| Performance Details | Venue: Friargate Theatre, York Dates: 5th - 9th December 2006 at 7.30pm with a matinee at 2pm on Saturday 9th December. Tickets: £4 - £7 (all Tuesday 5th tickets are £4) Box office: 01904 613 000 |
Seeing a rare work of Shakespeare’s should be like uncovering a never-seen-before work of art; thrilling – even if the artefact itself doesn’t prove priceless. The York Shakespeare Project’s lacklustre revival of King John, however, manages to make the audience reluctant witnesses to a play that would be better left gathering dust in the theatrical closet. King John is the ninth undertaking by the YSP, a local amateur drama company that aims to put on all Shakespeare’s play in a twenty-year period. Superficially, it's got all the basic elements of a Bard classic: the fatally misguided monarch (King John), a rival heir (his nephew Arthur), and a bloody war (involving France and the Pope) for the throne. But while the cast make a respectable attempt to do justice to the text, theirs proves a vague, tentative stab at reconstructing what is supposed to be a deliciously gruesome medieval plot. | "the lesser male characters dance across the stage in their bedroom slippers, wielding plastic toy, ketchup-smudged swords" | |
The lights go up – and down – on a bare stage that’s meant, according to the director’s notes, to “enhance the bleakness of King John’s disintegrating mind”. Unfortunately, it only works to expose some comically dismal performances. King John’s voice booms with the authority of a Shakespearean royal, but otherwise he seems devoid of anything resembling personality, giving no hints to his motives or psyche. As a consequence, he is upstaged by even the minor characters. Flashes of believable emotion come from Constance, Arthur’s mother, devastated by her husband’s and son’s deaths, and from the beautiful, blonde Lady Blanche, the King’s niece, who submits with visible to disgust to an undesirable, and purely political, marriage. They are dispensed with soon after the interval, however, giving the lesser male characters an hour to dance across the stage in their bedroom slippers, wielding plastic toy, ketchup-smudged swords and discussing “death” – but with little impression that they’re actually fighting on a battlefield. The small, intimate Friargate theatre made escape from this two-hour performance impossible. When the King dies, poisoned, on his throne, as if asleep in his armchair, his were not the only eyes shut in the house. Joanna Shelley |
