KING CHARLES III's Mike Bartlett on Making Today's Royals Shakespearean Characters

Until his Olivier-winning King Charles III came to Broadway, British playwright Mike Bartlett was best known on these shores for COCK, his relationship drama that played Off-Broadway in 2012; noted for its suggestive name and its staging in a circular ring with audiences seated as though they were at a cockfighting arena.

While he had never written in Shakespearean blank verse before, he found that writing about a future time after the passing of Elizabeth II, when the now Prince Charles assumes the throne, necessitated something more stylized than contemporary prose in order to avoid the feeling of pseudo-journalistic reality drama.

"I realized that the best way to tell the story was to make Charles a Shakespearean tragic hero," he said in a New York Times interview. "The idea that he's waited all his life to do a job that he would have for only a short while felt really Shakespearean."

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The Queen is dead. After a lifetime of waiting, Prince Charles ascends the throne. A future of power lies before him...but how to rule? Winner of the 2015 Olivier Award for Best New Play,King Charles IIIis the "bracingly provocative and outrageously entertaining" (The Independent) drama of political intrigue by Mike Bartlett that comes to Broadway following a sensational West End run. Directed byRupert Goold and deemed "the most insightful and engrossing new history play in decades" by Ben Brantley of The New York Times, this "bold and brilliant" (The Times of London) production explores the people underneath the crowns, the unwritten rules of Britain's democracy and the conscience of its most famous family.

Photo: Walter McBride