Michael Shaeffer (King Aerys II Targaryen) in Games of Thrones: The Mad King at the RSC. Photo: Johan Persson
Where better to host the premiere of a Game of Thrones play than the Royal Shakespeare theatre? George RR Martin is famously indebted to Shakespeare’s history plays and this story, written by Duncan Macmillan and directed by Dominic Cooke, is a typically blood-soaked tale of regicide, treachery and revenge: murder begets murder, on and on. It opens 18 years before the start of the HBO TV show: the fall of the insane tyrant Aerys Targaryen, the rise of Robert Baratheon and the birth of some very important babies.
Ten years in the making, The Mad King is the biggest of swings for the RSC. It sold out before it even opened and the company is doubtless banking on a long-running West End transfer. Its challenges are intrinsic to the enterprise. It’s very long (almost four hours), rather serious, and can’t match HBO for spectacle. There’s a bit too much exposition for a play yet probably not enough for someone who hasn’t seen a minute or read a word about Westeros, the land of endless fuckery. But if there must be a Game of Thrones play, then this sets a high bar and I suspect it will tighten up as it evolves.
Michael Shaeffer plays Aerys Targaryen as a terrifying hybrid of Lear, Hitler and Stalin, although you might think of America’s mad king, too
The Mad King opens at the Great Tourney of Harrenhal with what feels like the entire 36-strong company of actors and puppeteers arriving in a tremendous display of theatrical force. A great door swings open and a spectacular pageant proceeds down the cruciform stage in a gust of dry ice to the sound of Will Stuart’s clangorous score. Georgia McGuinness’s costumes colour-code the rival clans: the Starks in grey, the Lannisters in red, the Targaryens in beetle-black. The giant puppeteering is of the War Horse school (Finn Caldwell worked on both), allowing for looming horses, lumbering suits of armour and, eventually, an immense red-eyed dragon. Cooke uses cinematic tricks like slo-mo and freeze-frame to jazz up the combat sequences but Bethan Clark’s swordplay choreography is impressive in its own right. It’s the full banquet.
The theatre design is ambiently Elizabethan (actors slide into the stalls to watch the tournament with us), as is Macmillan’s dialogue, with many a nay, oft and mayhap. It’s not exactly Shakespeare, of course, but the best lines have a weighty, aphoristic ring: “A king is just a man in a metal hat being told whatever pleases him”, or “Peace is naught but the silence between axe blows.” I’ll have to dock a point for “Let them play their game of thrones” though.
L-R: Elizabeth Ayodele (Princess Elia Martell) and Tanisha Spring (Lady Ashara Dayne) in Game of Thrones: The Mad King. Photo: Johan Persson
Macmillan digs into Martin’s tension between supernatural prophecy and human agency. Lyanna Stark (Harmony Rose-Bremner from The Years) asks the Heart Tree whether her life is “plotted out from this day to the last” but learns that it is not so: “For what are we if not the choices we make?” Rhaegar Targaryen (the Hemsworthian Noah Ritter) proves that. His two big decisions – flinching from patricide and choosing Lyanna over his Dornish wife Elia Martell – are triggers for catastrophe. After the interval, days turn to months and Aerys, previously a pathetic tatterdemalion in need of a drastic manicure, becomes a petulant, paranoid monster. Slouching in his throne of swords before a green-glowing pit of exterminating wildfire, Michael Shaeffer plays him as a terrifying hybrid of Lear, Hitler and Stalin, although you might think of America’s mad king, too. How quickly a realm disintegrates when the wrong people are in charge.
The explosive set-pieces are bridged by scenes of surprising tenderness. Callum Woodhouse’s Robert Baratheon is a more melancholy head-clobberer than Mark Addy’s bluff, boozy rugby lad in the TV show, and Michael Abubakar’s Ned Stark more self-conscious about filling dead men’s shoes than Sean Bean’s flinty chieftain. “We are none of us living the lives we were promised,” he says. Even Aerys, the swine, gets a human moment. As Rhaegar patiently grooms him, he could be any father in cognitive decline, muttering “the world has ceased to make sense”. I also loved Hughie O’Donnell’s Lord Varys, a silky, slithery Machiavel, and the terrible dignity of Elizabeth Ayodele’s Elia.
Noah Ritter (Prince Rhaegar Targaryen) in Game of Thrones: The Mad King. Photo: Johan Persson
Best known for People, Places and Things, his acclaimed 2015 play about an addict played by Denise Gough, Macmillan is more explicit than Martin, and indeed HBO’s boob-loving showrunners, about the brutal gender politics of Westeros. Before the climactic battles, three pregnant women unite in a haunting folk song and you can guess, if you don’t already know, that they’re incubating the protagonists of the next war. It pairs nicely with an eerie, hallucinatory vision of the spectres of the dead to give the play more of an empathetic kick that one might expect. The warring families are poignantly described as sharing a homeland after all: they are all “citizens of grief”.
Shakespeare liked to end his histories and tragedies with the ritual promise of healing amid the corpses, and there’s a similar gesture towards peace and progress here, but it’s obvious that this is merely the silence between axe blows. As Lyanna says: “Winter is always coming.” The RSC must be hoping that this potential blockbuster proves just as enduring.
Dorian Lynskey is the Nerve’s theatre critic. He co-hosts the politics podcast Origin Story. His 2019 book The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 was longlisted for both the Baillie Gifford and Orwell Prize