In the Tom Stoppard-scripted film Shakespeare in Love, our William and Christopher Marlowe engage in mutual luvvie admiration of their individual merits as playwrights. Marlowe praises just about everything Shakespeare has written, but in reply receives the Bard’s nod of approval for just one great work. It is, of course, Tamburlaine, and some of its majesty, although by no means all, is on display in David Farr’s gripping production for the Bristol Old Vic.
The play lasts six hours in full so it is inevitable that in Farr’s truncated adaptation many of Tamburlaine’s bloody campaigns of conquest are reduced to soundbites. This allows little scope for Greg Hicks, in the title role, to establish any sense of charismatic leadership that might explain his rise from humble shepherd to brutal ruler of most of the known world.
Both Hicks and the narrative line are better served when Farr slows the pace and introduces more revealing and intimate scenes. Jeffery Kissoon and Ann Ogbomo make the humiliation and eventually suicide of the Emperor of Turkey and his wife both moving and cruel in the extreme, while the first time Hicks is seen as more than just a blasphemous tyrant with a lust for power is at the death of his wife Zenocrate, portrayed as a slightly ambiguous figure in the loyalty stakes by Rachael Stirling, and then his own unexplained demise.
Altogether an impressive fresh look at an epic work that whets the appetite for the full version, perhaps staged in two parts.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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