A pair of Kings

 Did I mention that I was doing time as a juror? I did. 

At lunch on the second day, I mentioned to our Jury Foreman that I was going to the theatre that evening, and there was a Dublin train at 16:08. IF the judge finished on the dot of 4 ANDIF everyone stood out of the way ANDIF I could exit through the court rather than through the Jury Room and the warren of first-person-shooter corridors and stairwells THEN I was confident I could trot the 600m to the station and make that train AND have dinner with my extended family before the show. It is the nature of things that at least half our fellow jurors earwigged on the conversation. So when the lawyer was still on his feet at 16:05 two of the jury turned round in their seats and raised their eyebrows in sympathy with my flight plight. It was okay, I had a back-up bus with JJKavanagh at 17:10 and was able to dine on grazed left-overs before we all left for the venue at Club na Múinteoirí on Parnell Square.

The play we were all going to see was II a clever riffle-shuffling of two Elizabethan plays: Edward II by Christopher Marlowe and Richard II [as R] by Wm Shaxsper. It is a matter of historical record that the former was the Gt-grandfather of the latter and that both kings were from their crowns untimely ripped. Plays about monarchs of The Colonial Oppressor might seem a peculiar choice to show in The Republic, hmmm? But made a bit of sense in that it was brought here as part of Wilde Stages; the current incarnation of the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival. One snitty insider comment was that DGTF, in its 22 year, will find the money and a stage for any ould nonsense so long as it's Gay. 

It was kind of amusing that a) our family party almost doubled the mid-week audience b) was 90% female c) occupied the whole 3rd row. The rest of the audience was middle-aged to elderly blokes. Family members with better gaydar than me (I just wear BLT-Allied merch) said I was probably the only SWM in the dark  The elder king projected Presence as only an Ac-Tor can do. The other, The Beloved's 30-something neffy from ZA, was introduced to us near nekkid and sort-of-fetal broiling under the spotlights as Richard II. Although later he gets up and owns his patrimony. His Presence was why we were all attending alternative theatre way past my bedtime.

Who knows or cares now whether a fellow who died 700 years ago was gay? Not millennials, that's for sure: sex and gender don't seem to make no differ for my students or my childer and their pals. But at least some contemporaries believed that Richard II and esp Edward II preferred company and congress with men. 200 years after the facts, Holinshed's Chronicles maintain that Edward was disemboweled per anum with a red-hot poker "so as no appearance of any wound or hurt outwardlie might be once perceived" at Berkeley Castle in September 1327. 

I was not tooo distracted by the superficial campyness of the perf: corsets, codpieces, chiffon, tinsel crowns and petals. Underneath, the play is an eloquent discussion about the desirability, and even possibility, of renouncing great power and great responsibility [aka shirking one's duty] and walking into a less-stress sunset. That's important: in my family there is a generational thread of service and subservience of self. Is that a Good Thing? Would the world be richer if our ambition genes hadn't been shot off in the war?

Formally: The troublefome raigne and lamentable death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the tragicall fall of proud Mortimer . . . THE Tragedie of King Richard the fecond,