Don Carlos

The Royal Shakespeare Company brings Friedrich Schiller’s Don Carlos to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Rendered in modern dress and set within a stark setting whose walls aren’t walls at all but immense panes of frosted glass ? all the better for eavesdropping ? the RSC’s production of the 1787 work simmers with tension and intrigue. Schiller’s lucid articulation of public and private discord (the Inquisition, cronyism, the agony of unrequited passions) come dazzlingly to life via Gale Edwards’s taut direction and crystalline performances of the key players. John Woodvine portrays a formidable king and anguished father in the face of his son’s treachery while Josette Simon gorgeously captures the indignant innocence of the Queen. And the handsome and fittingly agitated Rupert Penry-Jones depicts Carlos in a realization that is at once awkward and agile, naive and canny ? effectively capturing and distilling the enormity of this tale of the 16th century Spanish court.