King John

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Temple Church (Middle Temple) on 15 April 2015

Shakespeare's Globe's first production of 'King John' is being performed at various historically relevant locations before coming to the Globe itself in the summer. The Temple Church, located in the Middle Temple which supported John during the baronial crisis of 1215, is particularly evocative as one of the characters in the play (the Earl of Pembroke) is actually buried there.

The production, directed by James Dacre, features Jo Stone-Fewings as King John, Alex Waldmann as the Bastard, Barbara Marten as Queen Eleanor, Tanya Moodie as Constance, Laurence Belcher as Prince Arthur and Mark Meadows as Hubert.  

The audience enters the Round Church - the image of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem - to find monks chanting around the figure of King John lying in state on a catafalque, in imitation of the effigy in Worcester Cathedral (a copy of which is nearby). However the performance takes place in the adjoining nave and chancel, where a series of rostrums has been constructed along the whole length of the central aisle and also along the transepts. The bulk of the lighting is provided by candles at floor level along the rostra and in various higher clusters, with some discreet spotlights which are at first hardly noticeable as the spring twilight streams through the windows. The general effect - chanting, lighting and quantities of incense - is dramatic and exciting.

The play opens with a procession from the Round Church to the acting space, and an incantatory acclamation as John is proclaimed king by his mother (the redoubtable Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine) and acclaimed by the nobility. Curiously, this scene is not part of Shakespeare's play. It derives from an earlier more sprawling version from which Shakespeare is presumed to have drawn and selected his material. Shakespeare's play proper begins with the startling arrival of the French ambassador to contest John's right to the English crown, in favour of the young Prince Arthur (son of a deceased elder brother).

In a series of striking tableaux questions of power, legitimacy and realpolitik are examined and most of the players found utterly wanting. The powerful (John, Eleanor, King Philip Augustus of France, the Dauphin, the Duke of Austria) act almost entirely from pragmatic self-interest while the politically weak (Constance, her son Prince Arthur, and his cousin Blanche of Castille) are merely the victims of circumstance. The papal legate Pandulph brings a steely consistency of approach to his task, but its manifestation is deeply repellent, and even his presumption of unanswerable authority fails at the final crisis.

The portrayal of John is far more nuanced than one might expect from his current cardboard image as a 'bad king' and a 'bad thing'. Jo Stone-Fewings reveals fascinating shades of character in a man both enthralled by his powerful mother, but wishing to stand on his own authority, and in a king at times quite charming and even slyly humorous, and at other times chillingly callous; his final demise is both pathetic and wretched. 

One sharp contrast to this ultimately inadequate character is provided by the Bastard. Initially revelling in the opportunity for self-advancement offered by the formal recognition that he is the illegitimate son of King Richard Coeur-de-Lion, Alex Waldmann's cynical, audience-friendly and worldy-wise commentator on the hypocrisy of others gradually develops into a deeply loyal and honourable Englishman who chooses loyalty to the legitimate succession above personal gain, and who can speak believably for the prospecs of England as a nation at the close of the play.

The other sharp contrast is the hapless Prince Arthur, an untried and unassuming young man here. (Though the play text itself can easily imply that a younger boy is envisaged, the real Prince Arthur was about seventeen when he died.) Laurence Belcher shows a certain determination in the attitude of humility the prince adopts in his attempt to survive the machinations around him at the beginning, a stance which would otherwise be merely coy. When faced with the prospect of being blinded, his passionate appeal for clemency brings a shocking clarity to the viciousness around him, and this turns the potentially sentimental scene of the abuse of a child into an intense personal struggle, and allows his gaoler Hubert's dilemma to come properly to the fore. The sheer technical demands of projecting the voice in the church acoustic perhaps influenced the decision to award this part to an older teenager, but it is fully vindicated in his performance.

The production emphasises patterning in the play, cleverly echoing the sacred space of the church in its use of sacred chant, repeating gestures of obeisance, staging fights as almost solo dances with weapons (excellent choreography by Scott Ambler), and using pulsing music to raise some phrases into war-cries ('war for war and blood for blood,/Controlment for controlment') or pressing motifs (a marvellous blending of the word 'magnificat' with the Bastard's exasperated 'Mad world! Mad kings! Mad composition!'). It also shows clearly a number of parallel but interestingly varied relationships. For example, the mother-son relation is exemplified between Eleanor and John, but also between Constance and Arthur, and very briefly between Lady Faulconbridge and the Bastard. All three sons have strong mothers, but only the Bastard frees himself successfully. Both legitimate princes seek to silence their mothers when they try to intervene in political events, but Arthur does not long survive separation from Constance, and John is totally unmanned when given news of Eleanor's death, no matter how much he may have resented her in life. 

The play lacks the depth of character so important to 'Richard II' or the Lancastrian plays, or even to 'Richard III', and yet it contains many strong scenes of personal and political conflict. Also, it conflates historical time more recklessly. The crisis over Prince Arthur, and also the death of Eleanor of Aquitaine, took place in 1204, and John died in 1216; but here his collapse and death follow on apparently in a matter of days. There is no mention of the later political struggles of the reign, and John's sudden single reference to a 'Magna Carta' struck a false note. (It, too, is not in the Shakespeare text.)

The church is perhaps not the best space either aurally or visually to stage a play. Occasionally the resonance defeated the speakers, leading to loss of clarity, though overall the verse speaking was strong and well-managed, with due attention given to the demands of the acoustic. It was in fact a great pleasure to hear unfamiliar Shakespeare spoken with assurance and rhetorical skill; a more downbeat style would have been fatal in this context.

The visual problems are more acute. There is probably not a single seat in the entire church with adequate sightlines. This is unavoidable given the presence of the pilllars supporting the roof, but it was unfortunately exacerbated by the relative heights of the rostra in use. Those on the transepts and in the chancel were several steps higher than the rostrum in the nave aisle, and for a seated audience they were actually just above eye-level. This meant that anyone sitting in the nave had a severely truncated view of what occurred beyond the transepts. In particular, only the top of the throne at the easternmost end was visible. It was obviously important to know who at any given time was sitting in this throne, but too often it was a strain to make out more than the top half of the head.

For those sitting in the chancel, the opposite problem was even more severe - the whole of the nave rostrum was entirely invisible as it was at a level several steps below the transept. This meant that anyone approaching from the far end could not be seen, and Arthur's death (by falling from a wall) could only be surmised. Also, of course, almost all the action taking place at the crossing point - of central importance - was played with the actors' backs to the chancel audience. For those in the nave who were closest to this crossing point, the sight of it was frustratingly obscured by the pillars. (I sat staring at a pillar in the first half, and in the chancel in the second half.)

Despite these shortcomings (which were after all created by the venue rather than the play), the production was well worth seeing.