Theatre in Review: Tamburlaine, Parts I and II

Drums pound, armies assemble, and blood comes raining down — quite literally — in Michael Boyd’s staging of Tamburlaine, Christopher Marlowe’s epic melodrama of conquest and revenge. It has been nearly 60 years since Anthony Quayle stepped onto the stage of the Winter Garden Theatre as Marlowe’s savage, world-dominating protagonist, and it is easy to see why we have had no Tamburlaine since then: the text features convoluted narrative and scene upon scene of pillage and slaughter, and a decent staging requires a stunningly gifted leading man, a large company of actors capable of pounding Marlowe’s words into plausible weapons of war, and a director who can shape the sprawling narrative into a coherent evening. All three requirements are met, and then some, in this extraordinary production. The title character finds an ideal impersonator in John Douglas Thompson. It has become commonplace to refer to Thompson as one of our finest classical actors; with this performance, it’s time to remove the qualifier. Thompson uses his enormous stage presence to create an implacable warrior who destroys entire nations without once looking back. Dismissed early on as “that sturdy Scythian thief,” he applies a cold logic of mass murder to the pursuit of “the sweet fruition of an earthly crown;” next to him, Shakespeare’s Richard III is the shy, retiring type. Whether casually breaking the neck of an impertinent servant; removing a bloody, poisoned crown from the head of a rival; or using the back of a prostrate rival as a stepping stone, he is every inch “the scourge and wrath of God, the only fear and terror of the world.”