Authors: William Shakespeare
Richard II (19 page)
During the previous decade, the prime minister, Robert Walpole, had been attacked viciously on stage and in the press for perceived attempts to censor both. The London audience, experienced in recognizing satirical portraits, evidently responded well to the employment of Shakespeare’s text in the continuing war of words. Over a century after the Essex rebellion,
Richard II
continued to be read by spectators as a commentary on the ruling classes.
While failing to establish the play as a regular repertory piece in their own century, both Theobald’s and Rich’s versions of the play laid the groundwork for future revivals. Most influentially, Rich’s production foregrounded spectacle. Sketches from the promptbook show highly formal compositions for the lists and deposition scenes, supporting Davies’ assertion that “the ancient ceremony which belonged to the single combat was very accurately observed.”
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This tendency toward spectacle and historical accuracy would continue into the next century.
The first major production of the nineteenth century was an adaptation by Richard Wroughton conceived as a star vehicle for Edmund Kean, performed at Drury Lane in 1814–15, and which later served as the basis for the first North American production of the play in 1819.
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Kean’s performance, predictably, was the center of attention, and William Hazlitt notes the general consensus that “It
has been supposed that this is his finest part,” though he goes on to give his personal opinion that this is “a total misrepresentation.”
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A natural successor to Theobald’s adaptation, Wroughton aimed for similar sentimental and pathetic effect, but chose to do so through increased focus on Richard himself; thus, where Theobald had expanded the Aumerle conspiracy, here it is cut altogether. In editing his play, Wroughton “makes his hero more decisive, less prone to lament his condition, less culpable and less pettily vicious.”
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Isabella is again present in the final scene, and her death concludes the action, with King Lear’s dying speeches transferred to her lips.
The success of Kean’s production established the play’s potential as a star vehicle, and the move toward pathos and spectacle additionally served to distance it from the troubling political appropriations of previous centuries. The stage was set for a full-blown Victorian spectacular, which Kean’s son Charles provided in 1857 at London’s Princess’s Theatre. Theodor Fontane’s description of one moment shows the production’s scale:
Between the third and fourth acts is an interlude devised by Kean: Bolingbroke is treated like a god as he enters London. Behind him is Richard, greeted by the people first with silence, then with muttering and curses … the representation (for good or ill) is a masterpiece. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole effect is that of a part of a street brought onstage, with the genuine London life and bustle.
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Kean’s interest in antiquarianism and full-scale reproduction led to jokes that even the playbills were printed on “fly-leaves from old folio editions of the History of England.”
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In 1902, Herbert Beerbohm Tree followed in Kean’s footsteps with the inclusion of a triumphant entry into London for Richard on a real horse.
Following Kean, the play fell again into obscurity until Frank Benson’s revival in 1896 for the Stratford-upon-Avon festival. While the sets of Benson’s production followed in the grand tradition of the Victorian spectacular, the production was more notable for remaking Richard II himself as a star part:
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Charles Kean’s large-scale antiquarian production at the London Princess’s Theatre, 1857.
Mr Benson’s Richard is a figure not to be looked upon without commiseration and pity. The Nemesis of his own folly has brought him so utterly low, his fantastic nature is so acutely sensitive, his will so impotent, his dejection so complete, that sympathy turns against the more manly Bolingbroke, and perhaps does him wrong.
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As well as establishing the role of Richard II as a key showcase for major actors, the production’s revival in 1901 as part of Stratford’s “Week of Kings” reestablished the play as part of a historical sequence. Benson’s performances in the role continued until 1915.
John Gielgud dominated both role and play on the early twentieth-century London stage. From his first performance, directed by Harcourt Williams at the Old Vic in 1929, “Gielgud focused on superb delivery of verse, perhaps emphasising Richard as pathetic, and certainly a man unfitted for the demanding duties of a ruler.”
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However, other aspects of the production impressed less.
The Times
remarked that “many of the parts, and many far above the rank of the grooms and servants, are played badly and, what is worse, listlessly,” singling out Brember Wills’ Gaunt: “let us have stillness sometimes: let us have firmness and splendour, not the nervous, bubbling senility of a dotard.”
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Gielgud performed and directed at the Queen’s in 1937, and in 1953 directed Paul Scofield at the Lyric Hammersmith, in a performance “strangely different from the others we have seen … the actor presents to us a mask of celestial composure in which two half-closed eyes glitter with inscrutable menace.”
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If Gielgud dominated the play in London, in Stratford-upon-Avon it was the property of W. Bridges Adams. Between 1920 and 1930 Adams moved through a succession of Richards, culminating in George Hayes (1929). Adams’ medieval costumes were singled out for praise, and the combination of modest historical spectacle with strong ensemble performances contributed to the growing appreciation of the play. Hayes continued to play Richard for Tyrone Guthrie (1933, “an inherently dull play”
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), B. Iden Payne (1941, with Richard’s “uncanny dignity”
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foremost) and Robert Atkins (1944), in which a “vision scene”
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at Richard’s death was particularly praised, the dungeon wall dissolving behind the body as a choir sang to reveal Bullingbrook as the new king.
Hal Burton’s direction of Robert Harris in 1947 was praised for reviving the quality of the artist in Richard that Benson had emphasized, although some reviewers still worked from Victorian criteria: “It achieves distinction because of its dignity, its pageantry, its beauty of outline and of detail and its admirably controlled lighting.”
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Far more influential was Michael Redgrave’s performance in 1951 under the direction of Anthony Quayle, who directed the entire second tetralogy as part of Stratford’s contribution to the Festival of Britain. Redgrave’s performance in the role, remembered by Laurence Olivier as an “out-and-out pussy queer,”
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was greeted with mixed reviews by critics unable—or unwilling—to acknowledge the character’s homosexuality, and confused by a mixture of lyricism and cruelty. Alan Dent suggested that “we found ourselves watching the excellent Bolingbroke (Harry Andrews), instead of the King, for in this Bolingbroke’s eyes lurked an infinity of contemptuous patience while he heeded Richard’s elaborately fanciful speeches.”
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The challenges of
Richard II
here shifted from the politics of state to the politics of sexuality, with lasting effect; by the time Ian McKellen performed both Richard II and Edward II to great acclaim for the Prospect Theatre Company in 1968–69, critics read a homosexual agenda into the play even though, as Margaret Shewring suggests, this was not actually intended by the company.
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A queenly king? Michael Redgrave (left) with Harry Andrews as Bullingbrook in Anthony Quayle’s 1951 production.
Despite its early African performance,
Richard II
is not among the most successful international exports in the Shakespearean canon. An exception is Germany, where the play was first staged in the 1770s, and where its potential as political commentary has been fully utilized. The fiercely anti-Nazi Jürgen Fehling directed the play in 1939 at Berlin’s Staatstheater, using abstract sets that acted to separate the profligate Richard and his court from the distant problems of their people. Claus Peymann directed a “death-obsessed”
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Beckettian production in Braunschweig in 1969, which emphasized “Richard’s reflections on man’s existential exposure and separateness.”
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Three decades later, Peymann directed a far more political interpretation of the play for the Berliner Ensemble, which toured to the RSC Complete Works Festival in 2006. Achim Freyer’s starkly white abstract set became a blank canvas on which history wrote its impact in dirt and blood, most strikingly as invisible hands hurled piles of mud at Richard upon his return to London. While Michael Maertens’ “charismatic” Richard was praised, the production allowed other parts to shine: Bullingbrook was a “repressed bureaucrat [who] was more comfortable with his bowler hat than with the crown,” while Northumberland became “the true Machiavel of this piece.”
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On the late twentieth century stage, a fascination with Richard’s performativity was emerging. David William’s production of 1972 marked the first performance of any of Shakespeare’s history plays by the new National Theatre Company. Despite one view that “this Richard was not only unmoving, he was fatally uninteresting,”
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others found Ronald Pickup’s performance enlightening: “Surrounded by ceremonies and flattery he has complete belief in his authority. But as soon as the externals start crumbling, so does his inner conviction.”
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Increasingly, the play was produced as part of a sequence. David Giles’ 1978 televised
Richard II,
one of the strongest productions in the BBC Shakespeare series, featured Derek Jacobi in the title role supported by Jon Finch (Bullingbrook) and John Gielgud (Gaunt), while the casting of Charles Gray and Dame Wendy Hiller as the Yorks “brings alive a whole subplot”
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often previously cut in performance. The camerawork prioritized actors over spectacle, exploiting the possibilities of television for Richard’s soliloquy of Act 5 Scene 5,
which was shot in several sections, drawing out his ruminations over an extended period of incarceration. The English Shakespeare Company’s
The Wars of the Roses
(1986–89), a seven-play adaptation of the two tetralogies which was also later filmed for television, began with a
Richard II
which adapted a “Regency style, Beau Brummell dandyism”
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that director Michael Bogdanov confessed would probably not have been their first choice for a stand-alone production. In such a large context, “the victim of production was invariably
Richard II
… the guinea pig that opened the sequence,”
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and both Bogdanov and his Richard, Michael Pennington, expressed disappointment in the result.
Internationally, interest in the formal aspects of the play and its pageantry have continued to stimulate directorial interest, though often unsuccessfully. At the Stratford Ontario Festival in Canada, Stuart Burge’s 1964 production ran over four hours when it debuted, losing the favor of many critics. However, it continued a twentieth-century trend to paint Northumberland as the piece’s key mover, with Leo Cicery’s Bullingbrook “a genuinely bewildered man caught up in a situation which he could not comprehend.”
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Zoe Caldwell’s 1979 production was felt by many to be overly gimmick-led, with three different actors for both Richard and Bullingbrook, no doubt in an attempt to replicate the success of the RSC’s Pasco/Richardson pairing six years earlier. Critics were bored, however, by the pageant-like blocking of all three versions, with a central staircase creating “a rigid formality on the playing space that is reflected, with a vengeance, in the performances.”
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More successful was Ariane Mnouchkine’s production in 1982 for Théâtre du Soleil in Vincennes. Inspired by Japanese kabuki theater, the production ran for over five hours, and drew critical praise for its precise choreography through which “the formality of the play’s constructions is revealed. The argument develops like a terrific algebra.”
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