Charles the interferer

Opera House, Manchester, to Saturday

The biggest revelation to come out of Mike Bartlett’s look at He Who Might Be King is perhaps a realisation that Shakespeare really knew what he was doing...

King Charles III explores what might occur if the new King Charles decides to raise his involvement in politics a notch and refuses to sign a press-gagging Bill into law, thus causing a constitutional crisis.

That crisis deepens when Charles ends the impasse between himself and the PM by dissolving Parliament - which, his lawyers tell him, is within his power, though not something his mother would ever have countenanced.

It’s an interesting “what if?” made all the more interesting by Bartlett’s shaping of the drama to resemble something Shakespeare might have written - though Charles isn’t really naive enough to intrude on the business of government after so long being a peripheral part of it.

The set is a sort of brick-walled ancient hallway with arched entrances and a large raised platform in the middle, with minimal props - just like a Shakespeare production.

The characters speak in blank verse and pseudo-Elizabethan terms - not completely, but enough to make what they actually say stand for a lot more.

Bartlett also plays around with rhythm and construction, the play passing between some characters as a series of interviews and reports rather than conversations - much like Shakespeare’s regal tone, king to courtiers.

In the end Charles is undone by his daughter-in-law and son, Kate and William - acting like a pair of the Bard’s scheming family underlings.

Robert Powell is good as the king. He doesn’t attempt any kind of impression but still manages to convey the plight of a man denied his birthright for decades - then denied it again by tradition.

Also good are Jennifer Bryden as Kate and Ben Righton as the butter-wouldn’t-melt William.

But in truth all the characters are there to serve the script; there is little depth in any of them.

And ultimately this is the play’s undoing: entertainingly serious and brilliantly creative and masterful though it is, half way through act two the play’s dryness does start to tell, and only the final twist of the knife serves to liven things up again nicely.