The BBC staged one of its most controversial dramas of recent years, imagining what might happen when the Prince of Wales takes the throne
500 years ago, criticising a recent or reigning monarch was enough to land you in the Tower on charges of treason, a fact many of our greatest writers – Shakespeare, Johnson and Marlowe – were only too aware of when they penned their own plays on Kings and Queens. It was in this Jacobean tradition that the BBC gambled on an adaptation of Mark Barnet’s award-winning stage play King Charles III, written in blank verse and set in a hyper-dramatised world that is almost – but not quite – our own.
The Queen is dead and the new King has gathered in Westminster Abbey with the royal family after the funeral. Brushing aside his Prime Minister, Tristan Evans (Adam James), Charles (Tim Pigott-Smith) says he will step out on his own accord, a frosty reception that soon explodes into a full-blown constitutional crisis. Evans wants to pass a new law restricting press freedom; parliament has passed the bill, but Charles is concerned and expresses his disapproval at one of two weekly audiences, the other being with the snake-like leader of the opposition, who reminds Charles that he can – legally – refuse his assent. And so as Charles withholds his pen, chaos reigns: riots on the street, a tank outside Buckingham Palace and a monarch on a collision course with his parliament, echoes of a previous King Charles abound…
King Charles III is ambitious and courageous story-telling, broadcast in the week speculation mounted over Prince Philip’s retirement.
Yet for all its courage, at the same time it felt a little insensitive. At its most controversial, Diana appears as a ghost, playing her son and ex-husband off against each other. There are not-so-subtle hints that Prince Harry might not be Charles’ biological son. It is hard to fall completely in love with the adaptation of King Charles III, not just because of the way it handles such a sensitive subject, but because it feels like it’s not been properly thought through. Some viewers might remember the 2005 blunder when the Prince of Wales scathingly referred to the press as those “bloody people,” so the entire plot feels somewhat flawed from the off.
Yet in this make-believe world of King Charles III, that’s exactly what it is: make believe. In this fictional world of Barnet’s creation, the King can become someone we hardly recognise – and that’s fine.
King Charles III is out now on
