Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan era play Tamburlaine has been showing in New York. Based loosely on facts, Tamburlaine is a 14th century warrior – a self made man who rises from farmhand to bloodthirsty conqueror of much of Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. In this play he becomes a timeless anti-hero caught in a spiral of endless wars that still resonate in these regions.
The superb actor John Douglas Thompson who plays Tamburlaine with huge energy and charisma is on stage for almost all of the four hours of this abridged version of Marlowe's two plays, Parts 1 & 2. At a separate event Thompson described how he prepared for this exacting part. The main challenge was how to make Tamburlaine likeable or at least fascinating to the audience for some of the time. How to at first seduce them, then shock them by their complicity with evil. And he succeeds in doing this. Thompson researched recent violent leaders such as Idi Amin, the heads of South American drug cartels, and fictional anti-heroes in films by director Quentin Tarantino who he says is the Christopher Marlowe of our time. Both Marlowe and Tarantino, he said, depict our fascination with the power, charisma, energy, and fearlessness of the anti-hero, and the loyalty culture they build around them, despite the evil they propagate.
Tamburlaine was written at the beginning of a time of daring global exploration and competition for resources. As the New York Review of Books explains:
“Tamburlaine was in the first place a history lesson, whatever its reliability: a synopsis for London theatergoers of earthshaking events not all that distant in place or time. The historic Tamerlane died at the beginning of the fifteenth century, after carving out an immense empire stretching from Turkey to India and embracing large swaths of Mesopotamia, Persia, and central Asia. An inevitable eerie accompaniment to a modern production is the sense of a war begun long ago that continues to unfold. The geographic names with which the text is dotted—Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Gaza, Arabia, the Red Sea—provide their own form of commentary without any directorial intervention. The history of the present moment becomes a co-author, adding its own expressive footnotes. As death closes in, Tamburlaine studies a map of the world, tracing his victories and measuring how far he fell short: “And shall I die, and this unconquered?” As he reels off the place names, the contemporary spectator is apt to feel that map itself closing in, as distant places and events—the burning of cities, the massacring of populations—begin to intrude on the theatrical space. Tamburlaine dies, but the play remains unresolved, like an open wound.”