King John
2019: Eleanor Rhode

This is the Royal Shakespeare Company’s version of King John from 2019. The RSC seems to be continuing with a deliberate program of trying to make their material arbitrary and absurd. Rosie Sheehy (yes, a woman) plays King John (not as a queen, but as a king; he’s referred to and addressed as a man, though obviously a woman in dress and demeanor). One gets the impression that there’s a point behind all this, but I remain unclear as to what it is. I understand why Sarah Bernhardt thought that Hamlet should only ever be played by a woman. I think she was wrong, but she at least made a case for it, and she represented him as the Prince of Denmark, not the Princess. Why John, a middle-aged man, not presumably just crowned as a teenaged boy, should be represented by a young woman is unclear. It seems just arbitrary. Arbitrary choices, I submit, seldom make good art.

I can sympathize with the desire of various actors to have the chance to play roles to which they were not born; at the same time the constant submission of every play to an apparently random gender variation takes what might be a point of some sort and renders it banal and pretentious through over-use. Arguably it’s not altogether arbitrary: the gender-bending goes on chiefly when it’s most likely to be absurd. The king is only the first of many. The papal legate Pandulf, obviously a priest, is also played by a woman sporting skirt-suit in a clerical purple, but carrying a purse and wearing dangly earrings and a high sculpted hairdo. Even today, perhaps it needs to be pointed out, women do not serve as priests in the Roman Catholic church. Perhaps the powers that be in the RSC believe that that is not as it should be, but it is beyond their power to change the facts of the thirteenth century, or the sixteenth. One doubts that their dramatized argument (if that’s what it is) will carry much weight with the Vatican even today.

In the opening scene John makes and drinks down a hangover remedy involving tomato juice (I think) and a raw egg (ugh) , while the BBC radio broadcast tells us that John has just been crowned, and brings us up to speed on various bits of background narrative. The townsmen of Angers (all women too) appear (quite reasonably) on a balcony, while (arbitarily) munching popcorn from red-and-white striped bags as if at a movie or at the circus, and wearing pointed women’s eyeglasses from the 1960s. The mayor of Angers appears to plead for his city wearing bloody rubber surgical gloves, with a bloody towel around his shoulders. Why? Is he a barber (a singularly incompetent one)? Hubert later dons rubber gloves and a lab coat as he prepares to kill or blind Arthur. Most of the costumes are exaggeratedly colorful cuts out of the 1960s, though some wear other things. One wears a ponderous faux fur coat, while another wears a turtleneck. Another wears a white evening jacket with a bow tie.

Scenes in the early part of the play are introduced by jazzy dance numbers that have nothing in particular to do with the story, tinged now with the choreography of Twyla Tharp, now with echoes of Chubby Checker and the Twist. Why? Perhaps I’m singularly dense, but I don’t see the point. Similarly the scene in which the papal legate first appears is set up as a wedding reception for Blanche and the Dauphin, where there is (of course) some more dancing from the 1960s; shortly thereafter it breaks down into a free-for-all where people throw colored powder at each other, while the ever-disgruntled Constance takes a knife to the balloons that spell out “Just Married” over the serving table. As the play progresses, the whimsical fades away and is replaced by an overriding sense of gloom, which is somewhat effective in spite of itself.

It’s not all bad. There are some good acting forces here. Despite what seems to me to be the lunatic decision to cast her in the role of King John, Rosie Sheehy carries the part off better than one might reasonably expect. She herself has considerable presence, and Shakespeare’s words and verse can drag even the most resisting material into some form. Good actors can convey something even through an absurdist garb. But why must the medium invariably be set up to obstruct and obfuscate the message? Has gratuitous obscurantism become the standard against which a production must be measured?

Philip the Bastard (with a broad Scottish accent) is good enough to command the stage and hold it even for his monologues — no mean feat. The part requires someone with real presence, and Michael Abubakar has it in abundance. He does so remarkably well, and comes out of the whole experience dramatically unscathed, at least.

Charlotte Randle plays Constance as a kind of hovering stage mother to her hapless son Arthur — not an unreasonable reading of the part, but not one that wins her very much sympathy. She’s more concerned with the “What becomes of me?” that she voices explicitly than with the actual welfare of her pathetically decent son, who is just a pawn in squabbles that are altogether beyond him. Her ultimate emotional meltdown is affecting in spite of the fact that it’s all seemingly set in a kind of circus. Young Arthur’s bitter fate remains tragic.

Most of what I can bring to the analysis of this performance is perplexity, dotted with a kind of incredulous admiration of momentary victories. I can’t say it’s all bad. There are some moments of genuinely great acting. Despite the abuse to which it has been subjected, too, the story is oddly robust, for all that it’s not one of Shakespeare’s most highly regarded. I can say, however, that the conceit that is forced over the resisting material is either simply stupid or so obscure as to defy all rational interpretation other than as a kind of nihilist manifesto overwriting Shakespeare’s text, as on a kind of cultural palimpsest. I cannot recommend this production at all to a student who has not already seen at least two other productions — and fortunately there are at least two other good ones. Then, perhaps, just to see the variety that can be imposed on a play, it might be worth a look. But even then...caveat spectator. It might be better just to stop at two.

Buy King John on DVD from Amazon. (N.B., this is not Blu-ray, as mistakenly claimed at the Amazon site.)