Edward II (review)

When assuming the artistic directorship of Toneelgroep Amsterdam in 2000–2001, Ivo van Hove took a gamble by mounting Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, a propagandistic piece that has survived in a corrupt memorial reconstruction and that has been underrepresented in the repertoire. That production featured a daring set by Jan Versweyveld, van Hove’s partner and collaborator since their early days on the margins of 1980s Flemish theatre, and costumes by gay fashion designer Walter Van Beirendonck. In this respect, it was as radical an artistic statement as the “filmic” production of Edward II (1924) with which the young and aspiring Brecht claimed his place on Berlin’s stage. As Martin Esslin and Jan Knopf have argued, Brecht’s Marlowe adaptation broached not only the subject of homosexuality but revived the question of history’s theatrical representation, which was either silenced in the wake of World War I disillusionment or spectacularized in epic UFA pictures like Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry (1919) and Anna Boleyn (1920). Almost a century later, the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz—the same company that revived van Hove’s acclaimed production of The Misanthrope for the New York Theatre Workshop (2007)—invited him to stage Marlowe’s Edward II. Outdoing Brecht yet using Marlowe’s original like both Claus Peymann (1998) and Frank Castorf (1999) before him, van Hove enhanced the homosexual theme and recontextualized the play within the problematic German heritage of World War II.

Telescoping events that took place years apart, Marlowe’s history play personalizes the early fourteenth-century struggle between the English Crown and the nobility through Edward’s love for the low-born Gaveston. In Germany, Edward II reentered the repertoire with Brecht’s adaptation, which was dependent on Lion Feuchtwanger’s help and Walter von Heymel’s 1912 translation, which van Hove also used. If Brecht was attracted to the play’s critique of abusive authorities, Derek Jarman, in the AIDS-dominated climate of the 1990s, took an interest in the play’s gay theme and its usefulness for his activist agenda. Van Hove also foregrounded these political issues, shifting the setting to the interior of a contemporary prison, replete with camera surveillance, factionalism, and sexual violence, and using a self-conscious, intermedial mise en scène to invoke the fraught memory of Germany’s military past—still repressed by the elder generation, already forgotten by the younger.

The result was a heavily edited text, structured and framed by fifteen intertitles that invoked Brecht’s epic theatre and Piscator’s agit-prop, even if the ideological side of van Hove’s earlier Marlowe production as a piece of religious propaganda may have proven a liability. For van Hove, Gaveston’s early intention of pleasing the art-loving king with boys reenacting Actaeon as he spies on a naked Diana—a speech delivered without visual support to give the language its full due—turned the entire deposition drama into an inset of sorts, “The Dream of Edward II,” as announced in the first program-matic intertitle. The brevity of the first few scenes, marked by the titles’ brusque and noisy intrusion, imposed a dynamic that instantly drew the viewers into the drama. Subsequently, the pace varied, following the demands of the action, ever summarized in single catchwords (Politik [politics], Liebe [love], Widerstand [resistance], Komplott [conspiracy], Kalkül [calculation], Homosexualität [homosexuality], and so on). All intertitles were briefly projected onto a screen straddling two rows of four cells separated by an elevated security desk, a panoptic watchtower against a back wall of galvanized metal plates.

Urs Jucker (Leicester) in Edward II. (Photo: Jan Versweyveld.)

This omnipresent camera surveillance, deployed in screen montages (by Tal Yarden), linked inmates separated by the wide stage but also exposed their intrigues, secret thoughts, and yearnings. Occasionally, the perspective of the prison interiors was distorted or the otherwise black-and-white images morphed into colors, thereby measuring the subjectivity of certain speeches and the drama’s emotional intensity. Van...