Mike Bartlett and Tim Pigott-Smith interview: ‘Images of the royal family are illegal on the tube!’

'I wrote a very bad play about Prince William when I was 23,’ sighs playwright Mike Bartlett, ‘in which he went off to the island of Iona to discover himself. It was very long and audiences should probably be very pleased that the computer it was on blew up.’

Alas, we’ll never know how good it was. But we do know about Bartlett’s second stab at the house of Windsor. ‘King Charles III’ is an epic tragedy about the rise and fall of the next king of England (ie, the current Prince Charles). It is three hours long, consciously modelled Shakespeare’s history plays and written in iambic pentameter. And it is utterly brilliant – the boldest, most absorbing new play of 2014.

‘I worried that it might work in what one might call Stephen Fry territory,’ says veteran actor Tim Pigott-Smith, aka Bartlett’s Charles, ‘where you have a funny first 15 minutes and then it ceased to be of value. But you just have to read a page to realise that’s not the case – you’re in a Shakespearean play.’

Premiering in April at the Almeida Theatre to a storm of praise, ‘King Charles III’ spins a massive, morally complex yarn in which Pigott-Smith’s achingly familiar Charles ascends to the throne and immediately clashes with the PM over a parliamentary attack on press freedom. It’s funny, it’s tragic and it pointedly asks whether we’ve really considered the full implications of monarchy. And the verse is genius – blowing the characters up to epic size, excusing them from banal chit-chat, allowing them to speak their inner feelings.


‘I’m not looking at Shakespeare and making in-jokes,’ says Bartlett. ‘It’s more that we can use all the tools in Shakespeare’s toolbox: soliloquies, ghosts, a storm…’

It’s a very complex portrait of Charles, who Pigott-Smith speaks rather admiringly of (‘I met him once and he was absolutely delightful’). But as the show transfers to the West End, do they consider the feelings of the real royals?

‘They’re public figures, and the fact I’ve written a play about them reflects that,’ says Bartlett. ‘I believe they would be advocates for free speech and my right to do this.’

I was curious about Palace reaction because tube posters for the show pixellated Charles’s face, which I’d assumed was to avoid offence. But the reality is weirder.

‘It’s not legally possible to put an image of a member of the royal family on the tube!’ exclaims Pigott-Smith, delightedly.

‘This is exactly what the play is about,’ says Bartlett. ‘Only in this country is there a family of people where we can’t put their face on a poster. I love the blurred poster because it represents everything this play is talking about.’

‘King Charles III’ is at Wyndham’s Theatre until Nov 29