[In the following review, Isherwood praises Karin Coonrod's Theatre for a New Audience production of King John for its clarity of direction, but notes that the production lacked conceptual inspiration.]

King John is one of Shakespeare's least admired history plays, and as you watch its meandering, unfocused plot unfold in fits and starts, it's pretty easy to see why. It's also, naturally enough, rarely staged, so Shakespeare completists may want to check out the Theater for a New Audience production Off Broadway, directed with admirable clarity if no particular conceptual inspiration by Karin Coonrod.

The title character hardly seems to deserve a play, let alone a country. Although the plot doggedly details his fight to retain the English crown, you get the feeling this diffident ruler wouldn't know what to do with it if he managed to secure it. Indeed, as soon as his mother dies, the mourning King John wanders off the field of battle and vaguely dies, “poisoned by a monk,” of all risible demises for a Shakespearean king.

The character's uncompelling nature—he'd be a classic passive-aggressive type today—is emphasized in Ned Eisenberg's portrayal. Eisenberg affects a contemporary swagger and puts the accent on the king's tendency toward surly laughter as an ever-useful riposte. But he doesn't succeed in making any emotional sense of John's endless shilly-shallying. Ambivalence is often a deeply humanizing trait in Shakespeare, but it doesn't do the trick for this distasteful character, who never seems to have the courage of his convictions, justly motivated or not.

The Bard never warms much to John, so he supplied a more charismatic figure to engage the audience's imagination: Philip Falconbridge, later knighted Richard Plantagenet, but more catchily known as the Bastard, for his informal relationship to his father King Richard. This intriguing character is credited by Harold Bloom with being the first example of the playwright's “invention of the human,” the grand phrase that gives Bloom's recent study of Shakespeare its title.

The Bastard certainly is the most complex figure on the stage, though it's indicative of the play's problems that he's least interesting when he's taking part in the action, loyally assisting John in his machinations to thwart attempts by the French to secure the throne for John's nephew Arthur.

When he stands outside it, wryly musing on the “commodity” (self-interest) that allows men to embrace a former enemy, to put aside honor for the sake of ambition, the Bastard compels our attention in ways that the joining of swords never does. Coonrod's staging, with an assist by Christopher Akerlind's stark lighting, reminds us often that this character stands apart from and above the action, giving voice to Shakespeare's mordant musings on the uncertainty of royal fates and the fluidity of men's allegiances.

Derek Smith, an actor memorable for his larger-than-life comic performances, brings an arsenal of sardonic latter-day inflections to his soliloquies, savoring the Bastard's rich taste for irony. Elsewhere his floridly theatrical tendencies could use some taming. The integrity of his performance isn't aided by vaguely ghoulish makeup and a spiky hairdo that give him a distinct resemblance to Robert Smith of the '80s gothic-rock band the Cure. (P. K. Wish's costumes generally seem medieval by way of '80s MTV.)

There are some pungent contributions from minor players. Pamela Nyberg has a pair of scorching moments—one in sorrow, one in anger—as Lady Constance, mother of the young Arthur, who is eventually captured by John and meets the end that young princes in Shakespeare tend to meet. Myra Carter brings arresting, prickly eccentricity to the role of John's belligerent mother Eleanor.

Most of the actors speak the verse intelligibly (no small thing) if not always beautifully, though they are rarely given enough scope to create memorable characterizations. And Coonrod moves us through the plot's frequent reversals and implausibilities in a straightforward manner.

There is, however, no disguising the baldness of Shakespeare's dramaturgy at times. “Here comes the holy legate of the pope,” says a character at one point, announcing a very dramatically convenient arrival. Conflating several decades of history into a short timespan, Shakespeare's endlessly fertile imagination for once seems overwhelmed.