I dropped in to the Donmar box office at a lucky moment last week, just as they released a batch of extra tickets for one of the last performances of Michael Grandage's swansong production, for which I failed to obtain seats last summer. Jonathan Slinger played he part for the RSC in Michael Boyd's Histories cycle, John Heffernan created an extraordinary Richard at the Tobacco Factory in Bristol last year, and in the last decade I've also seen Ralph Fiennes and Kevin Spacey do it. At the Donmar the role of Shakespeare's most capricious monarch is taken by rising star Eddie Redmayne, who gives a charismatic performance as a man who implodes under the strains of kingship. In a reedy voice thick with patronising irony, Richard arrogantly mishandles the quarrel between Mowbray and Bolingbroke which opens the play. This production, like Andrew Hilton's in Bristol, gains from the intimacy of a small theatre in which the audience is within touching distance of the actors. Though I liked the split-level set, which allows Bolingbroke and his men to be on stage at the moment Richard renounces the throne, I felt overall that this production didn't quite generate the excitement of the RSC version, nor the (unsubsidised) one at the Tobacco Factory.
Richard II, like Hamlet, is such a well-written part that actors are forever finding new ways to play it. Redmayne suggests the king's flakiness with hand gestures and a tendency to scamper around the stage. The more I see this play, the more I am impressed by the wonderful way Shakespeare tells the story of the abdication; rather than being forced out by Bolingbroke, Richard crumbles from within, and his impulsive handover of the crown takes his rival by surprise.
Bolingbroke, however, remains an enigma, and I didn't feel Andrew Buchan's performance came even close to unravelling it. Of the actors I have seen play the role, not many have really stuck in the memory, except perhaps Clive Wood in Michael Boyd's RSC production. Bolingbroke, unlike Richard, is a man of few words, giving the actor not much to work with, but I still feel hopeful that one day I will see a production in which an actor rises to the challenge of making him as interesting as Richard.
Footnote: I always keep my eyes peeled for the great and the good at the Donmar, and Tuesday night's interval yielded the intriguing sight of Sir Trevor Nunn and his companion Dame Janet Suzman waiting patiently at the end of the bar while everyone else was served their drinks first. Was this a case of theatrical monarchs being deliberately cast down and humiliated like Richard? More likely, I think, is that the very young bar staff simply had no idea who the scruffy man with the beard and his companion were. Like Shakespeare, I believe in proper respect for hierarchy. If I ever run a theatre, anyone with a title -- especially a theatrical Dame -- will automatically get priority in the queue at the bar.
Comments