Better What Is Don

The Sopranos is a fabulously good TV programme. Like all the best Mafia-based dramas it skilfully weaves the threads of family life - relations with mothers, children, husbands, wives - with "family" life - relations with mobsters, bruisers, victims, cops - to produce scene after scene of Wagnerian intensity(1). So it was interesting to find myself leaning forward on the edge of my seat, fearful of what might happen at any second, not while watching The Sopranos but rather a different sort of Don altogether, Friedrich Schiller's "Don Carlos". Like The Sopranos, Don Carlos is an elegant dissection of the true limits of violent power and the effect it has on those who wield it. Again, like the Sopranos, the lens through which this dissection is viewed is the family.

Though set during the reign of Phillip II of Spain (a few years prior to the time of the Armada, though that gets an anachronistic mention) like so much good drama the play begins with the stuff of soap opera(2) - a cold and unloving patriarch, a milksop son with a near-incestuous love for the father's young bride - but then does what soap opera so conspicuously fails to do by moving on to offer a critique of power and of lovelessness, whilst also offering up a call for the freedom to think and speak. In this production by Michael Grandage, the play proves to be beautifully constructed, guiding us safely over a web of deception and counter-deception, of love offered and refused, of power unused and abused, at whose centre we find, not the all-powerful and tyrannical King we had expected, but instead a lonely and uncertain monarch (brilliantly portrayed by Derek Jacobi, who deploys the good-old-fashioned Shakespearean roar with astonishing discrimination and effect) over whom looms instead the true temporal power of Phillip's time, the Church, in the form of the genuinely chilling Grand Inquisitor who believes "men - souls - are numbers - no more than that" and will see them dragged to paradise only through the Inquisition's flames. Appearing only during the play's final act (and yes, you could say that no one was expecting the Spanish Inquisition), the Cardinal not only chills the blood but also arrives at the peak of an astonishing sequence of peripeteia which leaves the audience desperately believing that the young Don (again, excellently played by Richard Coyle(3)) and his love, the Queen (the equally excellent Claire Price) will escape, even when it is sure that they are doomed. With a uniformly good cast, a lithe translation and a set of elegant simplicity this was fabulous and intelligent drama.

(1) thankfully without any Wagnerian music, anti-semitism or Idiot's Guide to Schopenhauer intellectual posturing.
(2) and for a rant about soap opera see In A Lather.
(3) previously in my good books for his delivery of the lines "It would be like a breast octopus" and "I've got the key to paradise but I've got too many legs" as Jeff in episodes of Coupling.