Thursday, May 29, 2008

Cardenio and King John

We attended the press opening of Cardenio on May 14 and the opening performance of King John on May 18. Both plays are trading primarily on Shakespeare’s name to sell tickets, but they could hardly be more different.

King John, written by Shakespeare, presents a steady pattern of relationships forming and unforming. The dispute over Falconbridge’s inheritance at the start of the play serves as a miniature of the struggle for the throne, and his shift in familial loyalty is echoed in several later conflicts. We see the English nobles forced to give up on their king, the French king forced to abandon an alliance with England by the demands of the church, and an intense scene when the young Arthur pleads with Hubert for mercy. The pain of torn loyalties is best given voice by John’s niece Blanch who, after being given in marriage to the French Dauphin to create a peace, sees her two families going back to war:

Which is the side that I must go withal?
I am with both: each army hath a hand;
And in their rage, I having hold of both,
They swirl asunder and dismember me.
This production by the Actors’ Shakespeare Project contrasts the coolly remote power couple of John and his mother Eleanor with the prone-to-hysteria Constance and her son Arthur. Casting Hubert as a woman adds a third maternal relationship when Hubert is given charge over Arthur, as well as adding some fascinating texture to John’s relationship with Hubert. The ASP also adds layering by staging the production in the basement of the Episcopal cathedral. The Catholic cardinal’s destructive meddling throughout the play foreshadows the foundation of the Church of England, and staring at the bare foundation walls of the cathedral brings that context, which was so immediate to Shakespeare’s audiences, closer to a modern audience.

The casting is mixed. Sarah Newhouse as Hubert is inherently interesting, and my reactions to her with Arthur are deepened by having seen her as Macduff and Lady Macduff in the fall. Bill Barclay gives a stand-out performance as the Bastard, neatly balancing his combined function in the play as dramatic agent and clown (an unusual combination for Shakespeare). John Kuntz as the Catholic cardinal grows more and more creepy simply by maintaining a constant smile as everyone else suffers, and Joel Colodner is a regal, powerful, and human King Philip. Khalil Flemming is a fine Arthur, grown by circumstance beyond the character’s or the actor’s years. Most of the rest of the cast is unfortunately forgettable.

Cardenio, written by Stephen Greenblatt and Charles Mee and having its debut at the American Repertory Theatre, is intended to evoke pieces of Shakespeare’s comedies rather than his histories. Some of the sketch comedy in Cardenio is wonderful, particularly Remo Airaldi’s one-man presentation of the play-within-a-play and Nathan Keepers’ solo wedding dance routine. I would not expect the standout scenes in a farce to be the ones where only one actor is on stage, but it highlights the relentless narcissism of the characters in Cardenio. Using simplified themes from a freshman Shakespeare course to plot a disjointed choose-your-own-Umbrian-adventure, Greenblatt and Mee abjure all attempts to evoke Shakespeare’s brilliance with language and with human characters, preferring to present an exaggeratedly negative and static view of contemporary marriage and courting (in that order). In three hours and a cast of 12, there should be time enough to reveal a character’s depth, or for a character to develop some depth. But that would presumably get in the way of lengthy parodies of the Overheard Conversation scene or the Surprising Arrival scene. The set is rich and lovely, but the writing definitely is not. Credit for the incredibly funny parts clearly belongs to the individual actors.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Was the production of King John funny? The one production of the play that I have seen played it as a blackly comic satire on self-interest in politics. This worked well, partly because the actor playing King John was a comic genius: (a few readers of this note may remember him as Cloten from the RSC Cymbeline of 1996 or so). Just curious as to whether that element was present in this production at all: it sounds like not.

There is a great play waiting to be written with the lost play Cardenio as its subject. Since I have fantasies of one day writing that play, I am perversely relieved that this play was not it.

Michael said...

The production was done as a tragedy, though the Bastard had a lot of laugh lines and the Catholic cardinal was creepily amusing. No humor from John beyond occasional sarcasm.

Michael said...

Oh, I really want to see the Cardenio-centered play that you’ll write. And not to distract you from that, but shouldn’t we put out a nicely designed edition of Winter’s Tale with a preface from you? That would be so much more fun to work on than, well, whatever it is I do for work normally.

Anonymous said...

Well, you may be waiting a long time, since I probably have a half a dozen articles and the requisite second monograph needed for promotion to full professor (assuming promotion and tenure works out and I stay in the profession) in line ahead of the play, which, since I have never written a play, I have no confidence that I could actually produce. But I'd like to try it.

I like the idea of a _Winter's Tale_ edition, but there are more editions of Shakespeare than teachers and scholars could possibly need, and producing a well-edited scholarly text is a huge amount of trouble.

If you want to start a line of Shakespeare editions, there's probably a market for them, though . . .