King John
Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon
****

It is not hard to see why, in its 45-year history, the RSC has produced the intriguingly off-kilter King John just four times.

Described by one commentator as "the runt in the litter" of the history plays, it lacks the welcome comic relief of the Henry IVs, the stirring rhetoric of Henry V and even the thrilling malignity of Richard III.

What it does illustrate, most emphatically in Josie Rourke's gripping production, is that when the centre cannot hold, a realm falls apart.

Quite who or what the centre is remains unclear for, as the old saying goes, King John himself would struggle to win the King John role in the Hollywood film of his life.

His sole concern is to shore up his uncertain claim to the throne against the cross-channel clamour surrounding Arthur, young son of his late elder brother. Perennially embattled, John allows expediency alone to dictate moral, political and religious affiliations.

As befits a monarch who fights to get a word in edgeways and dies what is surely the daftest death - poisoned by a monk - in Shakespearean tragedy, the sardonic-voiced Richard McCabe pulls faces and camps it up, and seems more like a refugee from a comedy, a distant cousin of Malvolio's perhaps. Yet his enemies, such as Tamsin Greig's severe, defiant Constance, are in terrifyingly sharp focus.

The RSC's commendable policy of giving its stable of younger directors a chance - Rupert Goold tackles The Tempest next week - pays handsome dividends here. Rourke's fresh approach, which includes much atmospheric music, serves to illuminate a notoriously dense and difficult text.

She also elicits from her cast verse-speaking of the highest clarity, not least from Joseph Millson, who has already triumphantly proved in this season's Much Ado that he is handy with an iambic pentameter.

Millson, who is surely going to be a big name, revels in the ambiguous role of Philip the Bastard. As he grows in patriotic sentiment, his vowels shift from flat to rounded, but mellifluous speech alone cannot drown out the alarm bells the conclusion sounds, that this essentially unknowable man has been left as the power behind the throne of young King Henry III.

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