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 beheavy 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
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 beheavy 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
Similar Books
