
Agydas, a Median lord – Ralph Davis
Capolin, an Eygptian- Salman Ahhtar
Basso, emissary of Bajazeth – – James Tucker
Zenocrate – daughter to the Soldan – Rosy McEwan
Anippe, her maid – Zainab Hasan
Zabina, wife to Bajazeth – Debbie Korley
Ebea, her maid – Vivienne Smith
Virgins of Damascus – Vivienne Smith, Yasmin Taheri
Young Callapane, son to Bajazeth – Haresh Raguram
Kasap – Naveed Khan
Turkish messenger- Shamia Chalabi

PART TWO
Calyphas, Tamburlaine’s son – Raj Bajaj
Amyras, Tamburlaine’s son – Salman Akhtar
Celebinis, Tamburlaine’s son – Anton Cross

Orcanes, King of Natolia – Ralph Davis
King of Trebizon – Sagar I M Arya
King of Syria – Debbie Korley
King of Jerusalem – James Clyde

Sigismund, King of Hungary – David Sturzaker
Frederick, Lord of Buda – Ross Green
Baldwin, Lord of Bohemia – James Tucker

Callapine, son to Bajazeth – Rosy McEwan
Almeda, his keeper- Mark Hadfield
Governor of Babylon – David Sturzaker
Captain of Balsera- Ross Green
Captain’s son – Haresh Raguram
Perdicas, the physician – James Tucker
Olympia, the Captain’s wife – Zainab Hasan

All other parts (what? there are more?) played by members of the company

MUSICIANS
Violin – Sarah Farmer
Percussion – Joelle Barker, James Jones

OK, you’ve scrolled past that astonishing cast list, and it takes the programme two whole pages to get a synopsis down … Marlowe originally wrote this as two plays, first Tamburlaine The Great, which became Part One,  and then Part Two. Here they’re combined. You thought the character list in the Wars of The Roses was long? Think on. Twenty actors play over sixty roles. The RSC has done four Marlowe plays in the Swan in four years. This is number four.

The best way to look at it is, Game of Thrones. No, I don’t know how the characters slot together and I’m not really bothered. I’ll focus on the guy in the middle and the action. And it aways looks fantastic.

They fall into groups. First we have the Scythians: Tamburlaine ( Jude Owusu) and his rough-looking home boys, David Rubin and Reid Ritchie (actors). The Scythian names are irrelevant. They recruit a Persian general with 1000 horsemen to their side … Menaphon (James Clyde). He gets scruffier as the play progresses and he gets into being down with the Scythians.

Jude Owusu is Tamburlaine

Very few actors have Jude Owusu’s stage charisma,  it’s an added extra and instant … Jude Law has it. Kenneth Branagh has it. Domenic Cavendish describes him better than I can:

Boyd has cast Jude Owusu, and what’s interesting about the latter’s approach is his refusal to grand-stand. With his imposing gold breast-plate, Owusu has the plausible physicality the role requires but the braggart instinct sits beneath an air that’s deceptively benign. Owusu often smiles, stays calm, as if it were self-evident that those he challenges will fall under his sway. It’s a surprisingly modern reading. In its favour, it chimes with the aura of today’s strong-men such as Assad, who wears his menace in business-like blandness; and something of the sinisterly beaming jihadist terrorist lurks here too.  Domenic Cavendish

Sagar I M Arya as the Turkish Emperor, Bajazeth. See later for what he ends up like.

Michael Boyd as director has found a great deal of humour “between the lines”. Several of the cast have amusing bits, but the main actor in this is Mark Hadfield, always funny as a series of kings.

Mark Hadfield as Mycetes: Uneasy lies the head …

He starts out as Mycetes, King of Persia, a trembling fellow in white surrounded by his black clad lords.  The early scene was embellished with action, but I have a feeling that Marlowe may have intended it.

Jude Owusu as Tamburlaine. Mark Hadfield as Mycetes, King of Persia. Here take it …

Mycetes knows Tamburlaine is coming:

MYCETES: They cannot take my crown away from me.
Here I will hide it in this simple hole.

Enter TAMBURLAINE

TAMBURLAINE:  What, fearful coward, straggling from the camp? When kings themselves are present in the field?
MYCETES: Thou liest.
TAMBURLAINE: Base villain, darest thou give me the lie!
MYCETES: Away, I am the king …

Mycetes hides his crown among the audience (this simple hole) and is pretending to be anyone but the king, but when challenged gets annoyed and declares “I am the king …” then Mark Hadfield as Mycetes realizes excruciatingly that he has blown his own cover. It is the famed Dad’s Army joke when the German officer demands Private Pike’s name, and Captain Mainwaring says Don’t tell him, Pike! Did Marlowe originate it?

Hadfield, brilliant throughout, has another major laugh when he has changed roles (and coats) and become the Soldan of Egypt, and on entering confides to the audience, Now, I’m the Soldan … I checked. That one’s not Marlowe. Soldan is an archaic transcription of the same Arabic root word as Sultan. I might have changed it.

James Tucker as Meander (Mark Hadfield behind)

James Tucker plays Meander, a Persian lord, but also more like a minister or vizier … a dodgy bureaucrat. And he takes the same role with later kings too. Another role that is played for comedy … we loved it. First he’s sucking up to rulers, then skipping over their corpses.

While the play is necessarily gory, blood is applied with a paintbrush from a bucket, so stylized. The captured son of the Turkish king, Callapine, has to do this a lot … the child actor (Haresh Raguram today) was startlingly good, and well-chosen for his large solemn eyes observing the mayhem. As things get worse on the slaughtering front, whole buckets are applied and eventually cover the plastic back cloth. Dead characters get up and walk away … much as Boyd did in Macbeth which opened the re-built RSC in 2012.

Yasmine Tehari as a murdered virgin of Damascus

There are four Virgins of Damascus (in modern black fundamentalist dress) and the one doing the speaking has a Scottish accent. It was probably Vivienne Smith, I think  (well, someone white) doing another accent to differentiate. Actually, it grated for me, as we have a cast of many ethnic backgrounds, all speaking standard English, and this is the only accent among them. You think, ‘Why?’ It’s a play where if you started getting in to matching accents to supposed nationality, you’d have one hell of a job. After years of teaching English, Turkish, Arabic and Farsi (Persian) accents are distinctive to me, but I’ve no idea what Uzbekistani (Scythians) sounds like!  Best avoided. That’s true even if you used substitute accents rather than real ones (like making all the Egyptians Northern, and The Persians Irish). They very wisely decided not to go anywhere near that, so that single Scottish accent sticks out.

Sagar I M Arya as the captured Turkish Emperor, Bajazeth

The whole cast, switching as various lords and kings deserve the highest accolades. I’ll single out Sagar I M Arya, who plays Bajazeth, Emperor of the Turks, and Debbie Korley as Zabina, wife to Bajazeth because they have so much humiliation heaped upon them in their roles. Bajazeth spends much time in a small cage, fed scraps of meat by Tamburlaine, while Zabina has to hobble around in rags and ankle chains as a servant to Zenocrate’s servant, Anippe (Zainab Hassan).

Rosy McEwan, as Zenocrate

Tamburlaine’s Achille heel (sorry, straying into Troilus & Cressida the day before) is his love for Zenocrate, the Soldan’s daughter (Rosy McEwan). I’m sure she was cast for being “very pale Caucasian” in contrast to Tamburlaine, and her clothes accentuate this. She is originally a captive, as the daughter of a ruler, becomes his concubine, then is crowned as his Queen.

The early scene. Tamburlaine has captured Zenocrate, Princess of Egypt (next to him).
From R, Scythian Techelles (David Rubin), Zenocrate’s maid Anippe (Zainab Hassan), Zenocrate (Rosy McEwan), Tamburlaine, Ralph Davis as captured Median lord, Riad Richie as Scythan Usumcasane, Naveed Khan as Scythian. Salman Akhtar on the floor … he had an open book this afternoon which was funnier.

In Tamburlaine’s first major scene, when he captures three people, he casually breaks the neck of one, Capolin (Salman Akhtar). Then he wants to display his gold to the approaching Persian lord, so the captives are lined up holding gold items. The dead body is dragged into position in the line, an open book shoved in his hand as if reading. When Salman Akhtar next appears (I’m not sure of the role) he has a neck brace, and we thought this was a funny back reference to the neck-snapping. However, in part two, when he plays Amyras, one of Tamburlaine’s sons, he still has the neck brace on. We suspect that he actually DID hurt his neck. Either that or the joke was continued too long.

PARTS ONE AND TWO

They break at the interval. Part One is intrinsically the better play … and Marlowe wrote Part Two as a sequel set “many years later” because of the then popularity of Part One. What happens here, is that everybody moves from exotic vaguely medieval Asian costume to mainly black military garb, and the scimitars have been exchanged for machine guns and rifles. The connection is clear … and the city names in Tamburlaine, Damascus, Aleppo, Babylon … bring it right up to date. Marlowe was using the same towns that are part of the Syrian and Iraq conflicts now. So many years later means “more like now.” That’s done with keeping Marlowe’s play locations intact too.

One of the themes is deciding on an heir between his three sons, Calyphas (Raj Bajaj)
Amyras (Salman Akhtar) and Celebinis (Anton Cross). Celebinus looks the chosen lad, and Calyphas is the cowardly one who’d rather stay and help his mum than go to war. He eventually gets murdered by his dad. Amyras, to his own surprise, ends as the new ruler.

In Part Two Zenocrate dies, then the dead body is carried around with Tamburlaine until his own death. The dead body is her sitting absolutely still in a wheelchair (for long periods too-try doing it!) Having died, Rosy McEwan becomes the grown up slave, Callapine, son of the Turkish king. This is done by the child Callapine handing over his chains and his bucket of blood and paintbrush. She then becomes the adult Callapine. It’s an odd move (the cast is large enough to have simply cast someone else) so must have an idea behind it, which escapes me. She then has to switch between the two roles, both dressed all in white.

Tamburlaine with carriage pulled by captive kings

In many ways, Part Two is less exciting. It has its set pieces, particularly Tamburlaine having a carriage full of golden crowns, drawn by the ex-kings. It also has a continued superb performance from Jude Owusu as Tamburlaine becomes ill and dies.

APPEAL

This week, RSC performances have the annual post-applause appeal for actors charities, and the cast collect donations in buckets on the way out. The appeal was done by Mark Hadfield, and beautifully done too. Sitting at the front, the surprise was how visibly nervous he was in the appeal, compared to the calm confidence in the roles! It is very different to ask for money, I guess. Our bucket holder was Jude Owusu himself, and we were treated to his magic smile!

TEXT

I went out at the interval having seen crisp new copies of Tamburlaine Part One and Part Two in the RSC shop. As they are both such LONG and in the original, overwhelmingly wordy plays, this new combined version is a brilliant job of precis and cutting. I wanted to buy this version, and so did the guy leafing through a copy next to me. We already have an 1893 edition of Marlowe in the Great Old Plays (!) series at home. As soon as I opened the RSC one, I could see it was old text scanned in, and it was a 1971 edition, last revised in 1997 in a brand new cover highlighted in RSC trademark bright red. Not interested. They should release this version as it was played. If I want to refer to a classic text in reviews I use Project Gutenberg on line because it’s searchable. But I would liked to have seen Michael Boyd’s version.

On the shop, as I’ve mentioned before, the stage crew for The Jew of Malta had “RMC: Royal Marlowe Company” T-shirts. As they’ve done a Marlowe every year since, they’d be worth selling in the shop.

PROGRAMME

A very good “From Timur to Tamburlaine” on the history, by Matthew Dimmock.  I enjoyed the one on breathing for actors to cope with the text, but Luke Harding’s article pointing out that we have autocratic despots in the world today (Hey, we have Putin and Trump instead of Tamburlaine) veered on the screamingly obvious, and I’d have left the audience to draw the conclusion for themselves, given the semi-ISIS costumes in Part II.

OVERALL

Part One is 5 star. Part Two is necessarily lesser (and maybe we’re surfeited with the conquests and humiliated losers) … between three and four stars.

So overall:

****

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
five star
Sam Marlowe, The Times *****

Awash with gore and glittering with succulent poetry, Christopher Marlowe’s two-part 1587 epic is an orgy of violence. It’s a hellish action thriller, a story of gargantuan, power-hungry ego and obscene brutality that makes the average 21st-century torture-porn flick look lily-livered. With Trump and Putin strutting on the world stage, this play has a gut-wrenching immediacy. Yet the great strength of this adaptation and production by Michael Boyd, the former RSC artistic director, is that it points up not only the horrors of tyranny, but its dangerous attraction.

four star
Domenic Cavendish, The Telegraph ****
Michael Billington, The Guardian ****
Paul Taylor, The Independent ****
Catherine Vonledebur, What’s On Stage****
Rosemary Waugh, TheStage ****
Marion Brennan, The Express ****

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

Several of the cast also appear in Tartuffe running in repertory with this at The Swan Theatre: James Clyde, Zainab Hasan, Salman Akhtar, Vivienne Smith, Sam Pay, Yasmin Taheri, Riad Richie, Raj Bajaj

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE PLAYS:

• Dido, Queen of Carthage by Christopher Marlowe, RSC 2017
• Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, RSC, 2016
• Jew of Malta, by Christopher Marlowe, RSC, 2015
• Edward II by Christopher Marlow, Wanamaker Playhouse 2019

MICHAEL BOYD
Macbeth, RSC 2011

JUDE OWUSU
Julius Caesar, RSC 2012

MARK HADFIELD
Richard III, Almeida,2016
The Painkiller, Branagh Season 2016
Jeeves & Wooster  in Perfect Nonsense (original production, 2013)

DAVID STURZAKER
Nell Gwynn, Globe 2015 (Charles II)
Richard II – Globe, 2015 (Bolingbroke)
The Merchant of Venice, Globe 2015 (Gratiano)
The White Devil – RSC (Bracciano)

JAMES TUCKER
The Tempest, RSC 2017
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Propellor, 2013

RALPH DAVIS
King Lear, Globe 2017 (Edmund)

JAMES CLYDE
Tartuffe, RSC Swan 2018 (in repertory)
King Lear, RSC 2016 (Duke of Cornwall)
Cymbeline – RSC 2016 (The Duke, Cymbeline’s husband)