Morte d’Arthur
Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in rep until 28 August
The quest for King Arthur is not to be undertaken lightly. The RSC’s éminence grise, John Barton, has devoted much of his life to it — or at least what has remained to him after Tantalus, his nine-hour dramatisation of the literature piled up around the walls of Troy. It’s not Barton, though, but Mike Poulton who’s now claiming the Grail of a completed stage adaptation of Sir Thomas Malory’s massive Arthurian epic. It’s taken Poulton ten years and the result, running for nearly four hours, arrives at Stratford directed by Gregory Doran.
In 2005 Poulton and Doran came up with a totally delightful show based on the Canterbury Tales. But Morte d’Arthur was always going to be a tougher proposition. Writing a century after Chaucer and towards the end of the Wars of the Roses, Malory cobbled together many diverse stories round and about Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere, most of them ‘taken oute of certeyn bookes of Frensshe and …reduced into Englysshe’. Faced with such a cornucopia, Poulton has wisely thrown a thousand knights and ladies to the winds, concentrating on the more coherent saga of Arthur and his Round Table as told in the last two of Malory’s 21 books. He could with advantage have been even tougher. To expect folk to hang on to the fortunes of the likes of Leodegrance, Pellinor, Lot, Lamorak and Accolon through a long evening is a pretty severe test of their fealty.
Director Gregory Doran is good at storytelling and manfully shoulders the narrative burden. He seizes every opportunity for striking theatrical display, as in the inauguration of the Round Table, jousting on horseback, and the scenes of mourning for Uther Pendragon and for Arthur.
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