By Gal Khalif, Second-Year Law
Edward (in Memoriam) is not just a play — it is a reckoning. A modern retelling of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, this adaptation, written by Noah Robinson, cuts with surgical precision into the rawest questions of identity, queerness, faith, and shame. Directed by Noah Robinson, Elizabeth Abbott and Lucy Marshall, the production is a masterclass in restraint and emotional force, their vision unflinching, and their efforts pays off in every moment of silence, light and rupture.
If Marlowe’s original showed a monarch undone by forbidden love, Edward (in Memoriam) asks what it means to live in the ruins of that love, what it means when a system demands your silence to survive.
The show opens under a blue shadow. Aron Jackson’s Edward starts with the haunting question, “If I was to become your king, would you bow to me?” The tone is intimate yet charged, immediately raising questions about power, legitimacy, and acceptance. The question lingers, setting the tone for a play that is as much about the struggle for acceptance as it is about monarchy.
Set in the year 2000, the religious imagery subtly punctuates the stage, a softly burning menorah at the rear reinforcing a sense of sanctity betrayed and used against the self. Edward later proclaims, “God doesn’t love — I am damned. I cannot fall into his love.” For any queer person raised in a religious system, or simply under unrelenting pressure to conform, this line resonates beyond the stage.
The performances across the board were outstanding, tightly restrained yet emotionally searing. A harrowing interrogation scene between Mortimer (Ruby Skilton-Robinson, commanding and ruthless) and Gaveston (Charlie Warwick, playing with feral restraint and tragic aloofness) stands out. His torment at being outed was painfully raw, clearly a man already halfway gone.
Under a single overhead bulb, they sit at opposite ends of the table, then the light goes out. When it returns, they have swapped sides. This repeated swapping happens multiple times, each time accompanied by a new audio clipping from the Etherton Report: raw testimonies of soldiers describing their maltreatment as LGBTQ+ personnel in the British armed forces. The play stops being purely fictional here, it becomes something more urgent and real, a haunting echo of contemporary injustice layered over historical tragedy.
Jemima Hurst’s Isabelle is no passive royal. Her homophobia is raw and personal, especially when she cries, “I’m sick of being unable to fix his perversions.” That word, perversions, stings deeply. It captures the pathologising of queerness, the fear that it spreads and corrupts. But beneath that anger is a profound grief: Isabelle’s pain as a woman trapped by duty and heartbreak. In her anguish, the play reveals how personal suffering can feed political violence, making her both victim and agent in the unfolding tragedy.
Sound design throughout resists closure. Music and ambience never fade gently; they cut off abruptly, as if someone, or something, is afraid of what might come next. This sharpness mirrors the characters’ inner lives, constantly policed, and interrupted, never allowing the space to fully express their vulnerability.
One motif that recurs throughout the play is the fox. It is spoken of obliquely, its presence lingering like a whisper or warning. While the play doesn’t explicitly say what the fox means, to me it feels like a metaphor for queerness, elusive, hunted, cloaked, and never quite named. The fox becomes a cipher for the coded, evasive language queer people have historically had to adapt to survive.
Where Marlowe offered grandeur and courtly intrigue, Edward (in Memoriam) gives us intimacy and brutal minimalism. The stage is sparse: a crafted wooden table, two chairs, a side table of props. Lighting becomes the directors' scalpel. At times, scenes are bathed in low, flickering lamplight; at others, flooded with surgical glare. The shifts are sudden and psychological, allowing no distance from the raw emotion onstage.
The play also injects moments of modernity and dark humour. Edward’s brief dance solo to Rhythm is a Dancer in the midst of the love triangle offers a striking contrast, a moment of human lightness amid emotional storms.
The symbolic finale plays with audio of a coronation ceremony. Mentions of sceptres and orbs echo through the space, reinforcing royal power and ceremony. But Edward onstage holds no crown — instead, he is once again alone, in the exact position he began the play under that bluey shadow, clutching a vial of poison and a pistol. These objects become symbols of a sovereignty without hope, a life marked by martyrdom and silence rather than triumph.
Edward (in Memoriam) is not simply a modern update of Marlowe; it is a howl for those history forgot, those history punished, and those still caught in its shadow. It forces us to listen, even when the music abruptly stops.
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