[In the following excerpted review, Tucker assesses Gregory Doran's Royal Shakespeare Company production of King John, praising Doran's emphasis on the plight of the innocent and finding that the production as a whole was appropriately dark in tone.]

Although often produced during the nineteenth century, King John was unjustly neglected in the twentieth. Certainly not among Shakespeare's best plays, King John forces its audience, nevertheless, to look at unpleasant truths about the political world that many persons would like to ignore.

For all the shakers and movers of the play—John himself; his mother Eleanor; the French king Philip; Louis, the Dauphin; and Cardinal Pandulph—are utter Machiavellians. The love of power and the love of gain (Commodity, as Philip the Bastard, terms it) dominate the world. Throughout the play these and other characters plot and counterplot against one another. The result is a world reduced to barbarity.

This savagery is made graphic on the stage by battlefield alarms, charges by frenzied flag-wavings partisans, and, perhaps most grimly, by English soldiers playing football with the Duke of Austria's head.

True to the text, director Gregory Doran's production emphasizes the plight of the innocent, those unable to fight back or survive even emotionally in a world of Realpolitik: Blanche, John's niece, married to forge a jerrybuilt pact, engulfed in a spotlight as the alliance crumbles and she is surrounded by marching soldiers; the child Arthur discovering Austria's head and vomiting; Constance, the boy's mother, lamenting his capture, insisting that she is not insane even as she pulls out her hair.

Guy Henry's John is not a cardboard tyrant, but a complex individual. At the play's beginning we discover an immature, if not jejune, monarch. He rushes at the last moment into an audience with the French ambassador and fumbles in putting on his crown. The tool of his mother Eleanor, he is inept and insecure. By turn he is foolish, arrogant, unstable, savage, vindictive, and pathethic, slipping further and further into a sandpit of his own and others' delving as he struggles to climb free. Curiously enough, the character of John does not appear frequently on the stage, but Henry's embodiment of him looms large and casts a deep shadow.

Equally worthy of mention is the Bastard, John's cousin, the illegitimate son of Richard Coeur de Lion. A scalliwag, a rascal, a trickster, and a satirist, he rails at the hypocrisy and self-aggrandizement of the other characters. His garb, usually a faded dusty leather jacket, sets himself off from the “Establishment,” yet, as he freely admits, he is as greedy as any of the others.

One of the intriguing ironies of this drama is the inner metamorphosis of this character. As John's fortunes and power skid downward, the Bastard's better nature rises to the fore. It is he who rallies flagging spirits and encourages the English to fight against the French invaders. Jo Stone-Fewings ably brings this character to life.

This version's bare staging and melange of medieval and modern clothing underscore the relevance of the play to any and all eras. King John is indeed a dark play, and the RSC production allows us to enter its shadows.