Doran: On the front of the Swan Theatre in Stratford there are three terracotta plaques representing Shakespeare’s Histories, Comedies, and Tragedies. Tragedy, not unsurprisingly, is represented by Hamlet; As You Like It represents Comedy; the third plaque, representing History, is not as you might expect Henry V or Richard III but King John; which suggests that when the plaques went up, within a few years of the theater being built in 1879, it was regarded as an extremely popular play.
From a selfish point of view I was glad that the play didn’t have a recent weight of precedence; it meant that I could see it afresh. With Henry VIII I had gone into rehearsals weighed down with research material and historical references. With King John I just went in with the script. I wasn’t interested in the historical King John. I wasn’t even that interested in the period in which Shakespeare was writing, though I am pretty sure that it is a later play than it has often been claimed to be, because ultimately I decided it was a much more sophisticated play than it is often given credit for. It allowed us to take the play on its own terms and see how it spoke to us now. I have to say that we understood it in a completely different way by the time we came to perform it than we had done at the beginning of rehearsals.
I thought, and indeed I think, it to be a highly satirical play in the first half, but to begin with I thought the whole play was satirical; in particular through the character of Cardinal Pandulph, who can say at any one moment that black is white and then argue that black is black. That is quite clearly a satire on politics. Then some very significant events happened during the final rehearsals and then during the run itself. TV footage of a young Palestinian boy called Muhammed al-Durrah, who was shot while he crouched behind his father during a gunfight in a street in the Gaza Strip, was beamed around the world. The death of the innocent brought about an international outcry, but ultimately it didn’t change anything. It helped us realize that the death of Prince Arthur had a really significant impact on the play.
The other event that intensified and deepened my respect for the play took place during a Tuesday matinee. The matinee began at 1:30 p.m. and backstage the company had started to gather around a TV monitor: it was the Tuesday afternoon that two hijacked planes flew into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. At about 2:58 p.m. the South Tower collapsed, and nearly two hours into the production the North Tower collapsed in twelve seconds. The company were following this backstage and didn’t know what to do, whether to continue with the production. The audience knew nothing. At the moment when Prince Arthur slips from the walls, the Bastard comes on stage to say, I “lose my way / Among the thorns and dangers of this world.” He describes how “vast confusion waits, / As doth a raven on a sick-fall’n beast”; those words were intensified by what was happening in New York. Somehow the play grew from being a satirical portrait of politics into a devastating account of how human lives can be affected by the absurdity of politics and people’s individual agendas. Shakespeare is like a magnet for the iron filings of contemporary events. Our respect deepened throughout the run, and the play emerged for us anew.
Rourke: I think it’s important to remember that almost all of Shakespeare’s plays have waxed and waned in their popularity. At any particular time there are sets of critical thinking around a play that tend to influence how much it gets done. For example, the Victorians couldn’t get enough of King John. I think that is also partly because of the pageant; that would have appealed to their theater. It’s also because of the deeply moving and sentimental portrait of grief embodied by Constance in the latter part of her character’s journey. It is certainly important to note that King John is a heavily rhetorical play and currently rhetorical theater is not particularly fashionable. Of course, since the Complete Works production of King John we’ve had the Obama campaign that reignited our interest in rhetoric, but at the time that I was directing King John it was more about the art of spin than that of persuasion. I think that the other thing to bear in mind is that, whilst King John is a great part for an actor, it’s not a part that actors that enjoy long soliloquies are particularly drawn to: he has one line of soliloquy. I think that’s probably why you don’t see many actors saying, “I really want to give my King John.”
King John is an immensely demanding play for actors and audiences with its mix of genres, political debates, and ambiguous characterization—it’s been called a “failure” on account of these features. How did you approach and manage this complexity and did you find your production in danger of veering too far one way or the other?
Rourke: The critics were very kind and the audiences were tremendously responsive to our production; I don’t think that it has to be heavy going. I think that depends on whether or not the production and the performances are intelligent and gripping.
While the historical King John reigned in the thirteenth century, Shakespeare’s plays were performed in modern (i.e. Elizabethan) dress, which highlighted contemporary political and religious concerns for Shakespeare’s audiences; when was your production set and did it make allusion to early modern or contemporary political debates in any way?
Doran: I viewed the play in the context of a continuum of productions in Stratford. In 1974 John Barton had done a production in which he had included some of his own writing, and Michael Billington described it in the Guardian as “one of the best new plays we’ve seen this year.” I wanted to look at the play entirely on its own merits and in the context of our own world. We staged it with a sort of eleventh- or twelfth-century look. I didn’t want to put it specifically in modern dress but I did want to allow the metaphor to apply to the modern world.
Rourke: We did a medieval production of the play. For a number of reasons, actually. One is that I was struck by the idea that Shakespeare was writing, in some sense, a “period” drama and was enjoying the different sensibilities of a period of history that was not his own. Also, the pageantry of the medieval world was extremely helpful to the storytelling of the production—all the bright, distinct colors of the different armies both looked amazing and did a great job of clarity when it came to the gates of Angiers, where the powers of England, France, and Austria are all assembled (that’s even before Rome turns up). However, there were modern touches to the style of playing. When I directed the play it was around the end of the Blair government. Sometime later, when Gordon Brown was faltering as prime minister, I nearly called Michael Boyd to ask if we could revive the production, I was so struck by the parallels. In King John, the play offers us a dazzlingly acute portrayal of a man with a thirst for power, who clears everything out of his path without any moral compunction about what is needed in order to achieve the throne. Then once he achieves his goal, he finds that he can’t rule, he can’t cut it, and his reign fails through a series of terrible and quixotic judgment calls.
The thing about the play that was a big revelation to me when we did it in Stratford is the jingoism of it. I was astonished at the response to the vitriolic language about the French. The audience response was completely rapturous. It was fascinating to see how, even in the relatively middle-class milieu of a Stratford audience, a character urging a crowd to “get the French” awakes something really violent and vocal in our national character.
One of the things that must have interested Shakespeare about John was that he was the only king before Henry VIII to be excommunicated. We took great pains to stage the excommunication, with bell, book, and candle. We did it in a big moment of pageantry and then later, when John tells the Bastard to rob the monasteries and he replies, “Bell, book and candle shall not drive me back, / When gold and silver becks me to come on,” it would always get a massive laugh because you could see it was excommunication that he meant. The deep-seated nationalistic and antipapist reformation undercurrents of the play still connect with audiences now in the most extraordinary way.
History hasn’t been kind to King John on the whole—his reputation is based on the pantomime villain of the Robin Hood myth, defeat in the baro
ns’ revolt, and subsequent signing of Magna Carta; did you find him a more complex, shaded character in Shakespeare?
Doran: I had the sublime Guy Henry as King John. I had perceived the character as having a comic element to it. Guy thought that King John had no soliloquies but then discovered one: the moment when he hears that his mother has died and he says the line, “My mother dead!” Guy suddenly produced a sense of deep shock, which was beautiful and gave the character a greater depth. John is a pusillanimous, feeble, weak man and of course delightful in terms of comedy. Although it is the Bastard who guides us through the play, I think King John achieves a kind of elevation at the end. When he is sick at Swinstead Abbey and declares “now my soul hath elbow-room,” I think that deepens your appreciation of the character.
I think King John is balanced by Constance, in the same way that the Bastard is balanced by the dauphin. Kelly Hunter played Constance as having a fanatical belief in her rights, to an almost fundamentalist degree. She provided a rigor that was balanced against everybody else constantly compromising and shifting their positions. The one certain mooring in the first half of the play was Constance’s faith in the rights of her son, and that existed in balance with King John’s feeble vacillation.
Rourke: I think he is terribly complex. Richard McCabe, who played him, was absolutely fantastic at showing us that complexity; his psychological understanding of John’s rise, falter, and fall was astonishing. For Richard, John was someone who was continually teetering on the precipice of an immoral act. King John struggles and struggles for power, attains it, and then finds out that he is a terrible king. There is something fascinating about a character who pushes and pushes at their ambition, gets there, and then can’t deliver. And then he has what is effectively a nervous breakdown. His mother is dead; Arthur is dead; the French are attacking; the country is in revolt. When he learnt of his mother’s death he was left alone on stage and said the line “My mother dead!” quietly to himself, then he acted this extraordinary sort of collapse, his whole frame slumped down into the throne and you saw, in that private instant, that he was finished. It was an incredibly powerful and intimate moment for the audience to watch this tiny but infinitely powerful gesture on the Swan stage. I always found it quite terrifying to witness, it was as if he sank down into his clothes; you could see him physically shrink. Then we forced this enormous pause and Hubert came in with his news about Arthur’s death, and it was the final nail in the coffin of his sanity. We created a sequence where he came on around his next entrance and haunted the battlefield: he was wandering around in a nightshirt being sick into a bucket in the midst of this chaos.
5. 2006, Josie Rourke production. Richard McCabe (King John), Sam Cox (Hubert). “For Richard, John was someone who was continually teetering on the precipice of an immoral act. King John struggles and struggles for power, attains it, and then finds out he is a terrible king.”
The unhistorical Bastard undergoes a profound personal journey in the play and is the most compelling, charismatic character on stage; he is sometimes seen as Shakespeare’s representative within the play. Is that how you saw him and how did you manage that shift from the exuberant personality of the first three acts to the political realist of the last two?
Doran: I do think that the Bastard provides our window into the Court and how that world operates. He’s initially thrilled by seeing how he’s going to be encouraged to pursue his agenda. It’s very funny to see how he exploits the situation—how this young man realizes how to get on in this environment—but also crucial to see how he matures. The Bastard is introduced into this mad world, is fascinated by how you get on within it and concludes that it’s all about commodity, expediency, about looking after number one. Then the death of Arthur changes the whole nature of the play and changes the Bastard’s view of how the world works. He develops from being an opportunist to become to some extent the moral center of the play.
6. 2001, Gregory Doran production. Guy Henry (King John), Jo Stone-Fewings (Bastard). “[T]he Bastard provides our window into the Court and how that world operates.… It’s very funny to see how he exploits the situation—how this young man realizes how to get on in this environment—but also crucial to see how he matures.”
There’s an extraordinary scene conducted entirely in the dark, in the “eyeless night,” where the Bastard meets Hubert, who of course has been through his own moral journey in deciding whether or not to carry out the blinding of Prince Arthur. The two of them meet trying to find their way to each other. It was a wonderful metaphor, demonstrating perhaps the difficulty and necessity of finding your ethical route through a very complex political quagmire. I thought that one scene gave an insight into a deeper reality of the play, one that transcended the sometimes cartoon versions of it that we had previously seen.
Rourke: I think that the journey that he makes is quite an accessible one in the twenty-first century. It’s essentially a filmic one. When we open the play you get what I called a POV Bastard: if it were being told as a film, the narrative would be shot from his point of view. At the top of the play there is a lot of information you need to give to audiences who aren’t necessarily familiar with medieval history, but instead you have to listen to something else, which is the Bastard’s personal history. That’s tricky for audiences, I think. It’s a bit like at the beginning of Henry IV Part I, where there is a really long speech about the crusade and then a shift into something else. It’s a tricky beginning to do.
To continue with the filmic metaphor, if you think of it as his POV and it being shot from his perspective, the idea that he then gets pulled into becoming more and more the protagonist and more and more at the center of the drama is fantastic. Joseph Millson, who played that part, was doubling it with Benedick in Much Ado in the same season. Benedick is another character that starts off as the sort of joker on the periphery of events and then gets personally pulled in because of something that happens to him. Having already played Benedick that season Joe had become used to making that leap from someone who is on the periphery commenting, to someone who is driving the plot and who is at the center of the story. I think that’s a story that audiences really understand; a regular guy, who wears his ordinariness in a very public way, suddenly winds up over the course of the play having to fight for England and everything it stands for in the midst of a rebellion. If you pitch that as a movie, someone would make that; that’s a good journey. Circumstances changing around a character, and then the character changing because of those circumstances, is a very playable thing for an actor.
Women play central roles in both dynastic and personal terms. Unusually there are three mothers in the play but in each case the mother/son relationship is seen as problematic: affection is compromised by self-interest. How did you find these relationships worked theatrically?
Doran: John’s mother, Elinor, is the power behind the throne. Lady Falconbridge is clearly rather ashamed of having produced a bastard son. And then of course you have Constance, who is terrifying in her self-belief but devastating in her loss. She provides another moment when the play grows and deepens because in “Grief fills the room up of my absent child” she produces one of the most harrowing and beautiful speeches about the loss of a child that I know of. It’s an incredibly beautifully written speech and must have come from a deep place within Shakespeare. I suspect the death of his own son must have affected how he came to write that speech.
Rourke: There are three mothers in the play. You only see two of them, but we also put in Isabella of Angoulême, who is Henry’s mother, so you get another mother and son moment. Eleanor of Aquitaine is one of the most arresting and important women in history and Sorcha Cusack really enjoyed getting into the meat of that role and playing someone who very clearly could and should be running the show. She had moments of real impatience with her son’s rule. She saw everything and knew everything and was ahead of the game. There is a lot of reversal in the play. Constance reverts from this sort of horrific s
tage mother pushing her son forward towards the throne to a childless, grief-stricken widow. It seems to me a real theme running through that play and that’s why we were interested in having Isabella of Angoulême so you’ve got another instance of a mother ruling through a son. I think actually if they’d just let these women reign, Europe would probably be in a much better place.
Shakespeare made Prince Arthur younger than the historical character, presumably for his own dramatic purposes; what problems did this pose, working with such a young actor (or more than one) and how did you overcome them? How did you manage the harrowing scenes of his threatened torture and then his death?
Doran: Initially I was very wary about it. I have been very wary about child actors on the stage. He does have to be young: it’s absolutely deliberate Shakespeare’s making him younger. I was very lucky that Barbara Roberts, who looked after the children’s casting, found and nurtured two particularly good young boys—one of whom, Joshua McGuire, is now playing Hamlet at the Globe. It was as important a role for me to cast as John, the Bastard, or Constance.
In this cynical world of shifting allegiances, Prince Arthur’s selfless love stands as a really important parameter. We had defined the moment of Arthur’s death as needing to jolt the play, to be a real shock. The designer Stephen Brimson Lewis managed to produce one of the most spectacular moments of shock that we’ve seen in the Swan: Arthur, all of twelve or thirteen years old, seemed to walk along the rail of the top gallery and then to fall from there to his death, a distance of some eighteen feet (5.5 meters). I remember a lot of mothers in the audience clutching their neighbors, terrified by the vulnerability of this young child. Of course it was all a rather brilliantly devised trick of substituting a dummy just at the moment when the child fell with a sickening thud onto the stage. But it did cause a shock and often a scream in the audience, which I think was required in the play: it’s almost like you’re being slapped by that moment.
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