The Tragedy of King Richard the Second

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 23 January 2019

Joe Hill-Gibbins directs Simon Russell Beale as King Richard with Leo Bill as Bolingbroke, Natalie Klamar as Carlisle, John Mackay as York, Robin Weaver as Northumberland, and Martins Imhangbe, Joseph Mydell and Saskia Reeves taking all the other parts.

The production uses a stripped down text, at less than two hours without an interval, in an oppressive box of felt walls and a perspex ceiling allowing for varying lighting effects, the design by ULTZ. All the actors are on the stage throughout, there being no obvious exit, and the only props are a golden crown modelled on the sort of crown found in a Christmas cracker; and two buckets each of helpfully labelled 'water', 'blood', and 'soil'. The costumes are anonymously modern tee-shirts and trousers.

This is an ambitious way of looking at a play usually taken as an opportunity to highlight some late medieval splendour, in keeping with King Richard's own grandiose self-image. The formal richness of the language - much of it rhymed - encourages a visual counterpart and of course the ritual nature of Richard's court, emphasised in the opening dispute between Bolingbroke and Mowbray and the joust which Richard so fatefully interrupts, is in irresistible contrast to the more prosaic power politics of Bolingbroke's court when he becomes King Henry IV, and also with Richard's ignominious end.

All this, together with Richard's youth - he was in his twenties and early thirties during the events covered by the play, and Simon Russell Beale is in his fifties - is foregone in this far more bleak vision of Richard's demise, and Bolingbroke's usual down-to-earth ruthlessness is interestingly exchanged for an almost helpless bewilderment as the untried new king faces the thankless task of attempting to control the feuding nobles who backed his bid for power. In the space provided, passions look like tantrums and the assertion of authority looks like almost panicked parental reproof, a fascinating interpretation of the incipient political disturbances that followed Richard's deposition.

Simon Russell Beale gives a nuanced and beautifully spoken interpretation of the doomed king; the play opens with a fragment of his anguished soliloquy in Pontefract Castle, quietly, musingly spoken, before returning to the real beginning of the play; thereafter the action is fast and the verse speaking intense and forceful, well managed by all the cast. Joseph Mydell delivers the famous John of Gaunt speech in praise of English exceptionlism with real dignity, even while not expiring on a sickbed as he would be in a more conventional production. 

At times the compression of the play, and the fact that minor parts are doubled up, leads to some confusion as to who is who; in particular the York/Aumerle sublplot gets shorter shrift than it deserves, and some of the weightier denunciations lose their force when divorced from their late fourteenth century context. However, there is in compensation an insight into the factionalism of the times as  the six actors apart from Richard and Bolingbroke often move together in a disquieting unison, even as they are faced with shifting allegiances which require them to protect or betray one another.  

For anyone familiar with the play, who is not turned off by the directorial intervention, it is a really intriguing and provocative production; but I am not sure how easy it would be for a newcomer to the play, who might well also be unfamiliar with the background, to appreciate the force of the unfolding tragedy. Rather than a medieval pageant we are witnessing an intelligent and thought-provoking meditation on political power and its numerous, often fatal, pitfalls. I'm glad to have seen it, though also glad that the medieval pageant approach is still worth watching when well managed.