King John (Vol. 88) | Ian Shuttleworth (review date 30 March 2001)
Ian Shuttleworth (review date 30 March 2001)
SOURCE: Shuttleworth, Ian. Review of King John. Financial Times (30 March 2001): 18.
[In the following review, Shuttleworth suggests that Gregory Doran's 2001 Royal Shakespeare Company production of King John resolved some, but not all, of the play's problems of characterization and structural unity.]
While Northern Broadsides beat the Royal Shakespeare Company to the punch by a couple of weeks with the first big production of King John in a decade or more, Gregory Doran's production in the Swan at Stratford is the more watchable; moreover, the problems with the play are not fictitious, and Doran goes some—though not the whole—way towards resolving them.
The main “problem”, compared to Shakespeare's other histories, is that John is neither a good nor bad king, a good nor bad person, nor let down by a single tragic flaw. This, for once, is not a history play...
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