‘Die Fel Omstrede Kroon van Edward II en Gaveston’ — underneath it all we’re all flesh and blood

‘Die Fel Omstrede Kroon van Edward II en Gaveston’ — underneath it all we’re all flesh and blood

Queer stories have been having a bit of a moment for some time now. So much so that audiences tend not to get too worked up at the sight of two men kissing or undressing one another in the build-up to a properly grown-up romp between the sheets.

Think of that scene in season two of White Lotus. Or, more recently, all those insinuations of male-on-male obsession and transgression in Emerald Fennell’s frankly breathtaking Saltburn. You begin to get a picture of an entertainment landscape in which the mainstream is absorbing and normalising queer subject matter to the point where gay characters can happily be the bad guys without risk of causing upset because of the potentially harmful depiction of unfavourable stereotypes.

Beautifully translated into Afrikaans by director Marthinus Basson, Die Fel Omstrede Kroon van Edward II en Gaveston (“The Fiercely Contested Crown of Edward II and Gaveston”) is a stage play with queer characters and a heated gay romance at its core. Currently playing at the Baxter in Cape Town, it’s by celebrated Belgian playwright Tom Lanoye, and although written in 2017 and very much of the moment, is actually an adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s play, written in 1592, about the private life of King Edward II.

And, while far from explicit, Marlowe’s play – its full title was The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the Tragical Fall of Proud Mortimer – certainly leaned into the rumours around Edward II’s homosexuality.

Much as Derek Jarman did with his 1991 film, Edward II, Lanoye picks up the hint and runs with it, making the taboo love affair between Edward and his “favourite”, Piers Gaveston, the heart of his drama, essentially claiming a piece of queer history for the queer canon.

Although history is factually vague, it’s widely believed that Edward II, who reigned over England from 1307 until 1327, had at least two identifiable male lovers. One of them, Gaveston, was so adored by the king that he was lavished with titles and powers and elevated to a status pretty much equal to that of the king himself. In Lanoye’s drama, there is no beating around the bush: Edward is out and proud and his status as a homosexual and his unequivocal devotion to his beloved Gaveston leads directly to his downfall.

While the play explores the politics emanating from lines of royal succession and the weight imposed by the crown that the king must wear, it is also about Edward’s struggle to essentially share that crown with his gay lover.

As the emotional landscape of that struggle is explored, we witness characters at their most vulnerable and at their most mischievous. We see them being savage and ugly, twisted and base, and we hear long lists of awful slurs used to describe homosexuals.

But we also hear the two lovers at the play’s heart uttering words of affection that are almost alarming in their beauty and lyricism; sometimes the expressions of love are like electricity, volcanic and heart-stopping.

So intense are Edward’s feelings for his lover, in fact, that in one scene, having already lavished him with endless glory, he tells Gaveston (played by Beer Adriaanse with a gorgeous, worrying twinkle in his eye) that they are essentially one person. It’s the kind of romantic admission by a character that you somehow know is going to end in tragedy, which of course it does, but not before the royal court transforms into a hot mess of political plotting.

You will in any case know from the get-go that things aren’t going to go well, that this is a tragedy. There’s an ominousness that director Marthinus Basson activates from the very beginning, a powerful sense of foreboding and of dark days ahead. It’s in the staging, in David Wolfswinkel’s moody music which amplifies the mounting sense of doom, and in Basson’s minimalist set which includes a series of sliding panels that are either transparent or reflective, depending on where they’re positioned.

And while these moveable panels are used to create the impression of being in different physical locations, they also have the effect of amplifying certain psychological states. Edward’s eternal loneliness, for example, is felt even when there are other characters on stage. Because they’re sequestered behind the see-through panels, though, they seem distant, unable to provide Edward with the kind of emotional comfort he perhaps needs.

That loneliness never truly goes away, and what Lanoye, Basson and actor Edwin van der Walt ultimately do is to reveal the steady transformation of the lovestruck king from an initial state of lonely desperation towards full-blown lonely despair that is ultimately experienced as madness.

While early scenes give us a glimpse of Edward’s ego, his rage and fury and hatred of his father, and his capacity for violence and retribution, by the play’s second half all the hard parts have been chipped away and the vulnerability is breathtaking.

Van der Walt’s Edward is stripped, both metaphorically and physically, his tortured soul laid bare.

In a scene that unfolds like some kind of terrible ritual, the politically scheming father-and-son Mortimers (André Roothman and Wilhelm van der Walt, both brilliant) wash the broken king and lavish him with lies, only to then send in his executioner.

During this scene, and in its aftermath, it is Edward’s humanity that rises to the surface: His frail faculties, his broken spirit, his unrelenting love for Gaveston. All of it is so tenderly rendered by Van der Walt that we cannot help but recognise the simple truth: That despite the crown and all its real and imagined power and status, he is just a man with a man’s needs and wants and human feelings.

It is powerful, heartrending stuff.

And while, yes, this is uncompromisingly a queer theatre piece, it is equally so much more.

It also ponders, in its own way, the suffering of those near and dear to Edward who are affected by his extramarital love affair. His wife Isabella (Rolanda Marais), for example, must spar with everyone around her in order to endure being knowingly cheated on. In real life, Isabella was – for reasons of political expediency – married to Edward while still a young girl. If the rumours and Marlowe’s theory are true, then Isabella long had to suffer the ignominy of being “the other woman” while her husband the king had his fill of male lovers, Gaveston no doubt being his main squeeze among many.

In a devastating twist that surely could only have been devised by a great dramatist, Isabella is at one point in the play motivated to not only plead on behalf of her husband for Gaveston’s salvation, but is further forced to abase herself at the foot of the man (the older Mortimer) who is plotting her husband’s downfall. It is a shocking scene, one that’s spied upon by Isabella and Edward’s son, the crown prince (beautifully played by the young Caleb Payne), planting a seed of revenge that returns with furious consequences later on.

But the scene also brings into sharp focus the desperation of those often overlooked victims of closeted homosexuality: The wives who have, throughout history, had to exist in the shadows of their gay husbands. Isabella’s heartache, one imagines, is akin to that explored by the actress Allison Williams in the recent gay TV series, Fellow Travelers. In it, Williams’s character finds herself playing second fiddle to husband Matt Bomer’s “special friend” over the course of a three-decade clandestine love affair that begins during the McCarthy witch-hunt era.

What stays with you, aside from the needlessness of it all, is the hurt, the loneliness and the silent suffering that the women caught in the crosshairs of these romantic triangles are forced to endure.

And all because of an ongoing legacy of shame that has cast its shadow over the private lives of people whose natural desires and heartfelt affections render them “other”, “different” or queer. DM

Featuring excellent English surtitles, Die Fel Omstrede Kroon van Edward II en Gaveston is an Afrikaans translation of Tom Lanoye’s play. It’s directed and designed by Marthinus Basson, and features Edwin van der Walt, Beer Adriaanse, Rolanda Marais, André Roothman, Wilhelm van der Walt and Caleb Payne. It’s at Cape Town’s Baxter Flipside theatre until 27 January.