Chapter 3 - Stanislavski in the Closet: Joe Hill-Gibbins’ Edward II (National Theatre, 2013)

Summary

When Joe Hill-Gibbins’ production of Marlowe’s Edward II opened in 2013, the production’s mixed reviews recorded the critics’ ambivalent response to a production David Nice described as ‘the polar opposite to Sir Nick [Hytner]’s conventionally handsome mainstream house style’. That house style, in the wake of Hytner’s flagship ‘modern media war’ production of Henry V in 2003, was known for its incorporation of live video. Edward II marked the culmination of ten years of strenuous efforts, by the National Theatre, to explore a broad early modern repertoire, while signposting a radical departure from Hytner’s ‘handsome’ diegetic use of video. This chapter explores how, with the involvement of video designer Chris Kondek and set designer Lizzie Clachan, live digital video, in combination with a set design that put the liminal early modern ‘discovery space’ centrestage, became one of the principal means through which Hill-Gibbins re-imagined the dynamic spatial relations of Marlowe’s tragedy. In the production’s first part, performance technologies enabled the creation of a post-naturalist stage which reconciled early modern ‘personation’ and the co-creation of characters by the audience with the provision of Stanislavskian ‘inner lives’ and ‘backstories’. Those contradictions were exacerbated to harrowing effect in a climax which juxtaposed the spatiotemporal organisation of naturalism with the extratemporal passion of the King’s tragic journey.