The director of this production, Helen McCabe, went to some trouble to inform us how very seldom King John has been performed over the centuries. Before the celebrated revival by the RSC last year you’d have to skip back in time to 1944 to see its last professional outing, and this is no coincidence, for it tends to be revived at times of national crisis thanks to some rousing patriotic set pieces. This scarcity is not, she assures us, because it is a rubbishy early effort by the young William (probably written before 1594) but just that it has been eclipsed by the more assured and flashy later history, and, well, all the other plays. I agree with her that it is a very powerful piece and thoroughly fascinating to watch as well as to perform. It has no fewer than four cracking parts for women: Queen Eleanor, Princess Constance, Princess Blanche, and Lady Faulconbridge. It has a powerfully emotional almost-torture scene, in which drippy young Arthur masterfully persuades his gaoler Hubert not to poke his eyes out with a hot iron – and this is as good as anything that came later. It has some startlingly beautiful poetry and intensely dramatic speeches; it has a very appealing hero, rather engagingly known in the printed text as 'Bastard'; it has some of Shakespeare’s most searing examples of the volatility of policy: great men puffed hither and thither, their loyalties swayed by “commodity” (a great speech early in the play from Bastard) or manipulated by the reptilian papal legate Pandulph; and most of all, for the entertainment of the audience, it has several dry runs for characters who appear more fully formed in later plays. Bastard himself isn’t quite sure, when he first appears in Act 1, whether he’s a goodie or a baddie; he appears cheerfully self-centred, opportunistic and cynical at first, but by the end of the play is almost the only consistently loyal and steadfast male character. The dodgy half of him develops into Edmund in King Lear ('Now God, stand up for bastards!') and the noble and loyal half of him turns up in the same play as Kent. As for King John, here played as someone who just can’t hack it when things don’t go his way and becomes peevish in adversity – his conspiratorial relationship with his mother and his frankly comical attempts to recruit a hit-man finger him as an early, slightly out-of-focus version of Macbeth. And so on.

TipTop Productions benefits from a cheerful young cast who tackle the text with great gusto. Their costumes were pleasingly in period, though it was observable that some people’s chain mail hauberks were fastened to their surcoats with safety pins. Mwenya Kawesha was a gorgeous but disturbingly pouty and flirty Queen Eleanor (who was after all an eighty year old grandma in 1202); Alex Bowles as John painted a convincing portrait of an intelligent, neurotic man who simply lacked the charm and stamina to make a success in politics, and the moral core to be a decent human being. James Carpenter was an hilarious Duke of Austria, wearing what appeared to be a pyjama case in the shape of a lion on his head; Arden Moscati was a delightful Bastard – witty, confiding, indignant, warm; Guy Westwood was deliciously perplexed as King Philip of the rumpled brow; Chloe Sharrocks touchingly distraught as the bereaved virago Constance; Verity Thomas as princes Arthur and Henry made use of an extraordinary facial dexterity in simultaneously doing an upside down smile and making her eyebrows slant upwards until, had they met, they would have formed a perfect right angle in the centre of her forehead, and her death scene as Arthur was something I shall treasure in my memory. The only teensy disappointment was Ben Forrest as Cardinal Pandulph, but only because this part really cries out for someone older and deeply corrupt, with a wheezy, very upper class, sly, suggestive voice – the late lamented Ian Richardson would have done it perfectly. This Pandulph was cold and magisterial - a perfectly legitimate interpretation. And the battle scenes were excruciatingly funny – fight choreography after the school of Wimbledon, with every thwack accompanied by perfectly synchronized loud grunts. All in all, it was extremely entertaining, and some parts very touching.