Dominic cooke

Wasn’t it Philomena Cunk who first observed that Shakespeare’s greatest work is Game of Thrones? She had a point. When I told friends that the Royal Shakespeare Company was adapting George R.R. Martin’s saga for the stage, the GoT fans lit up. The non-fans were incredulous, and not in a good way. Now Game of Thrones: The Mad King has landed, nearly four hours of it, and it represents a gamble for the RSC. Nearly a decade after peak Thrones, a vast inbuilt audience can no longer be assumed. This new stage version needs to please both camps if it’s to become the money-spinner that the company clearly (and justifiably) intends it to be. I’d like to imagine that I’m the target audience.

The Corn is Green by Emlyn Williams is a sociology essay written in 1938 about a prickly tyrant, Miss Moffat, who tries to civilise Wales by setting up a village school where sooty-faced miners are taught to read and write. Miss Moffat is an unmarried English layabout who has money to burn and time on her hands and so, of course, she wants to ‘help’. You know the type? Director Dominic Cooke treats the script as a period joke and the actors are encouraged to mock their characters mercilessly. Hoots of cheap laughter echo around the theatre. The show is presented very weirdly as a sort of botched technical rehearsal with lots of clunky sound effects and a Writer/Narrator on stage who paces about and shouts directions at the actors.

The Normal Heart is not about Aids. Larry Kramer’s play is set in New York in 1981 at a time when clinicians were struggling to find a link between a handful of rare diseases that struck only gay men and heroin addicts. The term ‘Aids’ wasn’t adopted until late in 1982. And this dampens the wheels of Dominic Cooke’s production. A playgoer is likely to stifle a yawn as the characters on stage try to discover medical facts that have been common knowledge for decades. There are other problems with Kramer’s ageing script. The story follows an indignant activist, Ned, who has to persuade the city authorities to take the plague seriously. He embarks on a laborious campaign whose numerous battlegrounds the script exhaustively covers.