Arizona Theatre Company goes royal for its season opener.
And Shakespearean. And contemplative.
Mike Bartlett’s “King Charles III” opens in previews Saturday Sept. 10.
Directing is Matt August, who gave life to Scott Carter’s “Discord,” which ended ATC’s 2015-16 season.
“King Charles III” is a drama laced with comedy. “If it were slotted into a Shakespeare play, it would be called ‘The Pitiful Tragedy and Comical Exploits of King Charles III’,” says August.
The play first opened in London in 2014 and was a hit. It was staged in New York City in 2015. It was a hit then, too. ATC’s production is the first of the play at a regional theater in this country.
The royal
The play opens as Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral ends. King Charles III has waited some time for his chance at the crown; he longs to make it less of a passive role. While he’s still getting use to how it sits on his head, the prime minister presents him with a bill for his signature. The bill has flown through the House of Commons and House of Lords; it only needs the king’s OK to become law.
But this is a bill King Charles can not get behind.
“The law he is trying to assert himself into is a law that restricts the freedom of the press” says August.
The royal family has long been harassed by the press. In the play, Prince Harry is dating a commoner, who is harshly exploited by the press.
But, says August, “Charles knows that if no one is there to check corruption by politicians or anybody, once you restrict freedom of the press, you give up liberty.”
There’s more to the play than that.
“That storyline incites the conflict,” says August. “What then happens is parliament drafts legislation that kicks the king out of lawmaking.”
The conflicts are deep, human and tragic.
“I do think this play is a warning that certain conflicts can upend and shield other conflicts that may be more fundamentally important,” says August.
The Shakespearean
It emulates the Bard in many ways, starting with the language: it’s written in iambic pentameter.
“He’s written a very Shakespearean play just by virtue of how he uses meter and iambic pentameter, how he uses prose versus how he uses poetry,” says August of Bartlett’s script.
But this contemporary play has an accessibility that Shakespeare sometimes doesn’t, he added.
“What you don’t have are the ambiguities or the anachronisms that you encounter with a Shakespeare play ... or the archaic poetic references that Shakespeare’s plays are very wonderfully full of.”
Bartlett gives nods to a number of the Bard’s works.
“This play is sort of a gold mine of little nuggets that reference other Shakespeare plays,” says August.
“You can find a little bit of ‘Hamlet,’ a little of ‘Lear,’ a lot of ‘Macbeth,’, a lot of ‘Henry IV’ there, and there’s a lot of ‘Richard II’ in Charles. There’s a scavenger hunt you can do through this play finding those little Shakespearean references and pieces.”
But there’s no need to brush up on your Shakespeare, says August.
“You won’t get lost at all. That’s not what the story is about. It’s just that if you know your Shakespeare and you hear a line, you’ll go, ‘ah, there’s a little jewel.’”
The contemplative
The play is a study in leadership and what that can cost a person. But it is also a warning, August says, about what we lose if we refuse to listen and compromise.
“It’s a call for more dialogue, more acceptance, understanding, less entrenching ourselves in our side of the argument,” he says.
In the play, King Charles starts out with honorable intentions. But because he is so rigid, he begins to lose his humanity.
“The biggest thing he does is he digs in his heels,” says August.
“And the further he digs in his heels, and refuses to participate in a process, the less human he becomes. … Even though he’s fighting for the right thing, he’s not going about it in the right way. … If we can make the audience feel conflicted at the end of this play, I think we’ve done our job. We’ve presented them with a circumstance that says you have to collaborate, you have to be part of a dialogue. You can’t close the door. Because once you close the door, things go by the door that you’ll never see.”
