SOURCE: Marks, Peter. Review of King John. The New York Times CXLVIII, no. 51,424 (5 February 1999): E8.

In the following review of Michael Kahn's 1999 production of King John at the Shakespeare Theater in Washington, D.C., Marks praises the contemporary relevancy of the play's political conflicts, power struggles, and questions of legitimate authority, while acknowledging a flatness in many of the individual performances.

The work, [King John], though popular in Shakespeare's time, is widely regarded today as a minor history play. The King is a weak, vacillating monarch, tied to the apron strings of his fearsome mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and with a contestable claim to the English throne.

But Michael Kahn, the Shakespeare's longtime artistic director, wisely stages King John as a turbulent epic, with filmic freeze-frame battle scenes that recall Braveheart and Kenneth Branagh's Henry V. And he locates in the unlikely alliance of the craven ruler—deftly...