Simmer down, all you Edward III haters out there. Washington Shakespeare Co.’s production of the sort-of classic is nothing to scoff about.

Truth be told, though the recently-christened Shakespeare play is often met with disdain in literary circles, D.C. audiences are probably more likely to react along the lines of “Wait, Shakespeare wrote about an Edward?” than anything else (to our credit, even scholars aren’t sure). Washington Shakespeare Company‘s production does a nice job of making this occasionally dry, good-but-not-great work accessible and entertaining.

A lot of the credit for this goes to Bruce Alan Rauscher, a commanding but entirely human Edward if there ever was one. Rauscher’s got the booming voice and authoritative gait one might expect in a king, but is all the more engaging when dealing with far more trivial matters than those of state, like his attempts to dictate a clumsy love poem to the forbidden Countess of Salisbury (Karen Novack). Rauscher can communicate as much with a dropped line or a raised eyebrow than with any dramatic soliloquy, and it is during those times when he is absent from the stage, such as during most of the second half of this production, when the work’s flaws are most palpable.