24/07/2019
The communist daily newspaper The Morning Star gives three stars out of five for a new adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's tragedy “Edward II”, the account of the gay king's fall from grace with his court after he defies the powerful barons. They use his love for men as a pretext for removing him from office and ultimately murdering him, in one of the enduring stories from the medieval Plantagenet monarchy. However, Chris Marlowe was also openly gay and a lover of beautiful young men, as well as the arts and humanities, in a period when to pursue non-masculine pursuits was arguably profoundly dangerous. Much has been written about Marlowe's life and mysterious death, and some historians speculate that his demise was fundamentally linked with his role as a spy for the court of Elizabeth the First. In any case, Christopher Marlowe's play makes Edward II a sympathetic character, and as the Morning Star theatre critic notes, we are made to feel more horrified at the war mongering and belligerence of many of the men at his court. The play is gender and ethnicity fluid, with actors taking roles that would not be common during the Tudor period when it was first performed. And it has been running at the playhouse named after Sam Wanamaker, himself a communist activist and advocate of making the high arts accessible to working class people.
