Ashland Theatre Note: A Convincing King John

For the second time this year, we’ve had the good fortune to stumble on a really good production of an, ahem, unconvincing Shakespeare play. The first was a stunning presentation of All’s Well that Ends Well, at the Duke on 42^nd Street in New York last spring (link). The second was this afternoon’s performance of King John at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland (link).

It’s an imperfect play, but that is hardly dispositive: every Shakespeare play, even the best of them, is imperfect in some way or other. It is full of neat prefigurings—half-mad Constance anticipates half-mad Lady Macbeth; bastard Faulconbridge anticipates bastard Edmund, and so forth—but this is hardly sufficient to carry it. What makes King John really worthy of attention is that it does have a consistent theme: power, and the search for power, and the mean motives of the contenders. The trouble is that this is a pretty cheerless business, and the play offers virtually no relief: no Touchstone, no Autolycos, not even a mad fool akin to the companion of King Lear. It’s so unrelievedly bleak that the stirring peroration, so much quoted in moments of (British) patriotic excess, appears almost as an affront.

In respect of its tone, one is tempted to group it with Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens. Troilus is perhaps more complex and thus more arresting than the other two; Timon comes as near to being unwatchable as anything in the Shakespeare canon (I guess I have to except Titus Andronicus, which I’ve never actually seen). King John isn’t as arresting as Troilus and not nearly so unwatchable as Timon; with good direction and a competent cast, it can carry conviction and hold the viewer’s attention. Kudos to Ashlandfor suggesting its possibilities.