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Written
by
Paul Webb
Directed
by
Peter Farago
Cast
Britto
Piers Ronan
Morville
Demetri Alexander
Catherine
Juliet Howland
Traci
Ken Bradshaw
Fitz
Peter Hugo-Daly
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Riverside
Studios
3
- 24 March 2005 |
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It's
a great idea, exploring the
year that the four knights
lived after they had killed
Thomas Becket in December
1170. They claimed they acted
on the king's orders, and
perhaps they did, but the
king went into public penance
immediately after the murder,
ostensibly to placate the
accusation of the Pope they
had killed a holy man on holy
ground, and to appease the
growing army of people who
regarded Thomas as a martyr,
which he was made subsequently.
Paul Webb's play and Peter
Farago's production grow in
intensity as in the second
act the arguments and dialogue
explore ever more deeply the
tensions between the four
knights and their various
reasons for killing Thomas.
Nothing is known for sure
about the knights so Paul
Webb has a clear canvas to
invent. All the knights are
'king's men' and at the beginning
and the end they swear an
oath to the king. They carried
out the king's orders to rid
him of 'this turbulent priest'.
In fact, they came to arrest
him and only accidentally
did arrest become murder.
They would argue (as did Eliot)
that Becket provoked them.
He wanted to be a martyr,
ìto do the right thing for
the wrong reason.î But in
Webb's play only one knight
murders Becket, the aristocratic
Fitz.
Morville is the first to state
his case, and the one most
upset by his ex-communication
and isolation. Riddled with
guilt in his Yorkshire castle
of Knaresborough, he argues
that Becket had to die as
he was opposing the progressive
reforms of King Henry. Henry's
reforms has been supported
by Becket when he was the
king's chancellor, but on
appointment as Archbishop
of Canterbury, he crossed
sides and became the most
ardent defender of the very
things Henry and he had been
trying to reform. Morville
claims he laid his life on
the line to defend Henry's
reforms, and he continues
through much of the play to
imagine that Henry is playing
a careful political game but
is really on the knights'
side. Morville claims at one
moment that Becket had to
die to stop the country sliding
back to 'fundamentalism',
a rather anachronistic idea,
but one that is very suggestive
of the twelfth century dynamics
being investigated in the
play. Demetri Alexander conveys
a very troubled Morville,
and though his enunciation
is sometimes so fast the words
become inaudible, his manner
and style ooze guilt, remorse
and despair.
Opposite to the high-minded
Morville is Brito, considered
by Fitz and the others a parvenu:
not an aristocrat like the
others, a 'new man'. He displays
a good deal of street wisdom.
He is rampantly heterosexual
though he displays a curiously
inconsistent loyalty to Traci,
who in his turn is amorously
drawn to Brito. Does Brito
represent a healthy new world?
Is he the exemplar of the
'new world' that Henry is
trying to create? Webb suggests
that Brito acted less out
of conviction than of opportunism.
Joining the other three could
be his making. Piers Ronan,
the 'good-looking one' as
he is described in the tongue-in-cheek
programme, plays Brito to
the hilt. He's the most active,
the youngest soldier. He's
the one who chases the mysterious
Catherine after she cures
his toothache. He's the one
who drives himself to martyr
himself for Catherine when
she succumbs to the fatal
disease circulating the village
of Knaresborough. Brito is
no philosopher, but his understanding
and feeling for the situation
grows as he grows through
the play. For him it is a
kind of rite of passage, and
Ronan brings this out brilliantly.
Traci is the most complex
character. He is in love with
Brito, though he dominates
him. He is guilt-ridden like
Morville, but is not a religious
man. He is a soldier, a lone
soldier, a lone man. In the
past he has had a relationship
with the fourth knight, the
self-consciously aristocratic
Fitz. Fitz thinks he has the
measure of Traci, but Traci
is the superior character,
and much less devious. Ken
Bradshaw is outstanding as
the intellectually challenged
Traci.
Peter Hugo-Daly plays the
sleazy Fitz. Why was he one
the murderers? He lechers
after soldiers, and has had
a relationship with Traci.
The whole play, much of whose
first act is full of swearing,
crackles with personal and
political motives, and the
female presence of Catherine,
a mysterious local landowner
acting as a servant to Morville,
whom she is intended to marry,
but who is tried as a witch
by water, acts as a catalyst.
Juliet Howland conveys Catherine's
anguish, repressed sexuality,
and mixed intentions to the
full. Her performance galvinises
those of the others.
Webb claims the play is a
comedy, but there aren't many
laughs. The swearing adds
a modern aggressiveness to
the text; but overall the
brooding sense of abandonment,
being out in the cold (physically
and metaphorically), of having
created a set of circumstances
they can no longer control
is very powerful. In particular,
the second act raises the
tensions created in the first
act. The play leaves a lasting
impression of the day-to-day
exasperation of the knights.
Do they have hope? Were they
not inevitably dropped as
too hot to handle, even though
the king may privately had
approved of their action?
He could never have gone public
with such an idea? This is
a dilemma that Webb draws
out of the history books to
make an excellenty play, brilliantly
acted.
Roderick Swanston |
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