After nearly a year of work, the script for Magic Circle’s Kings is nearly finished. Now the director (Ken Jordan) will take a look at it and we’ll see what changes grow from that. It’s been a very interesting writing experience for me, and I’m very excited and happy with the shape the play has taken. It really feels like a play of its own now, not just an editing of the three mammoth Henry VI plays and the equally mammoth Richard III. It is Kings.
I was feeling very discouraged with the project for a while. Having gone through all three parts of Henry VI and Richard III, all I could see was the hours and hours of text that had been eliminated. But when I can back to Kings again last week and read it fresh, I saw that it worked. And I think it works extremely well. There are many dead spots in the Henry trilogy and Richard III is very long, and transforming four plays into one two-act evening was a tall task. Working closely with director Ken Jordan, together we distilled Shakespeare’s epic history of the Wars of the Roses into a fast-paced narrative of an intense and bloody struggle for power. Shakespeare’s plays are Shakespeare’s plays, but Kings is its own animal. Watching it will be a different experience from watching a traditional production of Henry VI or Richard III. We’re giving you the whole bloody saga in one bite.
In Kings, I feel that the journeys of the characters are much clearer. In the original texts, amazing characters such as King Henry, Margaret, and even Richard can be dwarfed by the sheer volume of characters and storylines surrounding them. Kings brings these people and this story to center stage, with an intimacy that can’t be escaped.
I love how many echoes there are in the play, how things that happen in the first half are repeated in the second half. That’s Shakespeare’s art, not mine. But I think Kings makes it clearer than it would be otherwise, because the story has been distilled to its heart. In the beginning, when York talks to the audience about how he’s going to catch the crown and compares his brain to a “laboring spider,” it’s not hard to see where Richard III gets his personality from. Like father, like son.
I’m very excited to work on this show. I’m excited to play Richard. I feel like I understand him so much better now than I did before. We’re hopefully going to do a workshop/reading of Kings sometime this summer. Stay tuned to this blog and our website http://www.magiccircletheater.com for updates.
There are no Gods in Shakespeare. There are only Kings. - Jan Kott.
