Vivat Rex

I've been listening to Vivat Rex, which they have repeated in honour of the Queen's diamond Jubilee.  It was created in 1977 for the silver one.  I've only heard snippets before.  Now, thanks to  Iplayer, I can listen for an hour a day to fine actors repeating great lines dramatising 200 years of English nobles fighting for the crown.  (What a lot of ruthless cut-throats the Queen's ancestors were).

It kicked off with Christopher Marlowe's Edward II. John Hurt played Edward, managing a note of affronted whingeing that made me sympathise with Mortimer and Queen Isabella for deposing him, then his simple and dignified suffering at the end had me pitying him.  I saw this play many years ago done by the Lyceum in Edinburgh, and it has stuck with me - they had an excellent arrogant Mortimer and a creepy Lightborn, the assassin, with big clumsy red hands, quite horrible when he lay them on the broken Edward.  The Lightborn in Vivat Rex was equally cold and sinister.

Edward II was Marlowe's only play set in England.  What a loss it was, his death in Deptford at the age of 29.

Comments

[Allan]

I have never seen Edward II, just a magnificent Tamburlaine at the Embra Festival in the early 70s and school productions of Faustus and, of all things, The Massacre of Paris. I admire the playwright greatly and agree that his death was a huge blow to the English theatre [unless he was indeed alive and secreted in Italy where he wrote the complete ouevre of the Stratford Man (not)]. I taught for 20 years at a school founded by the man who played Faustus and Tamburlaine, a connection in which I delight.

[Ronda Scott-Marak]

Sir Anthony Quayle as Falstaff was beyond marvelous

[Rosie]

@ Ronda

You're right there. A great performance. Falstaff's public humiliation is a hard thing to listen to.

[Tony french]

Superb programme. In 1977, it fired my love of Shakespeare just when, at 20 years old, I was ripe and ready for it. It was an event which I'll never forget.

[Tony french]

And incidentally, I've still got the programme which you could write away and get a copy of back then.