HAILED as hilarious and intriguing, audacious yet affectionate, King Charles III opened to fanfares of praise in London last year. And now, after a sell-out West End run, award-winning director Rupert Goold's production is headed to the Theatre Royal Bath, starring Robert Powell. What's startlingly daring is that this royal family drama is writer Mike Bartlett's 21st century answer to Shakespeare's history plays. Written in blank verse like the Bard’s – but with droll modern phrases in the mix – King Charles III imagines what might happen in the near future, were Prince Charles to ascend the throne and be asked, by his prime minister, to assent to a privacy bill restricting the freedom of the press. In this scenario – which also features Camilla, a troubled Prince Harry, William and Kate – what ensues is a tense moral dilemma for Charles and a destabilising constitutional crisis. It raises questions about Parliament's powers, the monarch's prerogatives and how Britain is governed.

Robert Powell speaks to the Adver about playing the title role.

 

What, in particular, drew you to play King Charles III?

ROBERT POWELL: I think Mike [Bartlett] has written a quite brilliant drama, brilliantly constructed and very funny as well. It's totally of the moment, and is actually becoming more and more current with this whole issue of the freedom of the press.

Yes, 2015 has seen the Guardian, after legal battles, publishing Prince Charles's 'black spider memos' to government ministers. And of course the 800th anniversary has flagged up how the Magna Carta, in setting out to curb a king, ingrained the idea of civil liberties.

RP: And what I love is that Mike chooses a bill limiting press freedom as the bill that Charles won't sign – which is the opposite of what everyone might assume, thinking he'd be delighted if the press were shackled!

Is a modern-day verse drama also an exhilarating challenge?

RP: It's a massive learn! Improvising isn’t an option because it’s in iambic pentameters. But that's great…Last year, after I'd toured as Poirot in Agatha Christie's Black Coffee I was offered half a dozen plays, but they wouldn’t have tested any part of me as this one does. King Charles III also has the major advantage of being a new play that someone has already had out. So you know it works and has been successful. Verse and I are old friends too.

This play includes occasional echoes of Hamlet as well as King Lear, and you’ve played Hamlet amongst other Shakespearean roles in your career, haven’t you?

RP: Yes, I played Hamlet at Leeds around 1971. And I played King Lear when I was still at school – at Manchester Grammar.

You weren’t from a theatrical family, were you, but did any contemporaries at school also go on to become actors?

RP: My father was a mechanical engineer, from Salford… On my very first day at Manchester Grammar, the desks were in twos and I was paired up with Ben Kingsley (called Krishna Banji then). After school, I’d started to read Law but was doing a play with the Manchester University Stage Society when the Head of Drama, Hugh Hunt [a director of London's Old Vic Company in the 50s], came backstage and said, “What on earth are you doing reading Law?” I jacked in studying Law but then had a year to kill (because, bizarrely, I had to take 'O' Level English Literature to qualify for the Drama course). And during that year the director of Stoke's theatre-in-the-round, Peter Cheeseman, asked me to join his company. About six months in, we were doing As You Like It, and into the first day of rehearsal walked Ben Kingsley!...In any case, I never took up that place at Manchester.

You’ve played many famous people including – amongst your leading screen roles – Christ in Franco Zefferelli’s Jesus of Nazareth and Gustav Mahler for Ken Russell. More recently, returning to the stage, you played both Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt – to Liza Goddard’s Coral Browne and Elizabeth II – in Alan Bennett’s Single Spies. As with the characters in Bennett’s double bill, would you say playing Bartlett’s Charles involves far more than a spot-on imitation?

RP [chuckling]: I can do rather a good imitation, and there may be certain little habits such as playing with the lobe of the ear. But, as Rupert [Goold] says, an impersonation would be completely distracting. Once you’ve established you’re not doing that, the audience can get fully involved in the character and your energy goes into bringing that to life.

Have you ever met Prince Charles?

RP: Yes. He is utterly charming and Camilla is divinely funny.

Presumably, as stage sovereigns go, Ubu Roi was somewhat more anarchic at the Royal Court Theatre in 1966?

RP: Max Wall was Ubu; I broke the Guinness Book of Records understudying some 55 parts; the costumes were painted on sandwich boards by David Hockney; and we had brown footballs as cannon balls. We were on stage when England won the World Cup…and we played football with the audience. Ah, that was a great show, but completely mad!

King Charles III is on at the Theatre Royal Bath from Monday, November 23 to Saturday 28.