With this production following hard on the heels of Northern Broadsides', King John has suddenly moved from unloved orphan to teacher's pet. Gregory Doran kicks off the Royal Shakespeare Company's Stratford season with a wittily intelligent revival that highlights Shakespeare's corrosively ironic view of power politics - although the production leans a bit too far in the direction of black comedy.
The very casting of Guy Henry as John makes a statement. Henry is an attenuated actor whose very presence ignites laughter. So here, following endless Duck Soup-type brass fanfares, he misses his first entrance, forgets the name of the French ambassador and instinctively flinches when confronted by a noble appellant. Sid Field used to do a King John sketch and there is more than a touch of that great, fairy-footed comic in Henry's whimsically petulant performance.
But, although this king is a wavering usurper, there are echoes of Richard III and intimations of Macbeth that here go undetected. One of the great passages in all Shakespeare is John's cryptic instruction to Hubert to kill the boy Arthur. It runs "Death - My lord? - A grave - He shall not live - Enough." It cries out for Pinteresque phrasing but is here comically rattled off as though they were wrapping up any other business. Henry is always magnetically watchable but, by making him a kingly klutz, the production undercuts his role as anti-papist spokesman and pre-empts much of Shakespeare's own political cynicism.
It comes back to the old rule about playing a character from his own point of view. In that sense, the performance of the evening comes from David Collings as the Papal legate, Pandulph, who presumptuously intervenes in the battle for the English throne. Collings makes him a figure of self-delighting intellectual sophistry who impatiently rolls his eyes at the Dauphin's failure to realise that defeat can be classed as victory. If Collings's Pandulph is an ecclesiastical spin-master, Jo Stone-Fewings's bumptious Bastard is his secular equivalent. The scene where he convinces the French that "warlike John" is champing at the bit would take even Alastair Campbell's breath away.
Doran's alert production allows you to see the play's modern political parallels without cramping its traditional theatricality. Battles are evoked through swirling banners. The putative blinding of Josh McGuire's Arthur by Trevor Cooper's Hubert has exactly that mix of pathos and cruelty that so thrilled the Victorians; Arthur's later death-fall is also sensationally well done. And the production's dual focus is nowhere better seen than in the treatment of Arthur's mother, Constance, who is betrayed by the big powers. Kelly Hunter makes her a figure of justifiable maternal rage; yet when Geoffrey Freshwater's French king tells her "You are as fond of grief as of your child", the line cuts like a knife through butter. For heart-stopping moments like that I can easily forgive the production its occasional hints of Woody Allen in medieval England.
Until October 13. Box office: 01789 403403.
