EDWARD III

Bank Street Theatre, 155 Bank St., between West and Washington streets, (212) 971-4739. Through July 22.

A Shakespearean historical play, full of battles and plots and an attempted seduction by a horny king of the wife of one of his generals, is having its American premiere.

Let me explain.

The chronicle play “Edward III” has existed since 1596, credited to an anonymous author. It was not thought to be by William Shakespeare.

Recently, it was decided that certain scenes are so witty, so full of echoes of early Shakespeare, that only one explanation makes sense.

Shakespeare was beginning his career in the 1590s, and it’s possible he worked on some scenes and may have shaped the whole scattered play for a final airing. The play is today considered Shakespearean in part, and is included in most recent editions of the Bard.

The story is set in the 1340s and deals, in a helter-skelter way, with English campaigns against Scotland and France. The cunning English king is Edward; his son, the bloodthirsty young Prince, is cutting his teeth in these encounters.

In the early Scottish war, Edward is smitten with the Countess of Salisbury, and we get funny, dazzling passages of tutelage in courtly love poetry. But in France, it’s a play of moments and madness that has no center, but with tantalizing aromas of Shakespearean gardens yet to come.

This production can’t seem to make up its mind what kind of play it is. The tattooed Prince is togged in motorcycle-cop gear and played as a sadistic bully. The Countess is done as a screeching airhead. The directors – Heather Anne McAllister and Kelly McAllister – are so eager to express their attitudes of anti-war and anti-monarchism that they don’t bother to present the simple text.

The one gifted actor is co-director Kelly McAllister as King Edward, but he plays the king dementedly, alternately nervous and hysterical in the love scenes and bitter in the rest. This wacko production attempts to give us a deconstruction of a play that is just getting around to being constructed.