By Michael Coveney for What’s On Stage, 23 July 2015
There is an interpolated prologue to Simon Godwin‘s highly intelligent and fast-moving production at the Globe: a boy king – looking remarkably like Mark Lester in Oliver! – is presented on a golden throne and the arena fills with gold dust. When the dust settles, Charles Edwards is in situ and we’re off, “Old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster…”
The idea of succession is established and the following events – the dispute between Henry Herford (later Bolingbroke) and Thomas Mowbray, their banishment, the expedition to Ireland, rebellion and abdication – all suggest a land in turmoil, a churning over and replanting as symbolised in the marvellous garden scene.
We’ve had some terrific Richards of Bordeaux lately – not least Mark Rylance himself and (returning to the Barbican in the New Year) David Tennant with the RSC. But Edwards, a really fine actor, now proves himself a great one: his Richard describes, more acidly and more exactly than any Richard since the great Ian Richardson/Richard Pascoe alternating pairing of the king and Bolingbroke, his journey into self-knowledge without self-pity or weepiness.
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Laughs and Rage at Shakespeare’s Manchild King
By Michael Billington for the Guardian, 23 July 2015
Simon Godwin, having staged Farquhar, Shaw and O’Neill at the National, is fast becoming one of our best classical directors. While his Richard II doesn’t break new interpretative ground, it delivers the text clearly and demolishes Tynan’s quip about this being a play of “glittering feudal monotony” by emphasising its undercurrent of violence and ironic comedy.
Godwin’s main innovation is to preface the action with the coronation of the 10-year-old Richard: a shrewd touch, since it reminds us both of the king’s inherent belief in his divine unassailability and of the moral sanctions he was to violate. As played by Charles Edwards, Richard never fully matures but grows into a capricious, recklessly irresponsible monarch ruling over a court on the verge of disintegration. Even before the aborted joust between Bolingbroke and Mowbray, the two men and their factions are at each other’s throats. This sense of ancestral division, dating back to the murder of Richard’s uncle, reaches a climax in the absurdly hilarious scene where angry nobles hurl their gages at each other as if determined to look back in rancour.
By playing Richard as a king whimsically indifferent to surrounding realpolitik, Edwards scoops up unexpected laughs. He nonchalantly tells John of Gaunt, “Thy son is banished”, and while Aumerle describes Bolingbroke’s crucial ability to win popular support, he is raptly absorbed in a book of costume patterns. Even on his return from the Irish wars, parading under a white palanquin, Edwards seems comically heedless, but he captures well Richard’s sudden awareness of his vulnerability: “What must the king do now” is delivered in the panic-stricken tones of a man making up policy on the spot. It is a highly accomplished performance and movingly graduates into tragedy in the final act. All I miss is Richard’s lyrical relish for his own misfortunes.
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Cheerful Charlie plays Tricky Dicky… and ends up in Monty Python
By Quentin Letts for The Daily Mail, 24 July 2015
Charles Edwards is always a pleasure to watch on stage but can he convince us he is Richard II? Is dear old dependable Charlie not perhaps too agreeable a chap for this part?
Richard surely needs to start pitiless and end pitiable. That, by way of political intrigue, murders and banishments, is quite some transformation.
Simon Godwin’s production at the touristy Globe is on the light side. It seeks laughs and generally receives them from an audience of groundlings who naturally love being involved in the show — not least when the Queen’s gardener refers to people standing by the open-air stage as ‘noisome weeds’.
The Globe, under soon-to-depart artistic director Dominic Dromgoole, has cheerfully embraced its Elizabethan audience-immersion function. But what about Charlie Edwards’s king? He struck me more as one of life’s Michael Palins than as a vicious, possibly camp monarch in the era of divinely appointed rulers.
‘A Production for Tourists’
By Dominic Cavendish for the Telegraph, 23 July 2015
A few years ago, Charles Edwards played Michael Palin in Holy Flying Circus – a TV drama about the Life of Brian furore. If you wanted an understanding of his strengths and weaknesses as an actor – and why he takes his time to exert a potent grip as Richard II in Simon Godwin’s competent but only fitfully compelling period-styled revival – then acknowledging his Palin-esque charm gets you part of the way there.
However you dress him up, he reeks somewhat of being a good egg. He has the delicately hewn face of a gent – so the posher parts come his way with alarming regularity. One doesn’t expect Richard to be the model of rugged virility, but those who have memorably taken the role in the last decade or so – Mark Rylance at the Globe too, David Tennant at the RSC, Ben Whishaw on screen – have brought with them a natural, illuminating quality of deep maverick-mindedness.
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