The Globe and Mail, August 23, 2004
No clear victory for warrior king
By: Kamal Al-Solaylee
King John begins with a French ambassador describing the rule of the English monarch as "borrowed majesty." It continues with Philip the Bastard's famous speech of "Mad world, mad kings, mad composition!" Toward the end, the king himself acknowledges the "dangerous majesty" of his rule and the "curse" of kings attended by servants who take their whims for "warrants."
This is not going to be a drama about how a king rose to power or held on to it despite opposition and competing claims, but one where his gradual loss of power forms the real trajectory. And it's not just how he's going down, but who and what he will take with him.
As the play progresses, more and more misfortunes befall those whose lives have been linked with John's. Women and children in particular pay the heaviest price for the slightest sign of ambition: his mother, Queen Eleanor (Martha Henry), dies; Constance (Diane D'Aquila), the mother of Prince Arthur, the king's nephew and rival to the throne, loses her mind; and Blanche (Keira Loughran), his niece, is treated as a "commodity" and practically sold off to the French to avoid a war.
This fall and fall of King John explains the rise and rise of this play in dramatic fortunes of late. It's a play that appeals to an age when, despite claims to the contrary, there can never be such a thing as moral clarity and where absolute authority is associated more with fascist regimes than divine rights of rulers. John may hold the title of the play but its perspective is split among other, more arresting characters. Political savvy and courage belong to Philip the Bastard (Jonathan Goad); emotional centre to Prince Arthur (Aidan Shipley); and hope lies with the "kind soul" of the future King Henry (Ali Alnoor Kara).
Stephen Ouimette plays John in this competent but unimaginatively staged production from director Antoni Cimolino, which opened Friday at the Tom Patterson Theatre in Stratford. Ouimette has the complicated task of creating a character more visible in the reflections of others than in his own image. As he fights to assert his legitimacy (and fights dirty), Ouimette creates a king more morally desperate than incompetent; a king who loses his footing in the political world just as the Bastard's gamble to enter it pays off not in material gains but in increased nobility and honour.
Both Ouimette and Goad chart their characters' different journeys with verve and intelligence. Goad's Bastard is more than the ironic and glib illegitimate son of the former king other productions often reduce him to, and Ouimette revels in the king's psychological disintegration. The best of Cimolino's work as a director lies in focusing the play's vast political scope on the contrasting fortunes of these two men.
A former actor himself, Cimolino can be trusted to elicit every last drop of dramatic tension from scenes that involve two or three characters at a time. A scene where Hubert (Tom McCamus) is about to gouge out the young Arthur's eyes with a hot iron is unbearably tense and effective emotionally. He also gets the best out of a trio of women: Henry, D'Aquila and Loughran.
But all of this would be fine in either the comedies or the more contained tragedies (Othello, for example). King John is a war play and includes not only battle scenes but others where blistering threats, negotiations and arbitrations require defter hands.
The pace of the play's political machine is fast and ruthless, and Cimolino is overwhelmed by it. The result is some of the most hackneyed scenic constructions of battles on stage and a choppiness that confirm that a bigger, unifying picture for a play full of set pieces and speeches has eluded Cimolino.
Actors caught in the middle of these big scenes (Peter Donaldson as King Philip of France or Dion Johnstone as Lewis, the Dauphin) end up looking curiously out of place and dramatically ineffectual. You feel sorry for Ron Kennell who, as Duke of Austria, is asked to play yet another doltishly grotesque character that ends up with his head cut off so soon after a similar turn as Cloten in Cymbeline.
I can't quite determine if Santo Loquasto's set is helping or hindering the director's job. The centrepiece is a modernist metal staircase wheeled in and out, climbed up and down, and moved backward and forward. It hands the director an excuse to add movement to a play where long speeches give the illusion of a static rhythm. But since movement is not his thing, Cimolino's heavy-handedness shows.
He's subtler on the political relevance of the play. While the idea of a leader going to war to assert the legitimacy of his rule has several modern parallels, Cimolino declines to underline them. He has distanced his production enough -- sometimes to an inconsistent mix of old and new, swords and guns, chariots and trains -- by staging this medieval history play in the late Victorian period. The result is a King John whose claim to revival is not the here and now or the historically specific, but the eternal in human nature.