In ‘King Charles III,’ Glimpsing the Near Future of Monarchy
Ben BrantleyNovember 1, 2015: To sign, or not to sign. That is the question that hangs so urgently over the wavering title character of “King Charles III,” Mike Bartlett’s flat-out brilliant portrait of a monarchy in crisis, which blazed open on Sunday night at the Music Box Theater. Any echoes you may infer regarding a certain Danish prince are entirely appropriate to this dazzlingly presumptuous drama, set in and around Buckingham Palace in a highly foreseeable future. True, as a product of the 20th century, the newly anointed King Charles — whom you probably know better as the current Prince of Wales — would seem to have more in common with T S. Eliot’s muddling J. Alfred Prufrock, who sadly recognized he was not “Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.” Yet as portrayed by Tim Pigott-Smith, in a fully fleshed performance that finds heroic dimensions in one man’s misguided bid for greatness, this unsteady monarch acquires a pathos that might indeed be called Shakespearean. Yes, it’s only a pen he holds, not a sword, as he stares at the unsigned documents before him. But in that pen lies the power to divide a nation and to erase a king’s identity.
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