1. Timeline - stage & screen
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  2. Edward II

    Edward II
    by Christopher Marlowe


    (The Royal Exchange Manchester)


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    REVIEWS - October 1986

    Visually; sensually, Nicholas Hytner's production of Edward II is one of the most exciting, and exhilarating I've seen on the arena stage of the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. Tom Cairn's design draws on the three-dimensional, gladiatorial nature of theatre in-the-round. Filling the floor with a deep litter of dark compost surrounded by a raised walkway, it suggests both a circus and a bearpit as images of the medieval court. The glowering blue ball of the sky showers rain that churns the soft earth into sticky, degrading mud. All this theatrical wizardry, the glint and chink of golden armour, could be dangerously distracting. But the power and range of Ian McDiarmid's performance as Edward keeps thrusting the text on your attention.

    Guardian, Robin Thornber

    Nicolas Hytner's revival of Marlow's Edward II at the Royal Exchange in Manchester is one of the year's outstanding theatrical events: a superb staging of the first English chronicle play that is as modern and outrageous as anything you might devise by mixing early Shakespeare with Joe Orton.

    Financial Times, Michael Coveney

    Michael Grandage provides a credible unvoluptuous Gaveston, full of Gallic vitality in a somber Northern court and Iain Glen's young flattering Spencer captures the banal pedantry and monomania of those who, when the country is riven, strive to climb on the treacherous wheel.

    Independent, Michael Schmidt

  3. Credits

    Michael Grandage
    Piers de Gaveston

    Ian McDiarmid
    King Edward II

    Peter Wight
    Edmund, Earl of Kent

    Michael Hughes
    Lancaster/Abbott of Neath

    Duncan Bell
    Mortimer the Younger

    David Howey
    Warwick/Sir Thomas Berkeley

    Stuart Golland
    Pembroke/Rice Ap Howell

    Leonard Maguire
    Bishop of Coventry/Spencer the Elder

    Geoffrey Bank
    Archbishop of Canterbury

    Brid Brennan
    Queen Isabella

    Iain Glen
    Spencer the Younger

    Colin McFarlane
    Baldock

    Karen Henthorn
    Lady Margaret de Clare

    Alex Haig, Adam Sunderland
    Prince Edward

    Adrian Palmer
    Matrevis/James Pearson

    Sean Blowers
    Gurney/Levune

    Louis Hilyer
    Lightborn

    Nicholas Hytner
    Directer

    Tom Cairns
    Designer

    Jeremy Sams
    Composer

    Mark Henderson
    Lighting

    Martin Duncan
    Masque written & staged



    Edward II at the Royal Exchange in Manchester is one of the year's outstanding theatrical events.

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