THE THEATRE
- King John." By William Shakespeare. At the New Theatre.
THIS is one of those rare Shakespearian productions which recreate the play, and it is an infinite pity that London will lose it again at the end of the week. The credit must be divided between Mr. Tyrone Guthrie, the producer, the fine cast which carries no weak tail at all—no graceful extras or unmelodious heralds, and even the designer, Mr. Frederick Crooke—who has created a sense of glory out of a few flags and scraps of carpet material. But the producer must take the chief share, for who could have expected this feeling of continuous excitement at what most people think one of the dullest of Shakespeare's plays? With an unerring sense of time, with a critic's choice of cuts, and with groupings which show a fine poetic insight (that conference of the noses in a shadowy corner, the long thin pointed one and the vulture's beak, when John and Philip come to dubious terms: the agonising stretch of Blanch's hands torn between loyalties in a meaningless war : the kings sagging in their soldiers' arms during the equal battle). Mr. Guthrie detaches the real theme of the play from the red herrings of history and Arthurian pathos— the theme of the plain man lost in a world of cunning statesmen swapping pacts of non-aggression. Philip the Bastard is magni- ficently played by Mr. George Hagan (I have never heard verse better spoken), who brings out the darkening tragedy of honesty tied despairingly to evil because no other allegiance claims him, finding relief in bloodshed alone. And behind, directing all with his white eyeballs, is Mr. Ernest Milton's evil melancholic king whose jokes smell of brimstone like the squibs Marlowe tied to the devils' tails. Mr. Milton is an actor with trying mannerisms, but here is the part that fits exactly every Gothic twist of voice and gesture. How beautifully he expresses the sadness of the damned and jesting soul, speaking of " that idiot laughter" or praying in a burst of melancholy enlightenment for all the dead who are to die suddenly and unprepared in his dynastic battle.
GRAHAM GREENE.
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