Richard II (21 page)
Authors: William Shakespeare
3.
John Barton’s “mirror image” production of 1973. Richard Pasco and Ian Richardson alternated the roles of King Richard and Bullingbrook. Here they enact the metaphor of the two characters as buckets in a well, one going down as the other is pulled up.
One of these bodies is flawless, abstract and immortal. The other is fallible, individual and subject to death and time. These two natures are fused at the moment of coronation in a way that deliberately parallels the incarnation of Christ, whose representative on earth—as Richard continually reminds us—the king henceforth will be.
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For John Barton, as for Kantorowicz, the notion of kingship with its fusing of the king’s two bodies is at the center of the play. To give this dramatic expression, Barton’s production took up Shakespeare’s own use of the parallel between monarch and actor with their common assumption of roles, but whereas previous directors had seen the acting imagery only as a key to Richard’s histrionic personality, Barton applied it to his whole production and, most important, to the other king in the play—Bullingbrook: “The alternation of the two actors playing Richard and Bullingbrook constantly focussed attention on the theme of kingship.”
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The set and stage blocking helped to formalize these relationships, working with the stylized and symmetrical pattern of the play:
Symmetry, of course is a natural feature of the play (for example “On this side, my hand; and on that side, thine” [4.1.177]), and Barton developed this element and made it an important part of his production. The play began with a meta-theatrical device in which an actor representing Shakespeare (and carrying a large book) appeared to nominate one of the two Richards to play the King and to put on a mask, robe and
crown. Removing the mask the designated Richard assumed the role and the play began.
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In Act 1 Scene 3, two ladders rose up behind the combatants “with between them a platform on which Richard literally rose and fell.”
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B. A. Young of the
Financial Times
commented:
On this eccentric set the scenes are strictly formalised. There is no furniture but a tall golden cenotaph standing for a throne which comes and goes. The attendant characters are marshalled into rigid military ranks.
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Theater historian Robert Shaughnessy describes how
Movement, grouping and gesture were highly choreographed, formalised and symmetrical, with many speeches directed straight out to the audience, and others divided and distributed among the cast in choric fashion. Barons appeared on wooden horses or on stilts, the Queen and her attendants in half-masks … For the Flint Castle scene, Richard appeared on the bridge high above the stage wearing a huge circular golden cloak which transformed king and actor into “glistering Phaethon”—an image of the sun-king which “set” as the bridge descended to the floor.
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In the deposition scene, when Richard broke his mirror, Bullingbrook placed the empty frame over the king’s head, creating a noose. At Pomfret, a ragged Richard unburdens his soul to the groom, who turns out to be Bullingbrook, eliciting sympathy for the variable fortunes of the two “kings” but to some critics straining the text too far.
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Michael Billington felt that Richardson’s king “ranks with Redgrave and McKellen as one of the classic Richards,”
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while J. C. Trewin observed that “Mr Pasco tastes every word as he moves from the contemptuous smiling sun-king, through the arias on the Welsh shore, to the agony of Westminster Hall and the ultimate time-spinning metaphysics at Pomfret.”
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However, Trewin’s final praise
was reserved for Richardson as Bullingbrook: “no actor in my memory has so governed the ‘silent king’ of Westminster Hall.”
Irving Wardle’s review of
Richard II
for the London
Times
catches the way in which the highly unusual “cycle” directed by Terry Hands was to position the play:
Having begun in the middle of the English histories with
Henry V
and worked outwards in both directions, Terry Hands now arrives simultaneously at the beginning and the end of the cycle with this production and tonight’s
Richard III
… we have a version of
Richard II
which converts the play from a lyric prelude into a compressed epic.
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The “cycle” opened a season in 1975 celebrating the centenary of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre from its beginnings as the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. The “asymmetrical, even arbitrary” cycle, directed by Hands, comprised the
Henriad
in 1975, the
Henry VI
plays in 1977, with
Richard II
and
Richard III
completing the histories in 1980. Alan Howard played the lead role in all eight plays. Hands disregarded historical chronology and “opened out of sequence with
Henry V
in order to let the Chorus provide a prologue to the whole enterprise with his appeal to ‘imaginary puissance’ and ‘the brightest heaven of invention.’ ”
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Hands also revived his 1968
The Merry Wives of Windsor
to round off the cycle, making a connection between “a jaundiced depiction of the condition of England,” emerging through the
Henriad
, and the “run-down England” which “was ripe for the reappearance of an enfeebled Falstaff.”
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The pairing of
Richard II
and
Richard III
in 1980 suggests a compression of time, projecting a retrospective light on King Richard II’s tenuous grasp of the political realities that will unseat him and unleash bitter power struggles for the throne in years to come. At the same time, the unlikely companion piece of
Richard III
offered “a chance of showing another actor-king.”
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Stuart Hampton-Reeves
suggests that the productions were “a self-conscious challenge to the monumental histories of the 1960s. History was represented on a stage (designed by Farrah) which had been stripped to reveal the wood and brickwork of the theatre.”
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4.
Terry Hands’ 1980 production: from affability to opportunism to “a haunted figure bent under the weight of a usurped kingdom.”
B. A. Young described the effects of the minimalist staging in
Richard II
:
As we begin, the King stands before a costly panel of gold inlay and dons his crown with a gesture that speaks wordlessly of his divine right. Later this panel inclines backward to give a big open stage to which men climb up unseen stairs upstage, sometimes to fine effect, as when the savage Welsh come, lit from behind, to learn that they are too late.
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Shaughnessy argues that Hands’ approach repudiates the politics in the
Henriad
and
Henry VI
plays, “concentrating upon the private self rather than the public role.”
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In his production of
Richard II
, Hands shows the protagonists responding personally to the pressures of their situations. Thus, as Irving Wardle notes,
The first thing to be said of Mr Howard’s performance is that he does Richard out of the arias. “What shall the king do now?” is delivered in a terrified gabble. He really wants to know. It is the panic-stricken demand of an actor who has forgotten his lines.
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Wardle notes that the emotional journey for John Suchet’s Bullingbrook moves from “an affable open-hearted invader” to “a coldly-masked opportunist” and, finally, “a haunted figure bent under the weight of a usurped kingdom.”
Barry Kyle’s production of
Richard II
opened with colorful medieval scenic splendor, announcing its distance from the harsh steel world of the history cycle, directed by Peter Hall and John Barton in 1963–64, and from the minimalist staging favored by Terry Hands (1975–80). As Margaret Shewring relates, “It was the stage picture for Barry Kyle’s production that attracted most column inches of critical attention.”
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However, “This visual feast was not gratuitous. On the contrary, it was an essential image of the cultural richness of the Ricardian court.”
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Other critics were less impressed:
Barry Kyle has adopted a pop-up picture book approach to this play and William Dudley’s set, steeped in the artificial world of “The Book of Hours,” is an enclosed garden surrounded by castellated walls and turrets against a brilliant, azure background with the passage of time marked by an astrological arch which spans the stage. It is an exquisite set which becomes increasingly irrelevant as the tragedy moves out of the claustrophobic luxuriance of Richard’s court to the reality of Bullingbrook’s camp, not to mention Pontefract Castle. At times it is seriously counter-productive: “Come down—down court, down King, / For night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing” [3.3.183–4]. And sure enough, Richard goes spiralling downwards on a miniature turret, the very same turret that Bullingbrook leaps onto later—going up naturally.
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Stanley Wells also found the set “less than wholly successful” where “Richard, facing the audience, addresses his abdication speeches to
Bullingbrook, who is seated above and behind him, through the back of his head,” but argued that the production represented “an honest and intelligent attempt to objectify the style of this highly formalized play.”
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5.
Barry Kyle production, 1986. The “colourful medieval scenic splendour” of the set proved problematic for some, where “Richard, facing the audience, addresses his abdication speeches to Bolingbroke, who is seated above and behind him, through the back of his head.”
The play started with Jeremy Irons’ Richard
first discovered resplendent in peacock blue and gold, spread-eagled on the ground, the leopard encaged in his kingdom that will become his tomb. He looks up wearily, as if to say: I
know
I’m not playing the kingship game with the degree of seriousness everybody else expects of me.
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Without the context of a history cycle, the production can suggest an elegiac response to the ending of a medieval kingship. However, the “startlingly messianic” portrayal by Jeremy Irons of the tragic downfall of a divine king, a man “more or less crucified by his assailants,” is in fact “another aspect of the poseur.”
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Richard plays his role ineffectually and dangerously, misjudging the political climate. Critics were impressed with the ceremonial joust scene, “a public ritual whose essential meaning is obvious to everyone present and the actors brilliantly convey the sense of unspoken but thoroughly understood accusations,” and Michael Kitchen’s “mesmerising performance” as Bullingbrook, “a formidable figure: an unpleasant, unglamorous and devious man but one who simply radiates competence, shrewdness, and a cynical likeability.”
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While Jeremy Irons suggested the self-destructive path taken by the last undisputed medieval English king, Alex Jennings showed the repercussions of a tyrannical regime on the people subjected to his rule. Ron Daniels’ “stand-alone” production had a modern context: the world of realpolitik. The theater program included a double-page spread on tyrannical regimes throughout history with a printed quote across the centerfold in red: “Mussolini would have liked to have been a poet just as Hitler would have liked to have been a great
painter—most dictators, it seems, are artists manqués.”
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Maria Jones describes the start of the performance:
The tyranny of Richard’s regime was suggested through his personal bodyguard, the Cheshire archers, who trained their crossbows on the audience … Sinister guards in greatcoats and fur helmets recalled East European guards and referenced the tyrannical regime in Romania under Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu who were executed in December 1989 … Richard (Alex Jennings) entered “magnificently attired,” wearing “the kind of crown a Holy Roman Emperor might have worn.” His divine authority was emphasized through the presence of the Bishop of Carlisle (John Bott) standing behind the throne in ceremonial robes and bishop’s mitre. Sinking “voluptuously into the throne,” Jennings portrayed a monarch “utterly entranced with the role, the power, the trappings of kingship.”
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