[In the following review of Gregory Doran's 2001 Royal Shakespeare Company production of King John, Macaulay commends the strong performances of the cast as well as Doran's fine stewardship of the drama, but suggests that even these could not surmount the plot and pacing weaknesses inherent in Shakespeare's play.]

No Shakespeare play comes round less often than King John. And yet there's never any doubt that all of it—unlike Pericles or Henry VIII, for example—is Shakespeare's work. In every scene, the cut-and-thrust of dialogue, the wonderful alternations of plain talk and lyrical metaphor, the forcefields created simply by bringing dissimilar characters together: all this feels sheer Shakespeare.

Why don't we see King John more often? It has the most famously misquoted line in all of Shakespeare “to paint the lily and to gild refined gold” (usually rendered as “to gild the lily”—many a pedant has waxed hot on that). It has a wide selection of vivid and radically different characters: the unkingly King John with his unpredictable and drastic shifts of temper, the dead King Richard Coeur-de-Lion's impudent bastard son, the militant old Queen mother Eleanor, the furiously grieving Constance (mother of Arthur, rightful heir to the throne by rights of primogeniture), the Pope's wily Legate, eloquent King Philip of France and his highly political Dauphin son, and others.

And there are great scenes that just astound. If there's a single episode for which I would send anyone to the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of this play, it occurs in Act III, scene 4. Constance (Kelly Hunter) has never quit various forms of grief for her wronged and now abducted son Arthur, and the king of France (Geoffrey Freshwater) says to her “You are as fond of grief as of your child”—which, here, pierces with startling psychological acuity. In reply, Constance, looking calmly at him, explains promptly and quietly why he's right: “Grief fills the room up of my absent child / Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me.” A superlative speech. Hunter, an actress capable of amazing emotional intensity, is here at her most simple and heartrending.

Still, even if the RSC production is good enough to make you feel that King John should come round more often, it can't make it a great play. The problem principally is to do with plot: Shakespeare's focus keeps shifting awkwardly. And Gregory Doran's production worked better in Stratford-upon-Avon's glorious Swan theatre. Now that it's arrived at the Pit, the acting is less focused, so that after the first 40 minutes we feel a drop in tension and suspense, and a good many people (myself included) are in need of an interval coffee.

But there is not a weak performance here, and at least six of the actors deserve to be written large in the annals of King John in the theatre: Guy Henry, so hilariously, pathetically ignoble and volatile as King John, the fight-loving Queen Eleanor of Alison Fiske (exaggerated in her long-breathed snarlings but mightily enjoyable), Kelly Hunter's Constance, Geoffrey Freshwater's strongly phrased account of the awkwardly placed King Philip, the personable, impish bastard of Jo Stone-Fewings, and David Collings's oily papal legate.

Not all the RSC's child actors are strong, but young Jonathan Bailey is every bit as noble, as bright and as touching as Prince Arthur should be. Stephen Brimson Lewis's designs fall gladly upon the eye. I think this is a finer production than Deborah Warner's 1988 one: its faults are Shakespeare's, but one remembers chiefly its great virtues, which are Shakespeare's too.