Stage-to-screen review: The Madness of George III

National Theatre At Home, which uses recordings made during the NT Live cinema screenings that have become very popular internationally in the last ten years, has been at the forefront of online theatre in lockdown, with whole shows being made available on YouTube for one week only. I only haven't mentioned them on this blog yet because, being predominantly shows from the NT itself, I'd already seen them live and reviewed them at the time*. In recent weeks the NT has expanded the project's horizons though, offering shows from other venues, and with it the opportunity to share in the fundraising drive. This week this means a trip to Nottingham Playhouse, and Adam Penford's production of The Madness of George III. Alan Bennett's enduring play looks at the institution of royalty in all its alienness and pomp, and the frail, sometimes banal humanity holding it up.

King George III (Mark Gatiss) is a comparatively subdued, frugal and businesslike monarch, whose values are shared by his dry and humourless but efficient Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger (Nicholas Bishop.)

But in 1786 the king succumbed to the second of three bouts of a mysterious physical illness which also affected his mental health. As doctors flock to his bedside to try and cure him with increasingly barbaric methods, in the hope of gaining the notoriety that would come with healing a king, Pitt's enemies see this as an opportunity to unseat him: If the louche and extravagant Prince of Wales (an ever-expanding Wilf Scolding) can be made Prince Regent, the balance of power will shift in Parliament as well, so it's in the Opposition's interests that the cure never be found.

The Madness of George III is a light touch of a play in its beginning and end, that dips into a very dark place in the middle as we're reminded of just how recent a science modern medicine really is; the team of doctors are just guessing their way around and causing the king even more distress (on a side note, the play was written in 1991, which predates the discovery that George III may have had arsenic poisoning caused by medicines, opening up the possibility that the doctors were the cause of the illness in the first place.) Even when specialist Dr Willis (Adrian Scarborough) is brought in, we're reminded of the fact that Georgian madhouses were not a good place to be, and even his well-intentioned efforts amount to torture. Meanwhile there are those around him who are happy to see the king's pomp brought down and take a sadistic pleasure in the man with all the power brought down.

Bennett is of course a man who once wrote a novella about Elizabeth II being humanised by a mobile library (and probably approves of her famous liking for tupperware) and probably the most famous way he does the same to this king is in his relationship with "Mrs King" (an understatedly warm Debra Gillett,) the forcible removal of the Queen from him possibly being the cruellest of the punishments meted out on him. Gatiss gives a moving and powerful central performance as George III but Penford's production ensures this isn't a one-man show and we see how much the story is about the world around him and its small and large unfairnesses; like Nadia Albina's cynical and opportunist Fitzroy ultimately getting advancement over Jack Holden's genuinely empathetic equerry Greville.

With this recording being made available while Black Lives Matter protests are still going on it's particularly hard not to feel that the production could have made an effort to be a bit more ethnically diverse; at least it does better in the gender-blind casting, with all three of the scene-stealing comic doctor roles, Baker (generally inept,) Warren (sadistic) and Pepys (obsessed with the king's stools) going to Stephanie Jacob, Louise Jameson and Amanda Hadigue respectively.

Robert Jones' design emphasises the grandeur of the palaces but the constantly-spinning sets also give a suggestion of the king's mental turmoil which feeds into the nightmarish feel of the central scenes. Penford's production is perhaps on the unfocused side - Bennett is rarely a writer without a message and it feels a bit hard to see what element he wants us to focus on - but the flipside is that we get a taste of everything he's throwing at the stage, and the play's rich possibilities.

The Madness of George III by Alan Bennett is available until the 18th of June on the National Theatre's YouTube channel.

Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

*I've previously reviewed all the remaining shows in the season including Small Island, Les Blancs and The Deep Blue Sea, plus two shows I recommend so highly I actually revisited both of them at the theatre: Michael Longhurst's 2016 Amadeus and my favourite show of last year, Nicholas Hytner's Bridge production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.