Let kings assemble . . .
Equity Showcase, through September 28
by Louis Lopardi . . . September 13, 2003
The stories of King John and Richard the Third are respectively the most convoluted and the most direct of stories. While Shakespeare merely bowed to popular belief in the latter, the former is about as nonfactual as he ever got with history. This was not only the Prince John who was the bane of the legendary "Robin Hood's" existence during the absence of Richard I (the Lion Heart), he was, more importantly, the King John who signed the Magna Carta - but nothing of that is mentioned in the play. King John - like Henry VIII - is in fact entirely outside the concerns of the other histories.
Attempting to untangle part of the plot for us, the Frog & Peach production featured a narrator who gave a brief summation - seldom a happy solution, and an ungainly theatrical one. A simple program insert would have sufficed, or a modernist transfer of latter speeches from the play itself could in a way pre-configure the "prologue" device which Shakespeare shortly began adding to the histories just a few plays down the road. (Think of the fun one could have, gleefully fighting this out with a dramaturg.)
The summations are there. The grief-stricken Constance in her "mad scene" puts it with powerful Zen eloquence: "My name is Constance; I was Geffrey's wife; Young Arthur is my son and he is lost." The aforementioned Geffrey is the murdered Richard I (Goeffrey Plantagenet), and Arthur her just murdered adolescent son - the legal heir to the throne. Karen Lynn Gorney played the distraught Constance, first with understatement, then with fire. She has a clarion control of emotional effect. The venom was palpable in her rebuttal to King Philip "He talks to me that never had a son!" (Would that it were augmented by varied pacing in the dialogue to follow.) There was real moment in her "...let kings assemble" speech from Act 3.
James Carroll, the French King Phillip, lent grandeur to the hand joining scene as he begged the Cardinal to "impose some order" on the madness they were caught up in. (A tellingly contemporary sentiment in wanting the powers above to make all aright again - and what more powerful force than the Church?) There was a tragic eloquence to his painting the image of hands (and soon troops) being "overstain'd with slaughter's pencil." He had the man well enough, and suffered only from an occasional lapse of class. (This is the king who had already had a long, love-hate relationship with Richard I.)
It is the dim period at the birth of the Thirteenth Century, and in Shakespeare's play as in other sources the players are drawn crudely, their characters writ with large crayons. The play is albeit a treasure trove of medieval manners and vernacular which Shakespeare was as much a scholar of as usurper. The so-called "Bastard" - Richard's eldest son, also named Philip - is knighted by John in a wise political move (confusingly enough as "sir Richard ... Plantagenet"), with the powerful Elinor recognizing in him her grandchild. Rob Sedgwick played this most colorful of characters with absolute conviction, making child's play of the complex tangle of loyalties, aspirations and belief systems which comprised him - we could actually see him winnowing them down to, for him, simple choices. It was an utterly consistent performance that still managed to grow as the play progressed. Hanna Hayes gave us a remarkable "Eleanor" conveying with ease the mother of two great kings - and one who knows how to handle John.
King John is an enigma, appropriately played so by Jerry Griffin, who was believable rather than flip (the easier way) when dealing with John's kingly decisions. One heard in his referring to Cardinal Pandulph (an excellent Hal Smith Reynolds) as "this meddling priest" a foreshadowing of Henry's plea to be rid of Becket in Anouilh's play. Indeed, echoes of that infamous and earlier king-ordered murder vibrate through much of this play: Mr. Griffin was at his most believable with his wryly manipulative speech on "it is the curse of Kings"(...to have their orders taken too literally).
The murder-plotting scene between John and Hubert really needed coaching, to vary the pacing - to show the awful moment when Hubert realizes his task. Shakespeare made it easier for us by the time he wrote the similar scenes in Richard III. This Hubert, Joe Corey, was an interesting actor making intelligent choices. The character as written is simply hard for me to understand. In the end, John, febrile, leaves all to the loyal Bastard to run. (I am curious, but feel it wasn't until Lear's Edmund that the term became entrenched in the popular imagination as utterly synonymous with evil, - as personality rather than bloodline.) In latter plays Shakespeare will make much of a leader's inability to act.
Derek Devareaux was electrifying as Lewis the Dauphin, adjusting his range of depth and reach of instrument throughout the play; - incredibly, moment by moment in some scenes. This can give the character a schizoid quality when overdone; Mr. Devareaux treads the line; dangerously. Oddly, it is this element of danger in an actor's performance from which true theatre excitement springs.
Lynnea Benson's direction was at its best in the intimate moments - bringing out quickly and simply what is truly driving the moment between two or even three characters (as in the Cardinal and the two kings, for example) but lacked the sense of theatre moment - the big scene, the mis-en-scène. Obvious act-endings simply were not. In a way, not belaboring the dialogue leading up to such moments is what gave the performance its welcome transparency. But surely a compromise can be made.
Bradley Thompson lit all with a basically muted color scheme, somewhat cooler in the second half. Wisely, the beautiful ceiling illuminations in this church-basement theater were directly lit during the Cardinal's scenes, lending their warmth and credibility to the action below, and reminding us perhaps that - lit or unlit, seen or unseen - the Church is a dominant and manipulative force to be reckoned with in this political universe.