(Ben Brantley’s article appeared in The New York Times, 11/1; via Pam Green.)
To sign, or not to sign. That is the question that hangs so urgently over the wavering title character of “King Charles III,” Mike Bartlett’s flat-out brilliant portrait of a monarchy in crisis, which blazed open on Sunday night at the Music Box Theater.
Any echoes you may infer regarding a certain Danish prince are entirely appropriate to this dazzlingly presumptuous drama, set in and around Buckingham Palace in a highly foreseeable future. True, as a product of the 20th century, the newly anointed King Charles — whom you probably know better as the current Prince of Wales — would seem to have more in common with T S. Eliot’s muddling J. Alfred Prufrock, who sadly recognized he was not “Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.”
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