The Life and Death of King John
by William Shakespeare
The Eleventh Hour
Queen’s Theatre, Adelaide. February 25.
Tickets $25 – $49. Bookings BASS 131 246
or adelaidefestival.com.au
Until March 7.

Vs Macbeth
by William Shakespeare
The Border Project and Sydney theatre Company
Odeon Theatre, Adelaide. February 27.
Tickets $16 -$39. Bookings BASS 131 246
Until March 6.
Wharf 2 season opens March 20

Even though, in its fiftieth year, the Adelaide Festival’s theatre program is a diminished one, it has still made room for two of the Bard. Both are re-readings and deconstructions, one is perhaps Shakespeare’s least-known play, the other among his most familiar.

The Life and Death of King John, from the Melbourne company, The Eleventh Hour, is the work of two Williams. Dramaturg William Henderson, with director Anne Thompson and an able cast, has devised a framework for the performance which is a play in itself.

It is Armistice Day, 1918 and led by their mortally wounded captain, four blinded and gas-affected soldiers, three nurses and a padre take shelter in a ruined barn awaiting orders on the cease-fire. They have been rehearsing a play, King John, about a kingdom in anarchy, a disputed monarchy, the capture of a young heir and the duplicitous role of cardinals. It is about tactical misjudgments and futile deaths – all linking events of the 13th century with the divisions and torments of World War One.

With a startling, large-as-life set, in the cavernous Queen’s Theatre, complete with stacks of barrels, wagons and drays, Anne Thompson creates a microcosm of the chequered history of Europe, as well as of the English, Scots and Irish . The players’ thick accents cross all classes and regions, but the set pieces from Shakespeare’s play, even if little known, are timelessly mythic in their implication – Lady Constance (Jane Nolan) bewailing her dead son Arthur, the henchman Hubert (Michaela Cantwell) vexed by his cruel orders to kill him, and the King (the excellent David Tredinnick) regretful for having given them. This is an ambitious, sometimes perplexing, but also rewarding production.

It is the legend (and also a documented fact) of “the Scottish play” that it is unlucky, and in their lively, witty, accident-prone version, the Border Project have built in an array of miscues, prop failures, rigging collapses and costume malfunctions, to remind us that Macbeth’s own ruin is also a result of miscalculations, misreadings and failures of nerve.

Skilfully avoiding mere comic undercutting of the narrative, the incipient calamities give the play an edge, and a sense of doom, that renders Macbeth and his scheming Lady (the outstanding Cameron Goodall and Amber McMahon) almost pitiful in their wickedness. Sam Haren’s inventive direction uses paintball guns for executions, green exit lights for candles and the set itself as the theatre of war. Energised by David Heinrich’s music and sound, this is an intelligent, affecting, and accessible Macbeth that hardly puts a foot wrong.

Murray Bramwell