King John & Henry VIII (26 page)

Even the temptation scene (Act 3 Scene 3) was played in a black comic fashion, with the staccato climax delivered in a rapid-fire exchange that, although it seemed to lack a final “boom-boom,” nevertheless elicited hearty laughter from the audience. Yet this scene has historically been treated with gravity. In a contemporary review of Macready’s 1842 Drury Lane production, for example,
The Times
recorded Macready’s own interpretation of John in this scene in the following terms:

The contrast with Doran’s version of the temptation scene is striking, prompting us to contemplate whether it is modern embarrassment at the potential sentimentality of the scene that makes a contemporary director prefer a black comic version. Given that, in the Doran production, Guy Henry’s John was a comic “nervy twerp”
⁵⁸
from the outset, however, it is perhaps hard to imagine how it could have been played otherwise. Indeed, while the strongly satirical
aspects of the Doran production were generally well recognized and received, nevertheless certain of the comic aspects appeared to generate a degree of irritation in several reviewers. John Peter, in the
Sunday Times
, panned the production as “medieval England as Fawlty Towers,”
⁵⁹
while Michael Billington, in a generally favorable review for the
Guardian
, was forced to admit that the production had “occasional hints of Woody Allen in medieval England.”
⁶⁰

To return to the contemporary political relevance of the Doran production, however, it seemed that this was largely highlighted by bringing out features already present in the text. Consider, for example, Act 4 Scene 3, where John yields up to Pandulph “The circle of [his] glory” and then reveals the other side of the deal—“Now keep your holy word: go meet the French.” In Doran’s production, this was done with sufficient bathetic contrast between John the prostrate penitent, stripped to a loincloth, and John the brusque wheeler-dealer, suddenly dropping the mask, as to emphasize strongly the cynicism involved and evoke laughter from the audience. The production also introduced other gentle political nuances. For example, Pandulph, after his insinuating persuasion of the dauphin to invade England is left alone on stage momentarily and, finding himself alone, he very slowly bursts into deep gales of laughter, revealing the pleasure he is taking in manipulating the political process.

While Doran’s success in treating the play as a political satire may have been largely due to the readiness of an early-twenty-first-century, spin-doctoring-weary British audience to accept such an interpretation, the fact that much of the language of the play draws on contemporary political pamphlets, as discussed earlier, is key to understanding its modern political appeal: Shakespeare built the essence of political language—its equivocating, declamatory, chop-logic nature—into the text by drawing on actual political propaganda documents of his day, the essential features of which are still present in political discourse of the present day. More generally, the play’s episodic structure allows for a series of set debates, which are also redolent of the political process. In several of these, however, notably the debate before the walls of Angiers (Act 2 Scene 1), the process is constantly interrupted by the Bastard’s series of asides and punctuated by his cynical soliloquizing (“Mad world, mad kings,
mad composition!”). This serves to undercut the political gravity and reveal it as political posturing. To make matters worse, the Bastard’s own entrance into the political arena—his plan to combine the English and French forces against the “peevish town” of Angiers—is accompanied with a certain pride (“Smacks it not something of the policy?”), leading us still to harbor suspicions about his sincerity even at the end of the play. The implication, then, is that Shakespeare’s text, in its structure, characterization, and language, presents an ironic, detached, and to a large extent cynical view of the political process. The relative success of Doran’s 2001 production of the play as a political satire may therefore be due to the rediscovery of this facet of the play.

Given its Stratford track record, one might have expected to have waited at least another decade for another RSC production, but the RSC Complete Works Festival in 2006 occasioned its revival by Josie Rourke just five years later at the Swan. Rourke’s set was sparse, with two pivoting doors being the main prop, and some attempt at historical accuracy in the costumes. The production received mixed reviews, and seemed to suffer from comparison with the relatively recent Doran production. Rhoda Koenig, in the
Independent
, for example, argued that “The part of John, who is mean and craven, is not one of Shakespeare’s best, and one might think Richard McCabe’s plodding interpretation sufficient had one not seen Guy Henry’s mesmerising, creepily whimsical monarch. This actor is indecisive when he should suggest a deeper defect, and when he tries to be fierce, he does it with popped eyes or arms akimbo.”
⁶¹
Similarly, Tamsin Greig, as Constance, had to live up to Kelly Hunter’s impressive interpretation of five years earlier, although her understated performance was by and large favorably received. Joseph Millson’s Bastard was generally perceived as powerful and mesmerizing, although Rhoda Koenig, while acknowledging the “impishness and sex appeal” of Millson’s interpretation, goes on to lament that “this actor, who seems to have attended the Douglas Fairbanks School for Bastards, becomes tiresome halfway through his first appearance, with his antic mannerisms. In the second half, the Bastard does act more normally, but before that he is exhausting rather than enlivening.”
⁶²

Although Rourke’s production did not seem to resonate so strongly with the public concerning the politics of spin-doctoring as the Doran production had—perhaps because Doran’s production had taken place at a period of significant change in British politics, toward the end of the first “New Labour” administration—the political relevance was still noted, with Dominic Cavendish in the
Daily Telegraph
observing, “The parallels with our own disordered times are plain for all to see—and it’s hard not to think of the carnage in the Middle East on hearing Tamsin Greig’s beautifully understated Constance deliver her heartbroken lament for her lost Arthur (Ralph Davis) in the play’s most heart-piercing speech: ‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child.’ ”
⁶³

Overall, the stage history of the RSC productions of
King John
reveals the fundamental problems in producing the play for a modern audience. In particular, while an Elizabethan audience would have had the Tudor image of the historical King John firmly planted in their mind, the modern popular image of King John does not quite accord with the image presented in the play. This, together with the large chunks of rhetorical and declamatory language, which do not particularly suit modern, realistic acting styles, has tempted some directors to produce the play with a comic aspect, which sits uneasily with the play’s bleak subject matter. Because of these problems, every production of
King John
is in some sense experimental in that the director has to experiment with ways in which to make the play relevant and enjoyable to a modern audience. A unifying theme of the RSC productions has been to examine the play’s modern political relevance, and in particular its political cynicism, which seems to be hardwired into its construction and language. In that sense, the RSC productions from Goodbody to Rourke may indeed have rediscovered in
King John
“a tract for the times.”

Gregory Doran
, born in 1958, studied at Bristol University and the Bristol Old Vic theater school. He began his career as an actor, before becoming associate director at the Nottingham Playhouse. He played
some minor roles in the RSC ensemble before directing for the company, first as a freelance, then as Associate and subsequently chief associate director. His productions, several of which have starred his partner Antony Sher, are characterized by extreme intelligence and lucidity. He has made a particular mark with several of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays, including
King John
(2001), which he is discussing here, as well as the revival of works by other contemporary Elizabethan and Jacobean writers.

Josie Rourke
went to school in Eccles and attended sixth-form college in Salford before going on to train on the Donmar Warehouse’s resident assistant director scheme in 2000. Her first major breakthrough was as assistant director to Peter Gill at the Lowry Theatre in Salford Quays in 2002 for the premiere of his play
The York Realist
. She worked as a freelance director from 2002 to 2007 and as associate director of the Sheffield Theatres as well as a trainee associate director at the Royal Court. Josie directed Philip Massinger’s
Believe What You Will
and Shakespeare’s
King John
for the RSC in 2006, which she’s discussing here, and was appointed as artistic director of London’s Bush Theatre in 2007. She recently directed
Men Should Weep
for the National Theatre, while her
Much Ado About Nothing
with David Tennant and Catherine Tate opened in June 2011 at Wyndham’s Theatre. Widely regarded as one of Britain’s most exciting young directors, she takes over as director of the Donmar Warehouse in 2012.

King John used to be a popular play which enjoyed spectacular “authentic” Victorian stagings but its popularity has steadily declined in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; why do you think this is the case and was it an advantage or disadvantage for your production?

Doran:
On the front of the Swan Theatre in Stratford there are three terracotta plaques representing Shakespeare’s Histories, Comedies, and Tragedies. Tragedy, not unsurprisingly, is represented by
Hamlet
;
As You Like It
represents Comedy; the third plaque, representing History, is not as you might expect
Henry V
or
Richard III
but
King John
; which suggests that when the plaques went up, within a few years of
the theater being built in 1879, it was regarded as an extremely popular play.

From a selfish point of view I was glad that the play didn’t have a recent weight of precedence; it meant that I could see it afresh. With
Henry VIII
I had gone into rehearsals weighed down with research material and historical references. With
King John
I just went in with the script. I wasn’t interested in the historical King John. I wasn’t even that interested in the period in which Shakespeare was writing, though I am pretty sure that it is a later play than it has often been claimed to be, because ultimately I decided it was a much more sophisticated play than it is often given credit for. It allowed us to take the play on its own terms and see how it spoke to us now. I have to say that we understood it in a completely different way by the time we came to perform it than we had done at the beginning of rehearsals.

I thought, and indeed I think, it to be a highly satirical play in the first half, but to begin with I thought the whole play was satirical; in particular through the character of Cardinal Pandulph, who can say at any one moment that black is white and then argue that black is black. That is quite clearly a satire on politics. Then some very significant events happened during the final rehearsals and then during the run itself. TV footage of a young Palestinian boy called Muhammed al-Durrah, who was shot while he crouched behind his father during a gunfight in a street in the Gaza Strip, was beamed around the world. The death of the innocent brought about an international outcry, but ultimately it didn’t change anything. It helped us realize that the death of Prince Arthur had a really significant impact on the play.

The other event that intensified and deepened my respect for the play took place during a Tuesday matinee. The matinee began at 1:30 p.m. and backstage the company had started to gather around a TV monitor: it was the Tuesday afternoon that two hijacked planes flew into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. At about 2:58 p.m. the South Tower collapsed, and nearly two hours into the production the North Tower collapsed in twelve seconds. The company were following this backstage and didn’t know what to do, whether to continue with the production. The audience knew nothing. At the moment when Prince Arthur slips from the walls, the Bastard comes
on stage to say, I “lose my way / Among the thorns and dangers of this world.” He describes how “vast confusion waits, / As doth a raven on a sick-fall’n beast”; those words were intensified by what was happening in New York. Somehow the play grew from being a satirical portrait of politics into a devastating account of how human lives can be affected by the absurdity of politics and people’s individual agendas. Shakespeare is like a magnet for the iron filings of contemporary events. Our respect deepened throughout the run, and the play emerged for us anew.

Rourke:
I think it’s important to remember that almost all of Shakespeare’s plays have waxed and waned in their popularity. At any particular time there are sets of critical thinking around a play that tend to influence how much it gets done. For example, the Victorians couldn’t get enough of
King John
. I think that is also partly because of the pageant; that would have appealed to their theater. It’s also because of the deeply moving and sentimental portrait of grief embodied by Constance in the latter part of her character’s journey. It is certainly important to note that
King John
is a heavily rhetorical play and currently rhetorical theater is not particularly fashionable. Of course, since the Complete Works production of
King John
we’ve had the Obama campaign that reignited our interest in rhetoric, but at the time that I was directing
King John
it was more about the art of spin than that of persuasion. I think that the other thing to bear in mind is that, whilst King John is a great part for an actor, it’s not a part that actors that enjoy long soliloquies are particularly drawn to: he has one line of soliloquy. I think that’s probably why you don’t see many actors saying, “I really want to give my King John.”