KING OF SHADOWS

The heady thrill of acting at Shakespeare's original Globe Theater. The ripe smell of the groundlings crowded in a mob below the stage. The exhilaration of meeting the devoted Queen Elizabeth behind the scenes. Nat Field can barely imagine how that all might feel as he prepares to accompany his director to London to perform A Midsummer Night's Dream at London's modern Globe reproduction theater. Jim Dale, himself a Shakespearean actor, and now familiar to many as the versatile reader of the Harry Potter titles, reads King of Shadows forcefully, with the intensity demanded by a story that employs bubonic plague as a time-travel device to transport a contemporary boy to 1599. Dale's accent, which leans slightly toward a drawl when Nat is speaking, is, nevertheless, predominantly British, and works less effectively for American secondary characters, though superbly for Londoners. T.B. (c) AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine [Published: DEC/JAN 01]