Article by Robin Thornber taken from The Guardian.

Izzard stands up to be counted a king

Edward II

As a stand-up comedian Eddie Izzard has been called the funniest man in Britain. But the tragedy of England's 14th century gay king is hardly a barrel of laughs. If it is every clown's ambition to play Hamlet, Eddie has a second Edward in him - a powerful and moving classical actor.

Where Shakespeare's histories tussle with the philosophy of Tudor kingship, Christopher Marlowe is more concerned with the narrative potential - revelling in telling a cunning, dramatic yarn about the mechanics of machination and manipulation in a medieval court.

Paul Kerryson's production at the Leicester Haymarket gives the play a fresh emphasis as an exposure of homophobic snobbery and ambitious intrigue among the political elite. Instead of playing Edward II as the traditional limp wristed wimp ruined by his weakness for young men of the commoner sort - first Gaveston and then Spencer - Izzard gives him a ringing integrity and plays the passion as honourable and sincere.

It is, at first, a muted performance, justifying the gibes of the nobles at this mild mannered nice guy too besotted with his "mignon" to defend his northern subjects from the marauding Scots or to defy his wife's brother, the French Valois king, over Normandy.

But this Edward has a steely side, brazening out the scandal of his affair although it costs him popular esteem and defying the court and church in defence of Gaveston, making him Lord Chamberlain, Earl of Cornwall and King of Man.

And after Gaveston's death, in a sizzling second half, Izzard gives us a dazzling display of emotional range on the way to his final humillation and betrayal. For once, although his predicament may have been of his own stubborn making, we actually feel for the man.

And his central performance is framed in a thoroughly stylish, contemporary staging of the play that delivers the argument and the complex issues with vivid clarity. Charles Cusick-Smith's design is a thrusting perspective of unforgiving steel screens and grilles, eloquently lit by Jenny Cane. The backdrop is rent by a scorched cruciform slit with both phallic and ruptured anal suggestions.

In this brutal world of power grabbing, the barons are not just disgusted by the king's "frolicking" they are affronted by his ennoblement of the low born - he does seem to hand out tides with the abandon of a lavender list.

And the English aristocracy is not lightly slighted. The earls of Lancaster (Richard Willis) and Warwick (Guy Oliver-Watts) make a formidable opposition, scheming in their Turkish baths. But it's the treachery of the unscrupulously ambitious ortimer (David Leonard) and Edward's scorned Queen (Vicki Pepperdine) that fatally conspires against the legitimate heir in a land where "lords keep court and kings are locked in prison".

There's a simmering performance, too, from Keith Lee-Castle as a darkly ambivalent Gaveston almost worth sharing a kingdom with. But it's really Izzard's show - "Edward this day hath crowned him king anew".

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