Nervous tics

A 2005 analysis of a clump of hair from King George III, England’s toppest of the top during the American Revolution, shows the regent probably suffered from chronic hepatic porphyria. That’s your doc’s way of saying he struggled with big-time bouts of madness and paranoia, ulcerated skin, spasms of the muscles and veins, fierce diarrhea and abdominal pain and a pesky tendency to discharge purple pee and poop. Against those odds, the war must’ve been a stroll through the vegetable aisle—as an abjectly terrified George wailed during one onset, “I’m not going out of my mind! My mind is going out of me!”

At least that’s what it says in Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III, third entry in The Old Globe Theatre’s 2010 Summer Shakespeare Festival. George has lots of lines like that, and Miles Anderson’s outstanding performance is a marker for this season’s shows. But this good cast fights a losing battle in a staging that can’t decide what it wants to be. It bobs and weaves in search of its style of choice, which is fine if you’re training for a fight. Problem is, you’re trying to watch a play, one that seldom lights long enough for you to take it in.

George stared his legacy in the face as the war ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1783. “They’ll lay it at my door,” he laments of the colonists’ victory—and Anderson’s superb delivery leads us to believe that George, to the grief of his wife, Queen Charlotte (an excellent Emily Swallow in a thinly drawn part), is on the verge of insanity. What follows has less connection with history than with your choice of spectacle. This is a period play amid political intrigue in the wake of George’s illness; a farce amid the absurd situations and the requisite collection of working doors on the set; a dance hall piece amid Bennett’s bathroom humor; a grand guignol amid George’s brutal medical treatments; a staged reading amid director Adrian Noble’s linear blocking; and an exorcism amid one doctor’s insistence that the king’s illnesses are in his head. (George recovers, but by now, it doesn’t matter.)

Festival artistic director Noble can point to a good King Lear (which he helmed), a spotty but fun The Taming of the Shrew, Ralph Funicello’s thoughtful sets and Deirdre Clancy’s first-rate costumes as the season moves into full swing. But as George quips near the end of Madness, “Style never immortalized anybody.” Ironically, amid rampant indecisiveness about that very element, he could’ve been talking about the show.   


This review is based on the performance of July 9. The Madness of George III runs through Sept. 24 at The Old Globe Theatre’s Lowell Davies Festival Theatre, 1363 Old Globe Way in Balboa Park. $29-$56. oldglobe.org. Write to marty@sdcitybeat.com and editor@sdcitybeat.com.