Christopher Marlowe

The School of Night

Playwright Peter Whelan
Directed by Bill Alexander
Taper Forum, Los Angeles

     Though The School of Night  was low in action, the tension created through the climate of fear kept me at the edge of my seat.  Would playwright Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, faced with several tests of character, take the road of cowardice or courage?

 

Set in 1592 England, a world of intense paranoia where repression lives around every corner, the play engages several historical controversies and ideas.

 

To start with, who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays? The play asserts the bard was passing Marlowe's work off as his own. William, the play maintains, was not the genius that everyone supposed him to be, but instead was the world's greatest plagiarizer!

 

Whelan's Marlowe is intellectual, homosexual, atheist, substituting reason for religion. His pursuits land him in a good bit of trouble, persecuted by the royal court for atheism. Where forward thinking and a love of science might be applauded in 2009, in Marlowe's age it was a threat to the status quo. 

 

This is Elizabethan England: Catholics war with Protestants, and political incorrectness – such as atheistic thoughts and pursuit of knowledge – might lead to your head on top of a spike.

 

The first act is filled with humor. But intrigue abounds as the audience tries to figure out who is part of what political faction.

 

Marlowe (played by the buoyant Gregory Woodall) debuts on his knees praying to his self-created "Dog" (God backwards). The cheeky writer feels he can neither pray to God (the Lord requires too much sacrifice) nor the Devil (Satan has his own agenda). So he prays to the God-head in himself, hoping that this being grants him all of his desires!

 

Kit ponders his future, his legacy and the nature of truth? At the very least, he wants to know his own existential truth, questioning ideologies, utilizing new inventions such as the telescope, and embracing his belief that ignorance is the original sin.

 

Most of the scenes take place at the estate of Marlowe’s patron and alleged lover, Sir Thomas Walsingham (Adrian La Tourelle), who, along with his reluctant wife Audrey (Alicia Roper), have taken in the scribe during his persecution. Sir Walter Raleigh (an intense Henri Lubatti), who has also fallen from the queen’s graces and is desperate to get back in, is invited for a visit and Marlowe is commissioned to provide the entertainment.  

 

With the help of Elizabethan actor Tom Stone (the irresistible John Sloan) and Kit's muse Rosalinda, an Italian actress of Moorish descent (played regally by Tymberlee Chanel), Marlowe’s skit is performed as a mockery of Sir Walter. Neither subtlety nor tact was Marlowe's forte. Raleigh easily reads between the lines of the incisive dialogue. He becomes offended. The nobles wanted frivolity but instead Kit forces them to face themselves.

 

Self-knowledge is, more often than not, painful.

 

Entangled in persecution, Raleigh and other artists pay the price for associating with Marlowe and his secret “School of Night", where alternative minds meet to discuss lofty ideas: Does the Soul exist? If so, where does such a Soul reside? Should monarchy be replaced by a republic? Dangerous thoughts to the powers that be. No one wants to be openly known as a student, and Marlowe can't run away from being the School's teacher. 

 

Marlowe was a 16th century "Shock Jock". His airwaves were his written words. His plays were a dissenting voice against the Church and its desire to control every aspect of life. That put Marlowe’s financiers, the Walsingham family, in a precarious position. The wife, Audrey, a distant relation to the Queen, betrays the father of tragedy. She has her man Ingrim (Ian Bedford) publicly promote her house's obedience to excommunicate anyone the crown deems unworthy, a la Marlowe. 

 

For Kit, freedom of speech and religion doesn't exist, just a crazy atmosphere of paranoia.

 

Historically speaking, the American Revolution broke from English tyranny. Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, et al, tried to overcome the nasty duo of Monarchy and Church. This play amply points out the dangers of unchecked royalty. But even with the American "Checks and Balances", the new nation still experienced slavery, the Salem Witch Hunts, and entertained the McCarthy-era "Red Scare", which compelled writers to snitch in order to save themselves from being blacklisted.

 

Perhaps the nature of government is to maintain ruling class privilege.

 

Kit is encouraged by his friends to do what many a Hollywood writer did to survive: write under a different name, go underground, hide out until the hysteria passes.

 

But Marlowe takes the martyr’s route, stands by his life’s work, punishment be damned. Though famously it is not the queen who gets to dole out his fate, rather it is a knife in the eye during a wild bar fight scene that snuffs this great voice.