What did really happen to the Mad King, Daenerys Targaryen’s father, how are the Rebellion of Robert Bara­theon and his big love for Lyanna Stark intertwined, and who is the Knight of the Laughing Tree? The Mad King, a theatre perfor­mance which premiered in early August in Stratford-upon-Avon, is the latest contri­bution to the globally popular Game of Thrones franchise and provides answers to these and much more questions about the recent past of the storyworld we know from HBO’s Game of Thrones.
Carolyne Larrington and Theresa Specht couldn’t help but to rush to Stratford to see the prequel. In this ‘SFB on tour’ podcast episode, they share their impressions and major plot reve­lations. They also discuss how The Mad King expands the neo­medieval storyworld of GOT in a reason­able way and how its aesthetics are realized on stage – where you can’t have CGI animations. Finally, they talk about the possible frictions between the global popularity of the franchise and this new – geo­graphically and temporally limited – theatre perfor­mance (aka high culture) – and Carolyne reveals what part Shakespeare plays in all of this.

(00:00)
Intriducing the Guest

(01:11)
First impressions: The Mad King without any idea about Game of Thrones?

(06:30)
Getting everyone onto the same page: Worldbuilding

(13:22)
Diversity: The Cast

(14:16)
Amazing Puppetry instead of CGI dragons: visual aesthetics

(19:38)
‘I like not what he says’: Accents and archaisms

(22:21)
The prequel’s neomedieval storyworld

(26:49)
What happens? Major plot twists

(32:25)
From ‘sexposition’ to strong women: Elia Martell, Lyanna Stark, Ashara Dayne and Rhaella Targaryen

(46:37)
Global popularity v Shakespearian Stratford-upon-Avon?

Carolyne Larrington is Emerita Professor of medieval English literature at the University of Oxford and an Emerita Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford. She has published exten­sively on Old Norse medi­evalism and on George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and HBO’s Game of Thrones. Work on Game of Thrones includes Winter is Coming (Blooms­bury, 2015), All Men Must Die (Blooms­bury, 2021) and the edited collection Memory and Medi­evalism in George R. R. Martin and Game of Thrones (Blooms­bury, 2022). Together with Theresa Specht she is preparing the edited volume Prequels, Sequels and Spinoffs: Story­telling Logics in Neo­medieval Trans­media Fantasy Worlds which will be published in 2027 (Blooms­bury Academic).

See also Carloyne’s review of The Mad King in The Times Literary Supplement: “A Destiny Already Written: The Royal Shakespeare Company Takes on George R. R. Martin”, in: TLS, August 21, 2026, p. 24.