The concept was simple enough. Michael Bartlett, an Oxford-born playwright with a knack for national critique, decided to craft a Shakespearean pastiche. The language would be in blank verse. It would be produced in 2014 by his old collaborators at the Almeida Theatre in Islington. The premise? Queen Elizabeth II is dead, and her son Charles has finally become King.
The result of this theatrical exercise — aptly titled “King Charles III” — ran for months, becoming a critical and commercial success almost instantly both in London and New York City. Both the original Olivier-award winning production and its BAFTA-nominated film version received immense acclaim, as well as incisive ire from those who believe the play was distasteful, unpatriotic, or just simply bad.
Bartlett’s drama is, at the very least, fascinating, and one can expect a renaissance of pop-up productions across the world as King Charles eases into his monarchical role. But what Bartlett got right — and what he got wrong — about the state of British politics at the time of Charles’s ascension is the starting point for a conversation we are finally ready to have. Bartlett’s “future history” is a reflection of his view of where British politics was going in 2014. Now, we can see if he saw true.
“King Charles III”, for all its fantastical elements — Diana’s ghost appears on more than one occasion — does get some things fundamentally correct about the circumstances surrounding Her Majesty’s death. Famously, the play has a subplot in which Prince Harry chooses to leave the Royal Family due to excessive media scrutiny toward his romantic partner, a commoner who, in the film version,is of African descent. Bartlett’s Jessica Edwards is not quite the same as the real Duchess of Sussex — Edwards is a London-born republican, Markle an Angeleno with democratic history — but the specificity to which he predicted royal upheaval years before it came to light is startling.
For a subtle but perhaps more prescient example, Bartlett correctly predicted that the Tory government that had been elected only a cycle prior to the play’s premiere would improve out of a hung parliament and be in power when the Queen passed on. Given the play premiered in 2014, one could argue that Bartlett was writing as if the Queen had simply died then. But the fact that he does not mention the Liberal Democrats at all suggests a strength and security of the Conservative Party within the play that was a bit beyond the reality of the Cameron-Clegg coalition. Perhaps that strength was somewhat predictable, but it’s still interesting that it was predicted at all.
Most importantly, however, the themes that Bartlett was most interested in and worried about when crafting the play, ended up only increasing in importance after its premiere. “King Charles III” is primarily based on two problems in early 2010s British politics: concern over Charles’s repeated public political proclamations in an age when monarchical neutrality is the expectation and fears of information safety after the News International phone hacking scandals that started in the mid 2000s. The central drama of the play is Charles refusing to give royal assent to a bill meant to get back at the press after the hacking scandals.
Both of these two themes have persisted into the present-day. Pundits and journalists are still wary of how Charles’ outspoken track record, even evoking a response from Charles himself, and fears around public digital safety did grow ever higher. After the Cambridge Analytica Files were released in 2018, and the Pegasus Project was released in 2021, we now live in a world in which fears around our digital safety are now a part of everyday life, a part that the government tries again and again to affect.
What Bartlett gets wrong, however, is an understanding of how larger society, both domestically and internationally, responded to the shift in monarchical status. More importantly, though, Bartlett’s preliminary analysis inadequately accounts for both the public opinion of the monarchy immediately after Queen Elizabeth’s death and, to a lesser extent, how the rise of sovereigntist movements would affect the conversation.
In the play, the death of Queen Elizabeth II is a uniquely solemn affair that very quickly turns into celebration, though it is not entirely clear whether this celebration is for the Queen’s memory or for Charles’s effective kingship. This heavily contrasts with events that occur later in the play, in which anti-monarchist protesters, enraged by the fictional king’s turns towards monarchal reestablishment — by, for instance, refusing to give royal assent to laws and sacking parliament — spark a public indignation against both Charles in particular and the monarchy in general. The concept of republicanism is introduced relatively early in the play, but the anti-monarchist protester as a recognizable archetype does not exist in the play until the King has already caused a constitutional crisis.
This is not what has happened in the past week. Rather than waiting well into King Charles’ reign, demonstrators almost immediately began opposing both King Charles in particular and the monarchy in general. While news outlets have been quick to point out that anti-monarchists are in the minority — a fact supported by the relevant data, though made far more complex during the Queen’s mourning period as death tends to improve approval — the fact that these protests are happening at all, especially to the extent that non-British news sources are covering them, presents a fundamentally different reality than Bartlett’s “future history play.” In the play, Charles has to prove himself a tyrant before he is publicly protested; the present-day public does not seem content to wait.
Furthermore, Bartlett’s play does not account for the rise of sovereigntist movements within the UK. The play is ironically correct in its assumption that the Liberal Democrats no longer really matter, but Bartlett did not predict — and, arguably, could not have predicted — the rise of the Scottish National Party and of independence sentiment in recent years. As the Supreme Court handles the legality of a second Scottish referendum and the continuing issues around Brexit and the Irish border, some have argued that Charles may preside over the break up of the union itself. Such a possibility does not exist in Bartlett’s work; when William eventually becomes King at the end of the play, he becomes King of the whole United Kingdom, not a fractured one.
Bartlett’s play gets a lot right, though not necessarily in the right order. His play’s concerns around party politics, monarchical neutrality, and digital safety ended up being more than justified as the United Kingdom. It is in the specifics, however, that things get more complicated. Issues surrounding republicanism within the United Kingdom and sovereignty within Scotland ended up being at least a bit more important than Bartlett originally recognized. For these issues, Bartlett has nothing to say. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Image by Ferdinand Stöhr licensed under the Unsplash License.
