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, it’s 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.
But Rhode chucks everything at the play — sixties frugging, crashing guitars, clownish costumes, a food fight at a wedding — on top of the usual RSC kettledrums, dry ice, stentorian booming and gesticulation. Shame: there are a few moments of pristine clarity that suggest what might have been if she trusted the material more.
I think we’re all grown up enough to accept gender blind casting now. If youthful Rosie Sheehy doesn’t entirely nail John’s character, that’s partly Shakespeare’s fault, and she is magnificent in the final scene. But a vagueness over gender 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, the king’s pawn charged with blinding a child with hot irons. There is great poetry and great drama to be teased out of King John, and I wish Rhode had dared give us more of it.
In rep until 21 March (01789 331111, rsc.org.uk)
