Think of England; Stratford Makes the Best of an Uneven Play About a Bad King
King John
The Stratford Festival
The National Post
The Stratford Festival's King John is a very good production of a play about a very bad king. Tom McCamus plays him, rivetingly, as a neurotic narcissist who, unlike his fellow Shakespearean tyrant Richard III, makes the fatal mistake of caring whether people like him. He enjoys being king, lolling back on his throne, rising from it to settle minor domestic disputes with a casual, fast-talking authority. When a displeasing embassy arrives from France, he rouses himself and all but snaps his fingers in its face: mainly, you feel, in order to impress his own subjects. When facing up to the actual French king - a nicer man but hardly more resolute - he can play the game, trading rhetoric for rhetoric, there being a lot of rhetoric in this early Shakespeare play.
When things go wrong for him, as they increasingly do after the intermission, he crumbles and crumples. At one point he throws himself on the ground, cowering and quivering under his wrapped-up robe; he also has a habit, in this Elizabethan-costumed production, of retreating inside his ruff.
It's a daring performance, thoroughly consistent in its inconsistency. Up, that is, until his last scene, which seems to come from a different play. John, poisoned by an unnamed and unseen monk, has a great speech about how his body is drying up and needs his country's rivers to moisten it. McCamus delivers it in a low croak that's medically appropriate but dramatically unsatisfying. Then he dies, while somebody else is talking. It's as if Shakespeare has given us the (extremely selective) history of a reign without focusing properly on the man doing the reigning.
Which is probably what happened. This is a play in which international politics unfold in scenes of stylized formalized debate, meaning the two sides line up and take turns flinging insults and self-justifications at one another, but in which rough humanity - sometimes in single lines or speeches, occasionally in extended scenes - can break startlingly through. Tim Carroll's "Original Practices" production does brilliant justice to both aspects, Original Practices being frankly admitted here to mean seeing what an outdoor Elizabethan play might look like if performed indoors. In the scenes of royal confrontation, the characters are disposed around the long platform stage for maximum clarity, according to their roles as participants or onlookers. The play's most famous scene, the attempted blinding of the boy prince Arthur by his conflicted jailer Hubert, offers the same lucidity in naturalistically fluid terms; it's tensely and very movingly played by Wayne Best and young Noah Jalava. (There are two eye-gouging scenes in Shakespeare, and they're both at Stratford this season. Mercifully, it doesn't seem to be a theme.)
The character who dominates the play, while also exemplifying its divided nature, is Philip the Bastard, magnificently played by Graham Abbey. In the first half he's the arriviste outsider, moral in his professed amorality, reacting with sardonic clarity to the mad world and its mad kings and sharing the joke with us: literally, and for once "playing to the audience" doesn't seem a selfconscious gimmick. Along the way, he conveys a genuine concern, possibly an unspoken love, for the conflicted princess Blanche who's most touchingly played by Jennifer Mogbock. In the second half, the Bastard stops joking, even stops soliloquizing, and starts speaking for England: a sign perhaps that Shakespeare had given up on making John a protagonist and settled for patriotic unity as a theme. Abbey, ringingly straightforward, persuades us that he is still the same man, one whom responsibility has forced into growing up.
The role of Constance, Arthur's bereaved mother - she acts bereaved even before she loses him - has traditionally been the province of overpowering tragedy queens. Seana McKenna plays her, refreshingly, for biting wit. She even pursues this into the mad scene after she really has lost her son, doggedly rebutting every false consolation her friends can offer; all that's missing here is the capstone, the identification of grief as her new child, that should top the performance off. She says it, but it doesn't strike home, She does, though, provide the offstage inspiration for one of McCamus' most delicious moments; hearing Arthur complain that his captivity will make his mother die of grief, the king silently registers that this might not be a bad idea. John's mother, the play's rival matriarch, is imposingly done by Patricia Collins; and the trio of English earls who keep deserting their king and then coming back to him again are honourably played by Stephen Russell, Brad Rudy (who at one point rivals Abbey in the sardonic laughter stakes) and Sean Arbuckle. On the French side, E. B. Smith does an impressive doubling as two variously outspoken nobles.
Not all the performances work, and I remain unconvinced by Carroll's contention that actors should pause when a line ends, even when the thought doesn't. In an early play like this they tend to end simultaneously but they don't always, and part of the pleasure should be in hearing Shakespeare discover syncopation. Some of these actors, of course, have it in their bones; McCamus in particular marches, or wanders, to his own beat. I also believe that giving words ending in "ion" their original extra syllable is a lost and artificial-sounding cause.
One reason for the play's equivocal portrayal of John is that protestant Elizabethans regarded him as a hero, for his defiance of the Pope. Shakespeare lets him step out of character for some anti-papal speeches, otherwise seems to see him as a villain but is nervous of pushing the portrait too far. John does end up defending England against a French invasion but isn't very good at it. Hence perhaps his perfunctory death scene. It happens because it happened; and the play has to end somehow. In Carroll's staging it has a second ending; as in all his Shakespeare productions, there's music at the close, reprising the beginning: a beautiful Latin hymn, sung by the whole cast in procession; everyone down for the finale. So maybe the monks have won. As the king's son and heir says at his father's demise "tis strange that death should sing." Haunting, too. By the way, that prince who hasn't even been mentioned earlier in the play, grew up to be Henry III. He wasn't a great king, either.