Richard II

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Barbican on 12 January 2016 as part one of 'King & Country'

This revival of the RSC's 2013 production is directed by Gregory Doran and designed by Stephen Brimson Lewis with music by Paul Englishby. It features David Tennant as King Richard, Jasper Britton as Bolingbroke, Oliver Ford Davies as the Duke of York and Julian Glover as John of Gaunt. As part of the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, it is being presented with the two Henry IV plays and Henry V as a sequence entitled 'King & Country'.

The play opens with a scene in which the king attempts to arbitrate in the quarrel between his cousin Bolingbroke and another courtier Thomas Mowbray. But his authority does not extend so far as to compel these adversaries to a reconciliation and soon the king concedes that a trial by combat must take place. In just a few altercations the fatal gap between assumed authority and personal weakness is laid bare and the train of events leading to Richard's deposition and murder is begun. 

In this production, the ostensible cause of the quarrel is emphasised visually by the presence centre stage of the coffin of the Duke of Gloucester, the king's (and Bolingbroke's) murdered uncle. Mowbray is accused of arranging the murder; the play barely hints at the very real likelihood that the king himself connived at it. But the coffin, and the immboile and black-clad figure of the mourning Duchess draped dramatically across it, focuses our attention on one of the great themes of the play, the degeneration of the state of England. Her grief-stricken speeches concerning the loss of her husband and its political implications, here given weight by Jane Laportaire, again set the personal quarrel of the two courtiers in their wider context.

David Tennant portrays Richard as vain and self-absorbed, effete and even slightly camp in his studied playfulness, but capable of a peremptory sarcasm and anger when affronted. His is a completely compelling performance. It seems impossible that the powerful nobles around him would tolerate his waywardness; but the aura of royalty and presumption of divine favour, so alien to us, was evidently accepted by the court as much as by the king. A powerful reminder of this is the immediate (if swiftly suppressed) outcry by everyone on stage when Mowbray, in panicked awareness that he has lost royal favour, attempts to grasp the king's elbow as Richard turns away from him. This is just one of many fine details in this production which consolidates the medieval world view so vital to understanding the political arc of this play.

The physical contrast between the king, with long flowing hair and either regal attire or Christ-like white garments, and Bolingbroke and the other military men is all too plain. But, cleverly, the likes of Bolingbroke and the young Harry Percy (in the next play to be better known as Hotspur, an excellent Matthew Needham) also have long hair - but it is tightly braided to the back of the head, the soldier's method of dealing with the court fashion. 

The brittle formality of Richard's court is reflected not only in the elaborate courtesy of the speeches (with political aggression only just contained by them) but also in the wonderfully versatile set, a series of fine metal chains suspended at various depths of the stage, onto which lighting can project hints of cathedral naves, castle walls or undifferentiated outdoor spaces. A suspended gantry is lowered at times to represent a gallery from which Richard can view his world, or else the castle battlements from which he must descend as his fortunes crumble.

Around the king various groups attempt to hold their own, or lament their lack of power. Julian Glover, delivering the 'second most famous speech of Shakespeare's' (his own words in the question-and-answer session after the performance), gave a fine rendition of a powerful figure from the past reeling under the blow of his son's exile and his own terminal illness, while Oliver Ford Davies was equally convincing as the vacillating and hapless Duke of York. Richard's court favourites were no match for Bolingbroke's realpolitik when he returns to claim his rights, while the queen, a cipher at the beginning, only belatedly revealed her affection for her husband at the point when he himself was becoming a person rather than a figurehead.

In keeping with the emphasis of the whole cycle on father-son relationships, in this production the character of the Duke of Aumerle (Sam Marks), the son of the Duke of York, was given more prominence, to resonate with that of Bolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt, and to underline the fact that Richard has no father and no son. Where Bolingbroke is steadfast in his own pursuit of rights and reputation, leading him ultimately to assume (or usurp) the crown, Aumerle bends this way and that, as irresolute in his own way as his father. His admonishments of Richard ('Comfort my liege!') are here elaborated into a sudden but sensual kiss, giving him a far more personal stake in the conspiracy he later joins to oppose the new king, but also creating a deeper sense of personal insecurity when he sues King Henry for mercy and then acts fatefully on Henry's casual exasperation with his deposed cousin. This leads to the controversial decision to make Aumerle, rather than the otherwise unknown character Exton, the murderer of Richard. It render's Richard's death more poignant as he unmasks the cousin whom he might have thought he could still trust, and renders Aumerle's position even worse as he has killed one cousin and not earned the gratitude of the other; but the directorial intervention is perhaps too neat and overt.

Jasper Britton's Bolingbroke has no such ambiguities, but he is far from being just a stolid political and military man somehow out of his depth with Richard's theatricality. In the deposition scene, instead of being outmanoeuvred by Richard's self-dramatising dejection he appears tolerantly amused - not baffled, but instead indulgent, since he knows he holds all the cards. He is perfectly happy to overrule the coldly demanding Duke of Northumberland (Sean Chapman) to excuse Richard from reading the dossier of his 'crimes'. His weak point, only revealed at the last moments of the play in his exasperated reference to his own son, is a matter which only receives due attention in the succeeding plays of the sequence.

This is a great start to the tetralogy.