Tyrant feeds on his divine right to be cruel 

Richard II Gainsborough Studios, London  (***  enjoyable) Thursday April 13, 2000 

            

            At the moment, we have an embarrassment of Richards. At
            Stratford-on-Avon
            there is a nakedly political, modern dress production. Now at the
            old
            Gainsborough Studios in Shoreditch, east London, Ralph Fiennes gives
            an
            unequivocal star performance in a traditional, pyramidal Almeida
            Theatre
            production.
            The space is astonishing. One feels as if one is in an aircraft
            hangar. At
            one end of it sits a wide stage which designer Paul Brown has turned
            into an
            image of a disintegrating medieval England. The floor is a grassy
            carpet
            implying the demi-paradise that once was. But the rear brick wall is 

            dominated by a huge central fissure which both suggests schismatic
            disintegration and allows for extravagantly regal entrances.
            And Fiennes himself certainly gives us a Richard swathed in
            kingship. This is
            not the artist-king created by Frank Benson exactly 100 years ago.
            Fiennes's
            Richard is a mercurial autocrat. Entering enthroned to the sound of
            Te Deums,
            he soon reveals the flawed being underneath the ceremony. He sticks
            his
            tongue out at the corrective John of Gaunt, seizes his lands with
            arbitrary
            zeal and skips off to the Irish wars as if going to a fashion
            parade.
            Within the parameters of Jonathan Kent's production, it is a fine
            performance. Fiennes has a stained glass profile, a resonant voice
            and a
            mordant irony. If the lyricism of Richard's downfall is underplayed,
            Fiennes
            compensates with a mocking humour. He is at his best in the
            deposition scene where he exaggeratedly cocks an ear as he cries:
            "God Save The King" and hugs the crown to his chest as if it were a
            favourite toy. Stripped of monarchy's
            protective divinity, this Richard becomes poignantly aware of his
            own
            wastefulness and other people's cunning.
            What I miss in Kent's production is much sense of the play's
            politics. We are
            magnetised by Richard. But Linus Roache's stolidly impassive
            Bolingbroke
            gives us no hint of a man who turns injustice into opportunity. And
            amongst
            the anonymous Shakespearean nobles only two performances stand out.
            One is David Burke's ferocious, death-haunted John of Gaunt and the
            other is Oliver Ford Davies's wonderfully dithering Duke of York who
            reacts to the dilemmas
            of power with the uncertainty of the liberal intellectual.
            Barbara Jefford also makes an impressive late appearance as a
            dominatingly
            maternal Duchess of York. But one looks in vain for an any insight
            into the
            way Boling broke's coup d'etat breeds another kind of tyranny.
            The production feels like an old-fashioned framework for Fiennes's
            performance and for his agonised discovery that even kings are
            subject to the
            imperatives of transience, time and death.
           

            (Thanks to Antonieta, who sent this to me! Mari)