Westeros

The theater grew dark, save for a flame in the middle of set designer Chloe Lamford’s cross-shaped stage. Two servants of House Whent, dressed in the yellow and black livery, marched out purposefully from the doors beneath where I sat in the Circle, down the long, long way to the great tall doors that represented the gates of Harrenhal. There was an ominous sound beyond, of many feet and hoofs, coming nearer, nearer. The doors were thrust open, and an intense light from lighting designer Jon Clark flooded through, limning the figures that followed: men and women bearing the strange three-headed red dragon on black, a tall man with silver hair on a great horse, a smaller man behind him, each dismounting before passing out of sight. On and on the procession went, a litter bearing a pregnant princess carried by attendants, her own attendants following her. Above, crows (or ravens?) flew, cawing, wings flapping. A dog sniffed the heels of the horses, chased away some commoner.

So began Game of Thrones: The Mad King, the immersive, epic play based on George R.R. Martin’s deep history for A Song of Ice and Fire, adapted by Duncan Macmillan and directed by Dominic Cooke. This long procession featured many of the elements of what the play would unveil over its 3 hour, 40 minute run time (including a 20 minute interval): the wondrous puppetry and movement of Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell of Lume, costume designer Georgia McGuinness’s bold pop-modernist color blocking in the heraldry, the drama of composer Will Stuart’s music and Tom Gibbons’s sound design and that enormous space where the audience surrounded the stage. But would the actual narrative of the play match that beginning?

The company in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones: The Mad King.

I’m happy to say it did. Not perfectly, no, but while it ran the audience was transported to Westeros during the great tourney at Harrenhal, the “greatest tourney of them all”, to see what George R.R. Martin might have meant when he remarked, “A lot happened there at Harrenhal.” That particular statement came in an e-mail to us that we dutifully archived in the So Spake Martin collection of archived correspondence and interviews and reports. But we redacted it, in accordance with GRRM’s wish for us to not be too specific about writing details that he revealed to us at the time. When looking back at it in preparing this review, I found what I had redacted…
 

Unredacted e-mail from George R.R. Martin to Westeros.org

And so now we can say that April 28, 1999, was the day George set down the bulk of Meera Reed’s account of the tourney at Harrenhal, and all the many details that 27 years later Game of Thrones: The Mad King brought to vivid life on the stage. For obvious reasons, this makes the play (and this review) especially poignant for me!

But it must be said that the play goes beyond the tourney. Although the original plan was to dramatize only the tourney, Duncan Macmillan has spoken about how he concluded, and Martin ultimately agreed, that the play needed to show the consequences of those events, culminating in Robert’s Rebellion and all the tragedies that came from it. The second act, therefore, moves into a somewhat different mode, away from the jousts and melees and dances featured in the first act, and to large scale warfare depicted in a series of montages of skirmishes and duels, all underpinned by the many characters whose fates were shaped by decisions made and actions taken at the tourney. It’s very dramatic and gives fans of the source material many of the major moments they would expect to see, but at the same time the attempt to compress a war that lasted nearly a year into under two hours does run into the limits of this particular form and structure to the adaptation. It feels at times hectic, and makes me feel that the first act is the stronger of the two.

If there’s any fault in it, I suppose, it’s that the repetition of the show’s signature fight design and choreography (by fight director Bethan Clark), combined with Barnes and Caldwell’s movement and puppetry (slow-motion movements, performers replaced by multi-person-controlled puppets at times and then coming forward again to resume the combat, cuts to black to advance the combat to a new moment), that seemed fresh earlier in the evening begins to wear out its welcome as those sequences pile up across the second half. In fact, for me the most effective fight sequence was one that did not use puppetry at all towards the end of the play. I wondered afterwards whether increasingly curtailing the slow-motion and puppets as the 2nd act progressed, to mark the shift from chivalric play to deadly warfare, would have worked very well on a thematic level as well as practically. The puppets truly are amazing, though, especially the oversized Gregor Clegane and the magnificent horses used in the jousts.

For many readers who have waited to learn in the pages of A Song of Ice and Fire the full details of these historic events, the play does stand at a curious crossroads: it is not canon, but it contains answers to the big mysteries of this era that came from George R.R. Martin directly and represent his intentions. As we have noted, this play has to adapt itself to the stage, to dramatize events in a way that entertains, to craft a narrative that gives complete stories to the many characters it introduces. It’s certain that Martin himself has not fully resolved all these details himself, with Macmillan having noted that Martin at times told him to come up with his own solutions to some questions because Martin himself had not yet decided them; he is a gardener, and he would tend that garden when it was time to actually write about the events.

Mariah Gale as Lady Shella Whent and the company in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones: The Mad King.

There are many adaptation choices in the play which, alone, remove it from being canonical. One minor detail that leapt out, as an example: Ser Ilyn Payne in this rendition is a Kingsguard knight whose unwise words not only relieved him of his tongue, but of his cloak, thereby making an opening that is still unfilled when the tourney at Harrenhal begins. And speaking of the Kingsguard, as Lord Jon Connington is not a part of the play, the narrative combines aspects of his character and his relationship to Rhaegar with the character of Ser Oswell Whent. There are many of these tweaks, some smaller and some larger, that work within the context of the play, but are not in accord with the novels and histories. For that matter, the language of the play itself owes a great deal to Shakespeare, with a sort of pseudo-Shakespearean style and structure at times quite plainly apparent (all the more reason that the Royal Shakespeare Company were the perfect choice to bring the play to the stage). The answers to the great mysteries may represent Martin’s intentions, but the characterizations, conversations, and dramatic route by which the play reaches them remain Macmillan’s creative interpretation.

And yet, to butcher Shakespeare, “the play’s the thing.” It does not actually matter if it is canonical: it matters if it is well-performed and well-staged and, ultimately, entertaining. It is all these things (with those caveats noted earlier), and for that near-four hours (the version seen in preview was 3 hours, 40 minutes with a 20 minute interval—down 20 minutes from the first week of performances). Macmillan finds paths to create poignant stories, most significantly for the core central characters of Lyanna Stark (Harmony Rose-Bremner) and Rhaegar Targaryen (Noah Ritter), but also (surprisingly, even to us) Robert Baratheon (Callum Woodhouse) and Aerys Targaryen (Michael Shaeffer). A deal of depth and agency, and an unexpected role in the storyline, is very notably given to Elia Martell (Elizabeth Ayodele). In the books and in The World of Ice and Fire, her place in all of this is not given much elaboration at present, and so Macmillan has picked a very Game of Thrones route for her which dives into the political as a contrast to Rhaegar’s esoteric melancholia. All of these figures are moved in different ways by the central questions of the play: the pandemic-inspired feeling of what one can do to control one’s destiny when forces seem to remove agency, and the inherent conflicts that can arise when love and duty clash.

Michael Shaeffer as King Aerys II Targaryen in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones: The Mad King.

These questions may be present in various iterations through various characters, but it’s Rose-Bremner’s Lyanna Stark and Ritter’s Rhaegar Targaryen who are most central to the story, and so both parts of the play’s themes can be found in them. Lyanna Stark’s initial scene after the entry into Harrenhal, before Lamford’s weirwood in the godswood of Harrenhal (a weirwood marked, the production has noted, with thirteen cuts—an easter egg reference to the time Prince Daemon marked the passage of days as he awaited his fateful encounter with his nephew Prince Aemond), explicitly calls into question whether she can avoid the destiny that her family and society has set out for her, to be a wife to a lord and bear his children.

Noah Ritter as Prince Rhaegar Targaryen in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones: The Mad King.

It is hard to pick out one actor for special attention, because so many excellent performances are found. Callum Woodhouse’s Robert, as we said, is quite surprising because of the depth of grief he has over the deaths of his parents, an incident which is made very central to the character’s identity in the play in a way that doesn’t jibe with the Robert of the novels, and yet for the purposes of the play it makes an excellent pairing with Rhaegar. There’s a line in the course of the play, delivered by the prince to Robert, that they are both “citizens of grief” which is repeated, poignantly, by Robert late in the play that resonated in large part due to Woodhouse’s sorrowful delivery. Michael Shaeffer’s Aerys is excellent, a Lear-like man who knows he is mad, is tormented by his past, but is also made cruel and mercurial. And it’s that cruelty that makes his queen Rhaella who she is. Although she only appears as Rhaella in the first act, Mariah Gale also appears as Lady Whent in the first act. A real veteran of the RSC, with many productions under her belt, her performance as the embittered queen was revelatory and transfixing and was one of the unexpected highlights of the production.

The company in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones: The Mad King.

I would be remiss if I did not, also, single out the performers of the Dornish cast. Dorne—and especially House Dayne of Starfall—has always had a special place for us here at Westeros.org, so I’m very happy to report that the roles of the various Dornish characters stood out as a real treat. Elia does indeed play an unexpected role in the play, and her depiction by Elizabeth Ayodele as a self-possessed woman with a keen political mind and a willingness to help Rhaegar succeed in his aims (but for very different reasons) was a delight. So, too, was the performance of Tanisha Spring as the beautiful, vivacious Ashara Dayne who conveys one of the clearest messages about the conflict between love and duty to Michael Abubakar’s Eddard Stark (who also gives one of the stronger performances across the play). Spring’s Ashara is a fine contrast to her brother, Ser Arthur Dayne (Kel Matsena), the Sword of the Morning, the deadliest of King Aerys’s Kingsguard. Faced with the challenge of delivering some of the play’s early expository dialogue, Matsena conveys the upright, honorable character who finds himself torn between his real doubts about what the prince he guards (and who is his oldest friend) means to do… and his loyalty to that same prince, and to his oaths. His story in the second act ends where it inevitably must, but Macmillan’s play gives Ser Arthur some surprising nuances. (Have to say there was a very special thrill in Matsena standing right next to my seat in the Circle level of the theater during one part of the play. Later, I showed Matsena and Spring both that I was wearing a pendant a fan from Spain had given us years ago, with the arms of House Dayne painted by hand on it, because the fans know how we love them.)

Elizabeth Ayodele as Princess Elia Martell and Tanisha Spring as Ashara Dayne in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones: The Mad King.

The RSC has asked those who’ve seen the play to try and be circumspect when it comes to sharing the full details of the play, and so I think I’ll conclude with this: I’m willing to admit there were tears, in the end, as a long-awaited reunion took place, a reunion filled with tragedy that has captured the imagination of readers for 30 years now. Seeing it play out on the stage, skillfully performed, the culmination of all the choices and missteps and shattered hopes that led to that moment, was very powerful to see in person. Though I love Shakespeare, my experience of his work was in reading the plays, and seeing filmed versions, and so the way that seeing it performed live and in person can draw you in and make it feel all the more real was not something I had expected. But it worked, and it worked very well.

Harmony Rose-Bremner as Lyanna Stark and Michael Abubakar as Eddard Stark in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones: The Mad King.

Game of Thrones: The Mad King concludes its run on September 5th at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Presently, all remaining dates are marked as sold out, but I’ve been told that the RSC has a few tickets held back for each day that lucky visitors may be able to get ahold of.