King John
1984: David Giles

This is certainly one of the less well-known of Shakespeare's plays, and there are not many productions available, but several of them are quite good. This BBC Shakespeare Plays entry from 1984 is as good as any of them in spite of its obvious limitations. It was clearly made on the slenderest of production budgets: the characters sport basic (Elizabethan) period costumes, but the sets and props are minimalistic: the stones of castle walls are represented by drawn bricks, and foliage by stenciled figures on the wall. The project was clearly winding down, and the bulk of its budget had been spent elsewhere. For all that, some very significant acting forces are at work, and they have produced a very solid presentation of the play for audiences more interested in what Shakespeare was doing than in what might be done to Shakespeare in order to reinvent him for some other purposes.

John himself is played by Leonard Rossiter, who sadly died later that same year; he presents the king as a fickle narcissist, absorbed in himself and with virtually no principle or empathy. Lady Faulconbridge is Phyllida Law — the mother of Emma and Sophie Thompson, whom many will know from a variety of roles (Ursula in the Branagh Much Ado About Nothing, Mrs. Bates in the Gwyneth Paltrow version of Emma, and a raft of other roles for both movies and television going back to the 1950s). Presenting Hubert de Burgh is John Thaw, known to a generation of BBC Mystery watchers as Inspector Morse, and the Earl of Salisbury is John Castle, Geoffrey from The Lion in Winter and many other noteworthy productions. Veteran Shakespearean leading lady Claire Bloom plays Constance; she had almost twenty years earlier been Lady Anne in the Olivier Richard III, and more recently Gertrude in the BBC Shakespeare’s remarkable version of Hamlet (1980, Rodney Bennett). She carries herself through the problematically exaggerated role with dignity, even as her character falls apart.

The real standout of the production, though, is not one of the bigger names, but rather George Costigan in the role of Philip the Bastard. He is not among the best-known Shakespearean actors, but he carries the role with real nuance and remarkable energy. He deals nimbly with the mercurial aspects of the character both in action and in speech. Treading a fine line between the cynical and the endearing, throughout it all he is the audience's friend, in sly asides voicing clever critiques of situations, characters, and pieces of dialogue. He's not quite cynical enough to be repellent, but he is coldly realistic and devoid of romantic pretensions, and his deflation of the windy rhetoric of other characters is almost unparalleled in the rest of Shakespeare’s plays. Costigan handles it well indeed.

This is a straightforward rendition of the play in the best sense of the term. It is not encumbered with production cleverness or arbitrary conceits. None of the male characters are played by women. There is no rock and roll, no anachronism for its own sake, or social encodings of one irrelevant social agenda or other. As such, it's an excellent place to encounter this play first, even if one wants to sample other more avant-garde productions as well.

Buy the complete BBC Shakespeare Plays at Amazon. Note that this will require a Region 2 player or a region-free player: it will not play on most normal American DVD players. Nevertheless, the price is so reasonable that even with a region-free player thrown into the deal, you’ll come out ahead.

Buy the complete set of the BBC Shakespeare Plays or individual plays (including this one) in Region 1 format direct from Ambrose Video.