A grocer’s apprentice, pressed into unwilling knighthood with his pestle as his weapon and emblem, blunders into a courtly romance, intent on slaying a (never materialising) lion as its baffled actors pout or play on. Breaking down the fourth wall when indoor theatres had only just put it up, Francis Beaumont’s 1607 parodic play is one of those history-baffling texts that’s most easily compared to products of cultures that are miles or centuries apart; Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the similarly frame-breaking novel Tristram Shandy, or the similarly anarchic Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Sumptuous with candlelight and laced with satirical bite, Adele Thomas’s ingenious direction brings a work that’s more often studied than seen into roaring, battling life.
The title’s Knight Rafe is only half-hero of this would-be picaresque. He’s the fragile receptacle of Citizen and Citizen’s Wife’s vulnerabilities and hopes for what an ordinary person can or should be – they become quarrelsome puppet masters as they push him onstage to dominate the planned courtly performance with an ill-defined, chaotic quest, while still retaining their incongruous authority over the play. Part of the reason this works so well is that they’re such an endearing pair; Pauline McLynn as Wife has all the bolshy, clucky charisma of anyone’s favourite auntie, while Phil Daniels’ Citizen slips from didactic people’s hero to loving husband, eager to fulfil the every whim of his beloved “mousie”. Their commentary ensures that the action onstage seldom escapes satirical slapstick, however much its actors try to wrest back control and the Wife’s rustling bags of sweets. Wooing Humphrey comes off the worst – the gloriously puffed-up Dickon Tyrell pronounces couplets that rhyme “clasp her” and “Jasper” like polished epigrams, while his breeches are voluminous enough to become characters of their own. He and Jasper alike have no hope of getting the girl – Luce, a baffled and defiantly ordinary Sarah MacRae – while the marauding Rafe is egged on to joust, slash and romance away in high courtly style.
But the candles are important, too, for the way they shape the text. Their wicks must be trimmed and tended during four musical intervals designed for the purpose, while the Boy (Samuel Hargreaves) lights up the stage to the accompaniment of surprisingly ribald period songs from the gallery above – his oak tree dance is especially hilarious, as he sheds his leaves, then poutily pranced between intruding stage hands sweeping them, and eventually him offstage with brooms. These interludes are a chance for the merchant and his wife natter and flirt with the audience – buying beer from basket-bearing ushers like un-briefed social ambassadors from another era. But there are also moments of high style and drama, with Hannah Clark’s rich, intelligent design allowing for both unobstrusive playfulness, and glimmering apparitions like the gold-clad Moldovian princess. And the play’s showpiece, a spectacular battle with the giant Barbarossa – more a thinning goatee on stilts – makes heart-stopping use of the theatre’s ceiling trapdoor.This production uses every inch, every cunningly-designed quirk of the newly built, Jacobean-style Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The pre-show is a gentle, witty induction into the space’s capabilities. Two clownish figures – one dopey and cerebral, the other portly and threateningly agile – light the candles on six chandeliers, which are lowered or raised by their shouts. Every possible mishap, from the softest murmur of laughter that greets a chandelier, raised too quickly, having all its flames extinguished, to the roaring hilarity of trousers accidentally set alight, is explored in loving, gradually unfolding detail – these (authentic, beeswax) candles are important. The introduction of candlelight in the new indoor spaces allowed for the first rudimentary lighting effects – the chandeliers are literally lowered in a solemn burial scene to produce a sepulchural flicker, or raised up high to imitate darkness.
The prevailing theme of period accuracy is periodically jolted away from slavishness by surreal, grim touches – their approach reminiscient of Joe Hill-Gibbon’s The Changeling at the Young Vic, which turned Jacobean noir into fat-suited, dog-food pounding horror, and used a strange alchemy to turn bowls of jelly into trembling viscera. Here, the alchemy finds its fullest expression in the character of Merrythought (Paul Rider), whose relentless hedonism is given a nasty, sweaty undercurrent – the full cast danced to his Bacchan hymn to drinking in soiled long underwear, combinations of childish glee and bottom-wiggling sexual predators menacing an unready audience.
This play moves to a disconcerting rhythm of its own. Atmospheres build, then are whisked away. The narrative pricks all over the plain like a knight who’s so errant he’s downright lost. The plots sometimes intersect with farcical energy, and sometimes miss each other altogether. Accordingly, this ragbag show can feel longer than its three hours. But such a magical, memorable, menacing pile of jagged pieces was never going slot neatly into one compact form – this production has lavished enough care on each fascinating protrusion to polish a historical curiosity into something gleaming and glorious.
First published on Exeunt
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