The New York Times - Highly Recommended
"...Directed with fiery wit and rushing momentum by Rupert Goold, this London import, which won last year's Olivier Award for best play, is a work that takes all manner of audacious license, poetic and otherwise. It's one thing to portray the current members of the House of Windsor, on whom it is always open season for writers of every stripe, in a mainstream drama. (A fictional version of Queen Elizabeth II showed up on Broadway earlier this year — and picked up a Tony for the actress playing her, Helen Mirren — in the form of Peter Morgan's "The Audience." But that play was highly respectful to Her Majesty and, while necessarily speculative, rooted in known fact.)"
Associated Press - Highly Recommended
"...A splendid Tim Pigott-Smith reprises his role as King Charles III, which he played in London, leading it to a best new play win at the Olivier Awards. He fiddles with his cuffs like Charles and nervously turns his signet ring, but never falls into mimicry. His descent into madness is Lear-lite, and Pigott-Smith is up to the task."
Hollywood Reporter - Recommended
"...Morgan's play is a reassuring endorsement of the constancy of the British sovereign, while Bartlett offers a fiendishly clever and yet serious questioning of the role of royalty in the 21st century. And lest anyone fear that this is all too English for American tastes, a concluding note about the "pretty plastic picture" of a monarchy with no meaning would seem eminently relatable to a culture that's content to anoint Kanye and Kim as its king and queen. The play makes savvy points about the supreme power of column inches and the value placed on the rule of popularity above all else."
Chicago Tribune - Recommended
"...Bartlett's play, which opened at the Music Box Theatre in New York the other day and imagines what might happen after Elizabeth dies and her son becomes King Charles III, suggests to me the level of nervousness felt by the British as the beloved queen ages. There is the worry - and, in some circles, the hope - that maybe it is the queen who holds it all together. That is the premise, really, of Bartlett's quite brilliant play, which offers an entrancing if apocalyptically chaotic vision of the royal follies yet to come, once Elizabeth is gone."
Time Out New York - Highly Recommended
"...Bartlett's otherwise bravura text also might have stalled if Rupert Goold's staging weren't so passionately acted and gorgeously designed. Scouring his soul on a red-carpeted dais surrounded by a medieval stone wall, Pigott-Smith wrings every drop of pathos and pride from his speeches as a monarch unthroned by high ideals. Galvanizing and astonishing, King Charles III doesn't just send you back to Shakespeare's histories; it makes you want to write one."
Huffington Post - Highly Recommended
"...Playwright Mike Bartlett's conceit is to give us a fanciful forecast of the next chapter of the House of Windsor, devised and written in the best Shakespearean style. Bartlett--working with visionary director Rupert Goold, who originated this production at the Almeida Theatre--has made a smashingly good job of it, and King Charles III is smashingly good. Here is a new Shakespearean tragedy, and one at which you won't likely be dozing off."
