ONE of Shakespeare’s less popular plays, King John has been described as the most satirical of his histories.

And, as the global scene politically increasingly resembles the goings-on in an exceptionally unruly school yard, Eleanor Rhode’s production attempts to capture that particular spirit of the times.

A radio newscast heralds the entry of Rosie Sherry’s tentative, childlike king. He’s like the first-comer to a kids’ party which is to turn into the bear garden disaster parents dread and the political power struggles at the heart of all Shakespeare’s histories is here played out as the ensuing action descends further into chaos.

After the rival English and French armies, contending over the legal right to the English crown, set up a boxing match in which a reluctant audience is encouraged to take sides, a wedding celebration degenerates into a food-throwing fight, followed later by a jolly good punch-up.

Even when the severed head of the Duke of Austria is delivered by Michael Abubakar’s pint-size Scottish Bastard — the satirical voice of the play — it looks like something fished out of the play cupboard.

When these grown-up kids aren’t fighting, and sometimes when they are, they break into dance routines as if they can’t be still for a moment.

It all sounds, and many found it to be, fun. But only in the relatively few quieter moments, as when Charlotte Randle’s Constance plaintively expresses the tortured grief of a mother at the loss of her son, does the language survive the theatrical imagery.

And the Bastard’s central recognition that “commodity” —  a term Shakespeare well understood before Marx’s analysis — is “the bias of the world” goes for little in the general melee.

This is essentially directors’ theatre, full of disparate ideas and images which never fully cohere into significant meaning. Poor old Shakespeare.

Runs until March 21, box office: rsc.org.uk