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. Atthe 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
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. Atthe 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
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