King John
by William Shakespeare
Directed by Eleanor Rhode
Designer Max Johns
Music Will Gregory (Goldfrapp)
Swan Theatre
Royal Shakespeare Company
Stratford-upon-Avon
Saturday 5th October 2019, 13.30
CAST
Rosie Sheehy- King John
Bridgitta Roy- Queen Elinor, mother of King John
Aaryan Dassaur- Arthur, Duke of Britanny, John’s nephew
Charlotte Randle – Constance, Arthur’s mother, widow of his older brother Geoffrey
Nadi Kemp-Sayfi- Blanche, John’s niece
Zara Ramm – Lady Faulconbridge, mother of The Bastard
Zed Josef – Robert Faulconbridge, brother to The Bastard
Michael Abubakar- The Bastard, Philip Faulconbridge, illegitimate son of Richard I
Tom McCall- Hubert, aide to King John
Corey Montague-Sholay- Earl of Salisbury
John Cummins – Earl of Pembroke
Ali Gadema – Earl of Essex
David Birrell – King of France
Brian Martin – Lewis, the Dauphin
Nicholas Gerard-Martin – Chatillon, the French Ambassador
Richard Pryal- Archduke of Austria, ally of France
Katherine Pearce- Cardinal Pandulph, the Pope’s represetative
Sarah Agha – citizen
Houda Echouafni- citizen
Zara Ramm – citizen
The RSC describe it as:
‘Shakespeare’s rarely performed play of a nation in turmoil vibrates with modern resonance in this new production.”
Not THAT rarely performed, surely? The RSC did it in 2001, 2006, then with Alex Waldmann as the king and Pippa Nixon as the Bastard in 2012. This is the fourth RSC 21st century version. The Globe did a major one in 2015, then the Rose Kingston did it in 2016. Still, nation in turmoil fits, but then it fits all of the history plays and most of the tragedies. Surprisingly it’s in the smaller Swan Theatre.
Is it less well-known than other histories because it’s isolated? Henry VI Parts I-III plus Richard III lend themselves to the Wars of The Roses compilations. Henry IV Parts I & II plus Henry V are another trilogy. Looking back at reviews, a running theme is that’s it’s a much better play than expected. Shakespeare also ignored almost everything the modern audience ‘knows’ about King John … plotting with the Sheriff of Nottingham against Robin Hood and his brother Richard, losing the crown jewels crossing The Wash at low tide, the Magna Carta and even dying of a surfeit of lampreys (an unpleasant eel like fish). Instead he beats the drums the Elizabethans loved … wars with the perfidious French and two fingers up to the authority of The Pope in Rome.
Rose Sheehy as King John. David Birrell as the King of France
The accepted 1596 date places it along with Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV-Part I. There’s not a weaker one in that period.
Eleanor Rhode’s production is set in an ‘alternative time period’ according to the designer, but it is mid-60s. The music before the play starts … Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, Keep On Running, Help, The Last Time, Glad All Over … conjures up 1965 to 1966, as does Constance’s op-art dress. The costumes are fun throughout. The Bastard initially gets a “lions of England” jacket when recognized as Richard the Lionheart’s son, then the sort of red Victorian army jacket Jimi Hendrix might have worn. The Archduke of Austria gets a huge leonine coat (he claims to have killed Richard the Lionheart). Dance is used instead of fighting.
The English arrive spoiling for a fight: L to R Hubert (Tom McCall), The Bastard (Michael Abubakar, King John (Rose Sheehy), Queen Mother Elinore (Bridgitta Roy)
The play falls into two halves (90 minutes / 65 minutes here). The first half is full of sixties costume and props, dance, music, sudden action, bright colours and lighting. The second is far darker, stripped back, the bright back tapestry of the first part is covered with a semi-transparent curtain, Wanamaker-style candles are lit, costumes are drabber. The lords have metallic chain mail effect turtle necks, then later they add camouflage army trousers. In the very last scene, those right at the back of the action (everyone virtually) are suddenly in medieval tabards and mail.
In my general railing against gender blind – or rather contrary gender – casting in everything in 2019, I’ll make an exception for this one. Female actors playing King John (as “he”) or Cardinal Pandulph (as “she” definitely) work a dream here, because Rose Sheehy is so good as King John, and Katharine Pearce is so funny as the cardinal. Rose Sheehy was outstanding as the stroppy teenager in The Whale by Samuel D. Hunter last year and she brings ‘attitude’ to this role. She has a good couple of minutes solo to open the play, breakfast with a hangover. It involves downing a raw egg in tomato juice too.
Rose Sheehy: The king at breakfast.
Rose Sheehy’s King John is in trousers with bright lipstick in the first half. In the second, she’s in a very full skirt initially- but maybe it interprets as coronation robes. Or just a skirt, but by then we are so into her characterization that we’re not bothered either way.
Rose Sheehy as King John: The second part of the play and John’s second coronation.
There is no attempt to make her look male … she flicks her hair with abandon, and shakes her hips in the dance sequences. This is a King John who visibly delights at causing mayhem, and at other’s complications and misfortunes, while preening and strutting as a king. Then in the second half, her red lipstick has gone, she’s paler, visibly disintegrating. Her long death, puking blood in a tin bathtub is brilliantly executed.
Without any cross casting, the play has three significant women’s roles – Elinore, Constance and Blanche. They’re played up here too- the cutting doesn’t fall on either Blanche or Constance (which I now realize it had in other productions). Both get their full whack.
Nadi Kemp-Sayfi as Blanche, a reluctant bride
Blanche of Castile, John’s niece, is a constant strong presence, reacting in the backgrounds and clearly not at all happy about being dumped on the Dauphin as a bride. Nadi Kemp-Sayfi is much stronger here than in versions where Blanche just wafts on to get married off. (She also understudies King John, I noticed).
Charlotte Randle as Constance
Constance (Charlotte Randle), in Mary Quant dress, lets out her full anger at the process of denying her son, Arthur, the crown, then having him spirited away by King John. Great fury. She has a point. Arthur is the son of John’s elder brother, Geoffrey. Elinore looks every bit the kingmaker and most powerful woman in Europe, which Eleanor of Aquitaine was (Bridgitta Roy). She’s John’s mother and Arthur’s grandmother, but she’s going to opt for the strongest leader, not a young boy.
There are several significant set pieces. I’ll never forgot the bare knuckle boxing match … the English champion (played by Nicholas Gerard-Martin) against the Archduke of Austria (Richard Pryal). Both are in boxing shorts. Large blue hands (France) are distributed to one side of the audience, large red hands (England) to the other. We are invited to participate. It’s one of the best and most violent stage fights I have ever seen. When Austria sprays blood I was a bit concerned being in the second row. In the interval, someone was explaining to a woman in the audience that it would wash off.
The wedding: Ali Gadema (Essex), Brian Martin (The Dauphin), Nicholas Gerard Martin (Chatillon), Nadi Kemp-Sayfi (Blanche), Tom McCall (Hubert), Katherine Pearce (Cardinal)
Wash off? Yes. The other wonderful set piece. Trouble breaks out at the wedding of the Dauphin to Blanche. “Letters of gold” turn out to be helium balloons spelling JUST MARRIED. Mics are used for speeches, the Cardinal turns up and excommunicates John, and chaos ensues as a huge Anglo-French food fight, rolling and tumbling taking up the whole stage. By the end all the costumes are liberally spattered. By the end, the gold balloons read JUST DIE. Wash off? I’d calculate they’d need three or four full sets of costume to cover it.
The citizens
Another high point are the three lady citizens of besieged Angers (high up in the gallery too). In mid 60s middle-aged smart clothes and spectacles they peer down at the French and English forces and comment constantly in facial expressions and body language. They munch popcorn avidly through the boxing match. They coo “Ahh!” at the wedding announcement.
So much about this production is five star. What works against it is an intrinsic weakness of the play, which I called “The Duchess of Malfi syndrome” in another review, which is killing off five major characters by the interval. All three of the powerful women’s roles have gone (and weedily in a report) … Elinore and Constance have died. Blanche just doesn’t get mentioned again. Shakespeare reports their going very briefly:
My liege, her ear
Is stopp’d with dust; the first of April died
Your noble mother; and as I hear, my lord,
The Lady Constance in a frenzy died
Three days before.
King John,Act IV, Scene 2
(Shakespeare got it wrong: Eleanor of Aquitaine had died on 1st April 2004. Shakespeare’s “3 days before” were actually “3 years before” – Constance died in September 1201. In a further inaccuracy, Arthur died in 1203, a year before his grandmother, Elinore)
Then the two great figures on the French side have gone. The King of France (David Birrell ) has become a far more interesting character in this, trying to balance things, bemused as chaos envelops the wedding which he is vainly trying to MC as father of the groom.
Richard Pryal as the Archduke of Austria
Richard Pryal’s Archduke of Austria is a show-stealing role from the moment he dances aggressively on with two companions. He is the thug of all thugs. He gets decapitated off stage by the Bastard – great model head too. So the King and Austria have departed by the interval too.
It leaves that dark, gloomy second part bereft of so much that we were enjoying. There’s not much anyone can do about it. Shakespeare wrote it. His fault. Much of the comic and dance potential is gone too. We do get some good moments. It’s Hubert (Tom McCall)’s point to step forward. At the end of Part One he did his speech (accepting the charge of looking after Arthur) while trying to apply a tourniquet to his own bleeding leg. It added so much depth to the character. Then, part two opens with him dressed as a surgeon with equipment and two nurses in face masks … two of the recently deceased women. The task was to burn out Arthur’s eyes (and castrate him … thus removing his ability to be king). There are three child actors as Arthur. We saw Aaryan Dassaur who was very good indeed. A lot rests on the Hubert-Arthur interaction … we had a reproduction of the painting by Yeames on the wall at school.
Yeames painting.
The plot point (if you don’t know the story, it’s in my other reviews of King John) is that John wanted Arthur dead. Hubert couldn’t do it, to John’s anger. Then John realizes all his nobles are against him because they think he has murdered Arthur. So anger turns to relief that Hubert has not done the dirty deed … but then Arthur apparently falls off the battlements by accident. But everyone thinks John did it.
I liked the way they did Prince Arthur’s dive off the castle walls (or rather the tables) to be caught and wafted away, and the stylised fights on the long tables. Cardinal Pandulph is still a comedy highlight whenever she appears, but it is such a contrast.
Michael Abubaker as The Bastard in three lions jacket
Michael Abubakar is The Bastard, often seen as the chief role as it has most lines in the text. Sheehy’s King John eclipsed it here, but Abubakar looks right – small, wiry, matches John in height, but the French king and the Austrian tower over him. Sheer aggression will let him beat them. He uses a Scottish accent, and studied drama in Scotland. There’s an argument that dominates about accent in Shakespeare … actors should use their natural accent. Brian Martin as the Dauphin is lightly Irish, Abubakar’s Scottish is stronger. I’m not so sure. It’s too frequent to use Scottish or Northern Irish for aggressive characters as a kind of shorthand. In an interview, Rose Sheehy said she would be using her own Welsh accent, but I didn’t hear it at all.
Katharine Pearce as Cardinal Pandulph
Also, is this production accent blind? Not really. Katharine Pearce’s twin-set suited Cardinal with shiny handbag firmly in the crook of her arm is so funny partly BECAUSE her Northern accent sounds perfect. One review below called it ‘Coronation Street’ but it’s not at all. It’s Northern posh, the accent you hear in a nice tea room in a department store in Chester or Harrogate. So it’s not accent blind. I’d tone The Bastard’s Scottish accent down, partly because it’s incongruous when he has so many patriotic lines about England and Englishness (NOT Britishness). Maybe actors don’t train in neutral RP anymore … I reckon you should be able to do both “neutral RP” and “my natural local accent.” Some actors are like Lenny Henry and can do a range of accents, others can’t. When we were doing audio recording, we wanted a range of accents from actors and there is a strong division between the “I don’t do accents” school and the ones who can switch at ease. I always find it odd that Messrs Tennant and McAvoy can do RP when Hollywood beckons, but their Scots accents broaden on chat shows.
The last battle: Katharine Pearce as Cardinal Pandulph. King John dead in bathtub.
The end? The patriotic speech dissolves into battle. I’m not sure that it was right to have a bloodied Prince Arthur appear at the end. If a lad does, it should be clearly Henry III. They only took one bow and the RSC / Globe dance ending would be inappropriate with everyone out of their basic costumes for the final fight, and King John in bloodied nightshirt arising from the tin bath. One bow is common on matinees … an extra five minutes break must be welcome. The applause was so large that I expected an unusual (for the RSC) standing ovation if they had returned.
It’s the best King John I’ve seen. It’s the RSC at its best. It runs into next year too.
**** (plus a bit) … no, I’ve just put in the photos and reminded myself of its visual delight. Let’s make that a full five.
*****
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
4 star
Miriam Gillinson, The Guardian ****
Michael Davies, What’s On Stage ****
Another RSC debutant, Rosie Sheehy, plays John, and the upfront obstinacy of the cross-gendered casting pays huge dividends in the king’s slippery, mercurial character. Sheehy’s performance is volatile, enervating and thoroughly gripping, and her emotional understanding of the monarch’s gradual disintegration is immensely powerful.
3 star
Domenic Cavendish, Telegraph ***
Her production lends a jaunty Sixties gloss to proceedings – apparently we’re in an “alternate universe” – and sets the crown on the head of little-known actress Rosie Sheehy. Experimental Shakespeare is presumably expected to woo a younger audience, but directorial overkill is a clear and present danger. It also feels as though gender-flipping has become the orthodoxy now: directors are working through the canon, deposing male actors from their supposed birth-rights, without always demonstrating any compelling rationale besides an egalitarian urge.
Sam Marlowe, The Times ***
TheatreCat.com ***
But all in all, the shouty carelessness with the verse (some of the loveliest lines of Shakespeare are in here) and the desperate determination to be fun made it less than gripping until its last more solemn moments. But look, I’m not hostile: it’s 2019, the RSC has lots of crap telly to compete against, so I’ve no objection to Cardinal Pandulph being depicted as a pouting, mincing Elsie Tanner from Coronation Street, nor to the homages to Bunuel and the Sopranos. And yes, on press night anyway lots of people did often laugh
2 star
Nick Curtis, Standard **
not star rated
Peter Rhodes, Express & Star
And here’s the rub. During this season, the RSC has ticked every politically-correct box it is possible to tick. It has delivered casting that is both colour-blind and gender-neutral. It has created gay storylines, introduced a disabled actor in a wheelchair and even presented an entire scene in signing for the deaf. And for all these well-meant attempts to be hip, happening, inclusive, outreachy and woke, the RSC was yesterday condemned by local schoolkids in Stratford and threatened with a boycott for accepting sponsorship from the oil company BP
LINKS ON THIS BLOG:
OTHER PRODUCTIONS OF KING JOHN
King John, Globe 2015
King John, Rose Kingston 2016
ELEANOR RHODE, DIRECTOR
Boudica, Globe 2017
ROSIE SHEEHY
The Whale by Samuel D. Hunter, Ustinov Bath 2018
Strife by John Galsworthy, Chichester 2016
JOHN CUMMINS
The Alchemist by Ben Jonson, RSC 2016
Don Quixote, RSC 2016
BRIAN MARTIN
The Lieutenant Inishmore, Grandage Company, 2018
Boudica, Globe 2017
The Merchant of Venice, Globe 2015
Titus Andronicus, Globe 2014
TOM MCCALL
Dido, Queen of Carthage RSC 2107
Titus Andronicus, RSC 2017
Julius Caesar, RSC 2017
The Alchemist by Ben Jonson, RSC 2016
Don Quixote, RSC 2016
The Shoemaker’s Holiday, RSC 2015
RICHARD PRYAL
An Enemy of The People, Chichester 2016
She Stoops To Conquer – Bath 2105
BRIDGITTA ROY
Dido, Queen of Carthage RSC 2107
CHARLOTTE RANDLE
Yerma, Young Vic 2017
Plastic, Bath Ustinov, 2017
COREY MONTAGUE-SHOLAY
Henry V, Bath Ustinov 2018
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