Eleanor Rhode's studenty approach to this Plantagenet tussle for the thrones of England and France crosses the line between vamping up a tricky Shakespeare play and overwhelming it.
It’s understandable: dealing with the immediate aftermath of Richard the Lionheart’s death, King John is a tangle of royal family politics, shifting loyalties, and indistinct motives, outside the arcs of the great history play cycles.
Two of the most interesting characters — John’s mother Eleanor of Aquitaine, and his brother’s wife Constance, mother of his child rival — die offstage during the interval. John does not die blazing like Richard III or with humility like Richard II but ignominiously poisoned.
But Rhode chucks everything at this problem play, including a tin bath that the King expires in. There’s Sixties frugging, crashing guitars, clownish costumes and a food fight at a wedding on top of the RSC’s usual default bombast of kettledrums, dry ice, stentorian declamation and a lot of arm-waving. Shame: there are a few moments of pristine clarity that suggest what might have been if Rhode trusted the material more.
We’re grown up enough to accept gender blind casting now. If youthful Rosie Sheehy doesn’t entirely nail John’s character, it’s partly Shakespeare’s fault: she speaks lucidly, passionately and is magnificent in the final scene. But gender vagueness throughout looks more like a fudge than a cogent artistic decision.
As Constance, Charlotte Randle cuts through the static with a bravura expression of maternal grief. Tom McCall does subtle work as Hubert, charged with blinding a child with hot irons, and Michael Abubakar brings a saucy swagger to the Bastard. There is great poetry and drama to be teased out of King John, and I wish Rhode had dared give us more of it.
In rep until Mar 21 (01789 331111, rsc.org.uk)
