The Mad King - A write-up
"The people love me," says Aerys, in moments of delusion, just moments before he goads his son Rhaegar, who has been plotting against him all tourney, into slicing him through the gut for his crown. "Love," he mutters elsewhere in the play. "Love is what is important."
The Mad King is a stage play of two halves. Our first takes us to the haunted seat of Harrenhal, for a great tourney (this, I joking call the 'fuck about' half). There, this generation of the Stark family - Lyanna, Brandon, Eddard ('Call me Ned'), and Benjen - all seek to find themselves, searching for love, duty, purpose, providence, all and none, while Rhaegar, his wife Elia, and his kingsguard try to sow seeds of rebellion against Aerys - a plot that is foiled when the Mad King arrives on stage, dishevelled and half-naked, to disrupt the plot in motion. It is about self-discovery, self-actualisation, and yes - the conflict between Love and Duty.
(The play desperately wants you to know this. In fact, the play wants you to know it is The Love And Duty play, in fact, almost as much as it wants you to know it is The Fate and Prophecy play, which is a little bit too much).
Still, while the script is a bit ham-fisted and perhaps overly expository at times, this first half is still very fun. The whole play is a spectacle, but this half is full of dance scenes, jousts, secret identities issues of the heart - a Shakespearan comedy more so than tragedy. For instance, Brandon banters about fathering a bastard Snow as he chases Ashara - then throws Ned at her, against his will, to dance with her so to wingman, leading to a really interesting discussion of what love is - is it a feeling, a duty, a promise, a form of freedom? - between two characters who feel like they're total opposites (Ned and Ashara's interactions, while only having a crumb of romantic affection on Ned's behalf, in that brief moment where he thinks she might be interested in him not just Brandon, are still honestly a highlight for how much the characters contrast a differ). We also get Rhaegar showing Lyanna the steps of an unfamiliar dance by talking her through swordplay techniques and moves, and see Benjen excitedly try and remember the sigils and shields of the squires who wronged Howland - the squires that will later be defeated by the Knight of the Laughing Tree. It's a great first half, but its main missteps are through choosing to prioritise the joust of Rhaegar versus Brandon, Arthur, and Barristan, over the Knight of the Laughing Tree, leading to the revelation that it is Lyanna to be somewhat anticlimactic. Still, it's fun - with an undercurrent of darkness, especially once the Mad Knig himself, Aerys Targaryen arrives on stage, and giving us scenes where Rhaegar helps him trim his nails and his hair - before telling Rhaegar that he could stab him here, right now, in this moment, and become king, and we see Rhaegar grapple with the idea that he is not the promised prince, that he's mad as his father in his own way, and see him lost without prophecy to tether him.
The second half though, is almost a different beast. Not in terms of technical wizardry - the puppetry, it should be said, is absolutely fantastic in this play, and deserves all the acclaim and praise for how elaborate and ambitious it is, and that only gets even better in this half. If the first half is a journey of self-discovery, the second half is the undoing of it - the exploration of those consequences. Enter the Rebellion: beginning, the moment that Rickard Stark, at the feet of the iron throne, demands his son freed by a trial by combat - only to face the enemy of wildfire. The second half is darker, and moves at a gripping, breakneck pace. We see interludes of Robert Baratheon swinging through swathes of soldiers before cutting back to the Iron Throne, the scenes getting increasingly more desperate, the bloody cost of war being driven home. We see our characters in desperate positions. Elia, who is depicted as an ambitious political mind who is set on being queen who co-masterminded the usurpation plot with Rhaegar in act one, is entrapped in chains - a stroke of the Mad King's madness, who even while clapped in irons finds some way to plot and scheme and attempt to manouvre her way back to power, almost as if she can't bear to do anything else. We see Lyanna, gripped by grief and guilt when she learns of her father and brother's deaths after running away with Rhaegar for love, proclaim she has no home to return to - not Winterfell, not without her brother and father, and certainly not Storm's End either - and in a moment of grief and guilt as a red comet shines over the sky, falls deep into the thrall of dreams and prophecy, gripping onto this idea that their deaths have meaning and weight if they're for some greater purpose, if they're able to conceive a child who'd be the subject of the song of ice and fire.
Rhaegar, interestingly, almost resists this - he can't stand the idea of prophecy, it's almost a prison for him, to run away with Lyanna was to abandon everything for a brief, beautiful moment (and now he has to return to it, again). For all these character moments, though, I think the absolute climax of this was the Battle of the Trident, which was an absolutely spectacular piece of theatre. Beginning with Catelyn singing Mother Mercy, as other female characters join in with the Hymn to the Mother from the balcony, we see the lights flash, then dim in total darkness, as we see how the scene changes and soldiers have been cut down, we see characters being torn apart, we see the momentum and the strength of Robert Bartheon, and we get this beautifully climactic joust between him and Rhaegar. Interestingly, Rhaegar is trying to get Robert to yield throughout - he wants Robert to bend the knee, for both sides to join together nd turn against Aerys, but Robert refuses, and as Rhaegar gets a vision of a great black dragon - a dragon that turns, to face Lyanna on the other side of the stage - it is here where Robert strikes. It is a breath-taking moment of theatre. The music, the sound design, the lighting, the choreography, the way parts of the fight looked as if they were underwater inside the trident, the way slow-motion acting was used to really emphasise different parts of the scene, was just simply brilliant.
(And also, it meant that when the dragon puppet's main wiring got stuck - a dragon puppet with 20ft wings that requires 6 people to hold it, whose wings were as wide as the stage, it was HUGE - and the performance had to be paused for thirty minutes, it meant that I wasn't even really all that mad about it. I had just seen some breathtaking performances. Quite frankly, it was really fucking funny.)
Anyway, the momentum died a liiiittle bit after the dragon did (lol, rip, and rip to the stage tech people who had to get out a giant ladder to unstick the dragon) - but we still had some great moments. Aerys refusing to believe that Rhaegar had died, for instance. Or Lyanna thinking that the kingsguard, in the throes of fever, were her brothers - Benjen, Ned, and the deceased Brandon. We had Ashara and Ned meet again, Ashara despondent with grief. And yes, we got the Tower of Joy fight - though, I'll be honest, Arthur Dayne's light-up lightsaber-esque sword that could have been £30 from Toys R Us really took me out of it. The show had a little bit of a problem where it could have ended two or three scenes earlier - honestly, I'd be tempted to call it at the Tower of Joy after Lyanna died. But honestly, this half of theatre was just so excellent that I couldn't bring myself to quibble. If nothing else, the spectacle should be admired, and the puppetry in particular needs to be highlighted as something that brought jousts and fights alive and added a spectacular element.
Things I also need to highlight - the women in this play were fucking excellent. Elia as a political schemer who is pragmatic, even remarking that in Aerys' shoes she'd also take her children hostage, but also not someone entirely cold or unfeeling, is, was an entirely unexpected but beautiful take on her character that I think makes her distinct from many others (indeed, a friend mentioned afterwards - we already have two characters who have unrequited feelings for Rhaegar in Jon Conn and Cersei, and we don't need a third). Ashara is fun, a necessary and refreshing take on love, who is positioned as a true romantic who wears her heart on her sleeve and loves openly but truly, but also adds a good foil to Ned (and a parallel to Lyanna, in her own way). Catelyn, who is shown only in a few scenes in Act 2, first on her wedding night, then pregnant speaking with Benjen, and third at Winterfell in the all, is absolutely phenomenal in all three, in part down to excellent acting.
But the standout here for me is Rhaella. Gods, Rhaella. Rather than a sad, passive wife, we got a woman as mad as Aerys - who showed two Kingsguard and Ashara Dayne her burns from Summerhall and her wounds from Aerys, stripped in daylight to do so, before declaring that HE is afraid of her, the dragon - rather than vice versa, as a means of trying to gain narrative control over her abuse. When the Kingsguard come to take her to her husband's chamber on the night of the red comet, Ashara and Elia (?) initially try to defend her, but eventually she acquieses and goes, declaring she would not bear a promised prince, but a vengeful daughter who would waken dragons and bring the kingdom to ruin (!!!!!). Like, fucking hell. What a scene stealer in less than 15 minutes! Absolutely phenomenal stuff. I do think all the women have different views on their womanhood, their roles in peace vs. war, that feels refreshing
In truth, Lyanna is the only hesitation I have, and I think this issue is definitely not with the actor, who did a fantastic job, but seems to be an extrinsic tension in the source text that the play's writing struggled to get around. How does a girl who wants to be a knight pivot to then running away with a man who got her pregnant - thus losing the ability to become a knight? How do you make sense of that dramatic swerve? I don't think the play quite managed to fully explain that character transformation - it fumbled with Lyanna at times, who felt a little generic for it, and I was saddened a little to see that. All that said, I do actually really like her falling into prophecy through grief. I do think it makes sense for someone so young to wonder about the meaning and purpose of her life and try and grab onto this 'great destiny' element, especially after her brother and father dies, which is when she really doubles down on it and becomes obsessive. In this respect, I think she and Rhaegar bring out the worst in each other - they abandon all duty, they drag each other into the mire of prophecy - and I don't think this play made either of them look particularly good (thank god!!!). Notably, while prophecy was a big element in why the two were drawn to each other, they clearly loved each other and ran away for that purpose, not to 'save the world' or any attempt at making what is fundamentally a selfish act become a selfless one. We instead caught them both in a moment of grief and crisis in the second half - one selfishly caused, perhaps. But the play did not apologise for them and I am really thankful for that. I knew the play was going to give us romantic Rhaelya, but it was a deeply troubled rendition involving two people having an identity crisis and suddenly finding themselves so deeply out of their depth. It did not mention Lyanna's age at all - a misstep, but one I thought would be a fair compromise. All in all, it's a complicated picture but I don't think it fully sold me on Lyanna's characterisation and its evolution throughout the play.
The overall picture, however, is broadly positive. I was enjoying the first act, even if I had issues; I was excited by the second, even if it lost steam, and in general the spectacle of the whole thing was somewhat magical. It was an exciting time, I had fun, I'm glad I went.
