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 barons’ 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 thinkKing 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
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 barons’ 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 thinkKing 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
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