[In the following review of Robin Phillips's 1993 production of King John at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Brantley notes the director's focus on John as the central element of the play and praises the performance's psychological insights, but finds its World War I setting unnecessarily confusing.]

Of all of Shakespeare's titular monarchs, poor, weak-willed King John has always been the ungainly step-child. The play that bears his name, a bafflingly amphibious blend of history and tragedy, was seldom performed in this century until relatively recently. And most productions and analyses of The Life and Death of King John have tended to emphasize the more dynamic character of the Bastard, the patriotic son of Richard the Lion-Hearted, over John himself, who has all of Macbeth's infirmity of purpose with none of his more Olympian qualities.

The great interest of Robin Phillips's emotionally gripping, if somewhat muddled, production at the Stratford Festival here is that it makes John its unconditional center and, in doing so, presents him as a disturbingly pertinent statesman for our times. Macbeth and Richard III, with their portraits of raveningly ambitious, Machiavellian heads of state, were the perfect choices for politically slanted revivals in the paranoiac heyday of the late 60's and early 70's, the years of Johnson and Nixon. King John, on the other hand, has vital resonance for an age that often sees its politicians less as monsters than mediocrities, distanced from greatness by all-too-pedestrian frailities.

As cannily played by Nicholas Pennell, a veteran of the festival, John is undone not so much by heroic hubris as by an almost childish ineffectuality. He has been brought up by a domineering mother to assume all the postures of majesty. Yet, forced to take charge of a byzantine territorial dispute with France that threatens his very possession of the English crown, he eventually turns into a peevish mixture of willfulness and insecurity, manifested in tantrums and literal weakness of the knees. By this production's end the shell of regal arrogance has shattered, exposing a petulant, touchingly confused soul.

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The cornerstone relationship between John and his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Janet Wright), is dominant in this version. In the play's early court and war-council scenes, John cannot deliver a single declaration of strategy without glancing quickly to Eleanor for corroboration. Moving like the prow of a ship and clutching a walking cane as though it were a weapon, Ms. Wright is the mother as soldier of the text, glowing with smug martial strength. Clearly, John draws his energy to act entirely from her, and once he learns of her death, in the play's second half, he is launched on a frenzied flight toward self-dissolution.

On other levels, this production is less satisfying. The thematic development of King John hinges crucially on the evolution of the character of Philip the Bastard, whom John makes his chief aide after learning he is his illegitimate nephew, from tentative, wry self-interest to nationalistic selflessness. As played with flashing charisma by Stephen Ouimette, this Philip is a fixed moral polestar from the play's beginning. And he delivers the famous early soliloquy on commodity, or calculating self-interest, less as a groping meditation than a trenchant choral commentary. This does have the effect of shifting the focus even more to John, but it also robs the production of an essential element of complexity.

King John shares with the chronicle plays a very broad canvas, with a more cynical emphasis on how commodity shapes the motives of an international host of feuding characters. Unfortunately, Mr. Phillips is not always clear in defining their relative places on the political spectrum.

It doesn't help that the play has been staged with costumes, settings and music that evoke World War I. This allows Mr. Phillips to create some ironically genteel tableaux of strife and carnage, which recall Joan Littlewood's “Oh! What a Lovely War,” and much smoldering stoicism over tea cups and brandy snifters. But it generates unnecessary confusion in a play in which France and England are antagonists, not allies, and the Papacy could still bring an English king to his knees.

Mr. Phillips has clearly tried to impose some sort of teleological-historical pattern on this sprawling play by underlining significant turns of plot with swells of astral music, pools of light and miked amplification of key spoken lines, as well as by grouping his characters in configurations that suggest pieces on a chessboard. This can occasionally be illuminating; more often, it is simply picturesque.

The director is far better on psychological specifics, particularly the poignant clashes of public and personal identities. The startled look of dispossession on the face of John's niece, Blanche (Michelle Fisk), as she hears herself being clinically discussed as a pawn in a politically expedient marriage, is truly heart-breaking. And as Constance, the mother of a child with a fatal claim to John's throne, Goldie Semple is superb, a fierce portrait of patrician poise unraveling beneath the conflicting burdens of maternal ambition and maternal solicitude. As Hubert, the reluctant assassin torn between compassion and soldierly allegiance, Scott Wentworth provides another affecting study in ambivalence, a trait that, appropriately, haunts this entire production.