King John
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

In the days, which must be at least 50 years ago, when King John was a popular play, its most celebrated scene was usually referred to as "Hubert-spare-mine-eyes."

This is the episode in which Hubert, the nasty king's imperturbable confidant, undertakes to put out the eyes of the captive child Arthur (who has an embarrassingly strong claim to the English throne) but is overcome by the boy's pleas for mercy and ends up his devoted protector. It's one of several scenes that are excellently done in the new Stratford production, with Aidan Shipley as a trusting Arthur who would melt any heart, and Tom McCamus a Hubert, walleyed on his own account, who undergoes a wrenching transformation whose results are with him for the rest of the play.

Antoni Cimolino's stern staging holds back on the obvious pathos and emphasizes the brutality, which, of course, makes it even more pathetic. This aborted blinding emerges as the second-most horrific scene in Shakespeare, and the production, consciously or not, echoes Peter Brook's famous staging of the one that surpasses it, the actual blinding of Gloucester in King Lear. Arthur is bound to a chair by two henchmen, and pushed onto his back, ready for his jailer to apply the hot irons.

There is an odd thing about this scene, though; it's the only one in the play in which blinding is so much as mentioned. The king's instructions to Hubert were to kill the boy, and once the scene is over, everybody reverts to that assumption. The dislocation is typical of the play. It is full of powerful confrontations, but they don't cohere.

This could be because Shakespeare, like Hubert, had a fit of conscience. He was writing in a militant Protestant culture, in which the customary view of King John -- he who signed the Magna Carta and lost his washing in the Wash -- was that he was an admirable if sometimes misguided fellow who had the guts to defy the Pope.

Shakespeare (who ignores the charter, though not the washing) portrays him, probably with greater accuracy, as a despicable fellow who had the guts to defy the Pope.

The speech in which he does so, though stirring enough in a xenophobic way, seems to have wandered in from another play. And if we take it in context, it sounds like the bluster of a weakling trying to impress himself and everybody else -- which is how Stephen Ouimette plays it.

John, as the production is at pains to point out, is a mama's boy. The show starts with a succession of spotlit tableaux: three male characters -- John, Arthur and the Bastard Faulconbridge -- each seen with his mother. This is fine as far as it goes, but it does not, chronologically, take us far enough, since none of the ladies survives into the play's second half. (One of them doesn't make it past the first scene.) I'd say it was an interesting sidelight, rather than a governing image.

That is no reflection on the maternal performances. Martha Henry makes, as you would expect, a formidable Eleanor, a dowager whose influence on her royal son can certainly be believed to stretch from beyond the grave. She is seen happily playing with the captive Arthur while John plots the boy's death, a touch sympathetic and macabre.

As Constance, who fights for Arthur's rights with a fervour that embarrasses him, Diane D'Aquila seems at first unsuitably subdued, but she rises superbly to her scene of crazed bereavement in which, like all the best players of madness, she is heartbreakingly logical. (Constance, in what must have been a far grander manner, was one of the great roles for the passionate likes of Sarah Siddons. It occurred to me that the actress whom D'Aquila plays in The Swanne would have had it in her repertoire.)

Lally Cadeau makes more than most actresses of Lady Faulconbridge, who has, not too blushingly, to tell her son how she was seduced by Richard the Lion-Heart. He approves, but then he would, wouldn't he? And, while we're with the women, Keira Loughran makes a highly promising Shakespearean debut as Blanche, married off as a peace offering and torn in emotional halves when her English uncle and French husband resume hostilities.

The play keeps doing things like that. People continually break faith or change sides, and John himself is a virtuoso of deceit. The trouble, dramatically, is that he isn't very dynamic or whole- hearted about it, as if Shakespeare, writing a patriotic play (and John's enemies, unlike Richard III's, are foreigners) couldn't quite give up the idea that he might be reclaimed as a hero. I wonder if it might be more effective to cast a heavyweight actor in the role, one who would let the weakness peep through an initially confident facade. Ouimette, nervously pacing his palace, is a neurotic from the outset. His performance is perfectly accomplished and perfectly credible, but you do wonder what this man is doing at the centre of an action-packed play.

Shakespeare seems to have wondered, too, since he has him progressively abdicate control. This sounds as if it should be more interesting than it is; Shakespeare abdicates too, allowing the king a vivid but strangely foreshortened death.

The problem has always been there, and it explains the tradition whereby the usurping John has himself been usurped, theatrically, by the far more attractive Bastard, who is vigorous and funny and observant and, despite some of his own protestations, good-natured. Jonathan Goad, who gets better and better, gets off to a fine start by sitting cheekily on the throne when no one is looking, and proves especially good at easing his way through the sparkling soliloquies that were their author's breakthrough in colloquial characterization. (So at least says Harold Bloom, and it's one of his more insightful observations.) Equally fine is his handling of the concluding "this England" speech, which he delivers not as a jingoistic proclamation, nor as a fashionable exercise in debunking, but quietly, alone on the stage, as if he hopes it might prove true but is by no means sure.

This fits right in with a intelligently ambiguous production, which is set in the late Victorian period (helpful for telling nationalities apart) and emphasizes carnage, perhaps unnecessarily since we know what war costs. More impressive are the scenes of diplomatic chicanery. The papal legate is as smoothly nasty as the most bigoted Elizabethan could have desired. Bernard Hopkins plays him on a silken note that can be monotonous, but is impressive when cajoling Dion Johnstone's ambitious young Dauphin, who proves a chillingly apt pupil and (an apt invention) treats his new wife appallingly. Peter Donaldson has more to offer as an actor than the presumably well-meaning French king can accommodate.

The principal feature of Santo Loquasto's design is a mobile platform, which is mostly useful and can sometimes surprise us. There are also striking sound and lighting effects, at their best and boldest for the death of Arthur.