Let me generalise: theatre people are luvvies.

When invited to speak about their craft, they tend to speak about themselves. When asked to consider the merits of a play, they will do so by invoking its impact not on the audience, but on themselves. And if required to mention a colleague, it is done with such abject reverence that one might suspect a Messiah had crept into the dramatis personae.

In time, there will be an accredited apprenticeship course to handle theatre Luvvies. In its absence, I take refuge in that ancient axiom, Numquam Actori Microphonum Des: never give an actor a microphone.

You will never get it back.

***

I am in Stratford-upon-Avon for a three-day theatre festival run by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC).

Each day, we get various talks pertaining to the play that same evening. I’ve been here in previous years. Typically, it’s all Shakespeare and maybe a smidge of Marlowe. But in 2026, as the RSC emerges from a Covid stupor and realises the coffers are empty, the plays come from The Bard, Doctor Chekhov and a freshly-written prequel to George R. R. Martin’s magnum opus.

How about that: Game of Thrones in the theatre for the first time – here on the iambic Avon?

I am a Thronic virgin, having consumed neither HBO eight-season, 73-episode blockbuster (2011-2019) nor the books on which it is based. But this does not mean I am naive to the demands of dynasty. Those of us who have lived through the Court of Diana succeeded by the Markle Menagerie, know how uneasy lie the heads that crave the crown.

What, then, would I make of a four-hour treatment of a ‘Game of Thrones’ backstory, subtitled ‘The Mad King’? And would it tempt me to HBO, or kill the appetite stone dead?

The tickets were bought, and I released myself into three lectures for a briefing from luvvies.

Alas, my preparations for disenchantment went to waste.

The theatre folk did a great job teeing up the work. And the show was immense. In the idiom of Lord Robert Baratheon, the whole affair was ‘absolutely fucking amazing’.

***

Game of Thrones deals in essentials.

Women give birth not to babes, but to future kings and queens; battles are whipped up not for trifles, but for the soul of the realm; winters last for years and they crush, crush, crush the weary.

How might such a story, famous on page and pixel, be freshly told for the stage?

This question was pondered for over a decade by George R. R. Martin, who chose the RSC as collaborators because of the inspiration he drew from Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies, most notably ‘The Scottish Play’. [In Luvvie-Land they never say ‘Macbeth’].

The first round of stage development considered the stage itself.

It was decided that the Game of Thrones story must live beyond the proscenium arch. The result is an immersive theatre space in which the theatre becomes a domed hot-cross bun. Thirty-six players occupy that cross. We, the audience, are the dough to make it complete.

‘Our first sketches were so immersive’, said Kurt Moores, a cockney RSC technical and production pro, ‘that there was no room for the audience at all’. I enjoyed his tattooed, relaxed demeanour and dry wit.

Players parade in 90° and 180° lines about the cross, often with multiple interactions occurring simultaneously. This places the audience on high-surveillance alert. I paid £110 to become a keeper at the watchtower.

***

The famously violent heave-hos of HBO’s Game of Thrones needed theatrical translation.

What would be the approach to blood for the stage? The developers decided that literal death and gore might seem like a lazy, cynical cash-grab. They sought to tell their story not as a simulacrum of television, but in the theatre’s own language.

The solution is the production’s defining inspiration. The epic warring and throat-slitting of the fantasy plot is brought to life by way of puppets.

Puppeteers [‘movement makers’, don’t you know] ply the art of expressing emotion, decoupled from the human form. Puppetry needs the audience’s imagination to complete the intention.

The UK has developed world-class expertise in puppetry since the success of War Horse (2007); three from that show are on the Game of Thrones team, and came to our Summer School the afternoon of the performance, to reveal their secrets.

To witness their work is to bow before a king.

On stage, we see puppet-ed ravens, dogs, horses and dragons come to epic life. The puppet forms the skeleton, the puppeteers become the muscles and breath; and the audience makes it real. The effect, no matter where you are seated, is a thing of such wonder that one weeps on the inside.

***

Many times the actors and directors reassured us that Game of Thrones: The Mad King works perfectly well for those who know nothing of the franchise.

This is true, but – having now seen the staging – I also have no clue what’s going on.

The dialogue is in declarative verse, choked by the knotweed of plot throughout. I left clear on who loves whom, and on who wins the Iron Throne in the end. But I have little idea as to why they are fighting, which clans are which, why we were here and how exactly winter lasts so long.

In the end, I found it did not matter.

Michael Schaeffer, who plays the mad King Aerys himself, spoke of his first reaction to the script.

“I hated it’, he said, to the consternation of his colleagues. ‘Too many names, too many details. I had no clue what to make of my character – and decided that was the best starting point’.

That evening, Schaeffer became my favourite, most evolved and understandable soul of all. In a memorable passage, delirious with authority, the King orders the forests of the realm alight in order to banish winter, and burns one of his most loyal courtiers for telling him the truth.

In real life, the actor is an angular, lean, middle-aged man. On stage, he became Lear-like: diminutive, ugly and grasping.

As I watched, his anguish burned into me; a shadow on my heart.

Beware, the world-class luvvies. There be magic there.

***