King Charles III, Newcastle Theatre Royal

THIS highly-original new work was honed in the Almeida Theatre and is glittering with awards including an Olivier Award for Best New Play and has a future on Broadway. It is a History Play for our own times, a ‘What If?’ exercise that imagines a chain of events following the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

The play is written in blank verse and as a work can easily trace its lineage back to Shakespeare, what with those epigrammatic, memorable lines which pop up frequently and a couple of spectres at the feast. It centres around a crisis which is a case of No Prime Minister, where the new monarch, yet to be crowned, refuses to give his Royal assent to a Bill for regulation of the Press to the Prime Minister, a Mr Evans.

Robert Powell plays Charles with great gravitas, without resorting to a straightforward embodiment of the voice and mannerisms of the man. In contrast his son Harry, played by Richard Glaves, is instantly recognisable as the toff jester we know from the headlines.

The stage is an unflinching picture of brick, an unyielding fortress battling to remain in a landscape of scandal, unrest and republican ideas.

Topical satire is, by its nature notoriously out-of-date the moment it is written and this play has been reworked since its premiere last year. Its most recent appearance I found overlong and tedious. Actors have spent generations fighting against the tendency for blank verse to become aggrandized, but here the pace grinds to a halt at the expense of the audience’s enjoyment. Yet its ingenuity is a powerful force: Long Live Theatre.

* King Charles III runs until Saturday. Box Office: 08448-112121 or theatreroyal.co.uk

Sarah Scott