The Stage

Morte D’Arthur

Published Monday 21 June 2010 at 13:15 by Mark Shenton

The Royal Shakespeare Company scored its most recent monumental success with Michael Boyd’s complete cycle of history plays - now the company’s apparent addiction to epic theatre turns deadly, in every sense, with Morte d’Arthur. This laboured medieval trudge through the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table follows wearingly through territory already covered by shows from Camelot to Spamalot (now out on a national tour) that respectively set its story to a musical soundtrack and an irreverent comic one.

Gregory Doran’s production inevitably takes itself a lot more seriously than either of those shows, pointing up the Shakespearean affinities to a tale written a century before the Bard that was, as adaptor Mike Poulton points out in a programme note, the first great English prose work, printed in 1485, and England’s very first best seller. It also runs to some 21 books - Derek Jacobi’s truncated “talking book” version, which only covers about half of the original, lasts nine hours.

The RSC at least has the good grace not to hold us captive for that long but neither, I’m afraid, does the nearly four hours it does provide hold us captivated. On the one hand, Doran’s staging brings the RSC’s default epic style of big, thrusting gestures (and tons of stage smoke) to bear on it, but though there’s plenty of narration, there’s not a lot of complementary narrative tension along the way.

Perhaps it doesn’t help that these stories and characters, like Merlin and Mordred, Gawain and Pendragon, Launcelot and Guenever, are so well known already, but though the production provides some striking images, like the sight of Excalibur suspended out of a sea of floating smoke or battles on giant horses, the endless pageantry doesn’t produce any notes of plangency.

The vast army of actors that populate a character list that runs to some 70 named roles have an epic job, but only a few make individual impressions. Sam Troughton’s Arthur, Jonjo O’Neill’s Launcelot and Noma Dumezweni’s Morgan Le Fay rise above the smoke and mirrors occasionally, but it’s not always easy to make out the dramatic journeys they are all going on, or to care about them.