Sir Walter Raleigh (or Ralegh) probably never did lay his splendid cloak across that muddy puddle for Elizabeth I. But he was an arrogant swashbuckler and a military devotee of the Elizabethan anti-Spanish regime. So when Elizabeth was succeeded by the pacifistic James Stuart, Raleigh’s head was one of the first, ironically, on the chopping block. Oliver Chris has worked through the historical sources to put together this reconstruction of the poet-explorer’s 1603 show trial for treason, a glimpse into the pseudo legalism of authoritarian regimes both now and then.
There are many potential problems in such a project, and Chris navigates most, though not all of them, successfully. Much Tudor legal jargon is probably impenetrable to a non-specialist audience, though the point that despotic regimes will twist any constitutional statute comes across loud and clear. The candlelight in the Globe’s wood-panelled Wanamaker Playhouse beautifully helps to recreate the claustrophobia of Jacobean court life. The actors are dressed in contemporary business attire, which efficiently ties together the director’s intended lessons about past and present.
Women are cast in key roles as Ralegh’s legal persecutors, which veils the extent to which James’s court operated as a patriarchy. But it gives us the always impressive Nathalie Armin as Elizabeth (as opposed to Edward) Coke, Raleigh’s chief prosecutor. If anyone can keep this language fresh and contemporary, it is Armin. She’s matched by Simon Paisley Day’s dignified, frail Ralegh – a faded war hero down to the limp.
Sporadically, phrases drop that resonate back and forth across history. James I’s virility is contrasted to the last years of Elizabeth, “a lady whom time hath surprised”; Ralegh denies being “a Robin Hood, a Wat Tyler, a Jack Cade”. But more historical context would have helped.
