RICHARD II Bridge Theatre, SE1
A THRILLING DANCE AROUND A CROWN
This is one of the most lyrically lovely, metaphorically rich of Shakespeare’s history plays, opening a great meditation on the gulf between human personalities and the sacred mystery of medieval monarchy. Some productions make much of the latter with spectacle and mystery: Tennant a rock-star king, Eddie Redmayne sad and gentle. Others go hard on human absurdity: Joe Hill-Gibbins had Simon Russell Beale doused with red paint from fire buckets all one Christmas season, and wearing a paper hat on the programme. This Nicholas Hytner production is different again: no spectacular mystery, no sackbuts and robes, modern suits, done fast and clear and as sharp as the daggers handed out by the marshal for the abortive duel between Bolingbroke and Mowbray (then put neatly away in their box for the next time.: it’s quite starkly set on rising platforms, but every piece of furniture has is chosen with wit)
It’s a bracing show, constantly exciting as we sit all around it like witnesses, like 15c Englanders. Jonathan Bailey as the King is a whirlwind of temperament, in love with crown and power, secure amid his cronies and his Irish ambitions but until his final sad meditation in prison as erratic and wilful as a toddler, but vicious with it. Sometimes Royce Pierreson’s solid, unsmiling Bolingbroke sits and listens to one of his tirades like a nanny waiting for it to blow over. When Scrope brings him news of the uprising, you see the other nobles’ flicker of impatience as the monarch starts on a selfpitying speech about “graves and worms and epitaphs”. Even more so later when , the situation even worse, he resolves to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings. There are several shockingly funny moments when, with pat timing, Bolingbroke or another bursts the king’s bubble in two words.
With some of the loveliest verse in Shakespeare and that theme of a crown overthrown, there is no reason it can’t also feel like a modern thriller: power and betrayal , outrageous executive orders , mistrustful ambition and sheer bloody delusional petulance . It’s a world where a cabal might change allegiance over a round of drinks and the confidence of power is expressed with a snort of cocaine. Hytner, by the way, leaves out the famous scene with the gardeners binding up apricot trees and thinking of England’s decline: probably its gentle rustic nature couldn’t have suited the hard-nosed excitement of the setting.
Indeed the very modern atmospherics of TV’s Succession , early apparent in the business-suited manoeuvrings of the nobles, are made mischievously explicit a couple of times in a snatch of familiar notes from the show’s theme. There’s also an eerie parallel with the new 47th President and his abrupt orders, notably Richard’s sneer that his patriotic old Uncle Gaunt should hurry up and die so “the lining of his coffers” could equip soldiers for his Irish wars. Clive Wood was unwell on press night and Martin Carroll stepped up remarkably, Gaunt’s great speech on England delivered in a wheelchair, and his bold reproof to his nephew the King from a hospital bed and walking frame. Which, horrifyingly, Bailey kicks away, cursing, a terrible child in supreme power . He then lounges on the bed finishing the invalid’s grapes and planning to take his money.
He is irresistibly watchable, whether in tantrum, self-pitying soliloquy or flashes of awful self-knowledge; some may find him not quite king enough, but he’s endlessly gripping. Other fine performances bring that hard-edged world to life: Michael Simkins as the Duke of York gives us the anxious, loyal decency of a man in an impossible position, exploding in his brave reproof to surly Bolingbroke with “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle!” . And in the late scene when his son Aumerle’s treachery is revealed ( Vinnie Heaven plays it as a nicely nasty teenager ) Simkins , with Amanda Root as his pleading wife , are wonderful. One of those scenes where a death hangs on it but you are forced into a shocked laugh. Christopher Osikanlu is a pleasure too, as Northumberland: again, eerie pre-echoes of today as he repeatedly presents a confession for Richard to sign, even after he has gone through his prolonged handing over of the crown to the unmoved Bolingbroke, and expressed from the balcony a childlike resolution to go and live in a hole in the road, and make everyone sorry.
The production’s clarity, pace and wit serve the play as well as any I’ve seen. And you needn’t be a Shakespearian to absolutely, shockedly, fascinated get it…
bridgetheatre.co.uk. to 10 May
Rating 4
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