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 The TheatreguideLondon Reviews

For the archive, we have filed our reviews of three productions of Richard II on this one page. Scroll down for the one you want, or just browse.

Richard II
The Pit, Spring 2001

Steven Pimlott's exciting production for the Royal Shakespeare Company proves once again that the most difficult Shakespeare plays become theatrically alive and crystal clear in the right hands. What in other stagings has been obscure and distant is real, human and contemporary in fascinating new ways.

Shakespeare's Richard is a weak and self-indulgent king who seizes the land of his banished cousin Henry Bolingbroke. When Henry returns with an army to claim his inheritance, he somehow ends up taking the throne as well.

Shakespeare never makes clear just when Henry's goal changes, nor why Richard surrenders so easily, leaving these for the actors to make clear. And Pimlott and his cast have found new and totally believable answers.

In this modern dress production Samuel West plays Richard as a callow young Prince of the City. He and his cronies resemble today's City high-fliers and dot-com millionaires, casually confident in their golden indestructibility.

When he returns from his Irish wars to discover that everyone has deserted him for Henry, the truth of his vulnerability and mortality hits him with a shock from which he never recovers.

West beautifully shows the trauma and the post-traumatic depression that gives Richard an exaggerated but psychologically true sense of helplessness and impotence.

Meanwhile, David Troughton, whose bluff sergeant-major of a Henry has honestly just wanted his own lands back, is practical enough not to refuse a gift when it is offered him, unexpected as it may be.

These very believable characterizations reinvigorate and illuminate the play in theatrically thrilling ways. The formal abdication scene becomes a public event, with Henry trying to establish some validity for his claim, and Richard, in his personal suffering, refusing to play by the script.

West gives Richard's emotional journey real power, from blind confidence, to despair, to understanding and the beginnings of acceptance, and in the process becomes the play's moral and emotional core. And Troughton makes very real the play's hints that he is not the simple victor, and that winning the crown will be as much a burden and emotional trauma for him as losing it was for Richard.

In a strong supporting cast David Killock plays the Duke of York as an elder statesman whose veneer of ethical authority barely covers his sensitivity to which way the wind is blowing, while Christopher Saul is the more openly slimy politician Northumberland.

Paul Greenwood doubles as a dignified Mowbray and an authoritatively moral Bishop of Carlisle. In a witty bit of doubling, the actors who played Richard's cronies in the early scenes play his murderers at the end.

The RSC has taken on the challenge of Shakespeare's entire eight-play historical cycle this season. If the others are anywhere as powerful and accessible as this first episode, it may prove to be a once-in-a-lifetime theatrical glory.

Gerald Berkowitz

Richard II
Old Vic Theatre Autumn 2005

Trevor Nunn directs Kevin Spacey in Shakespeare, and the result is neither the best nor the worst Richard II I've ever seen.

There's about as much reason to skip it as to go, with perhaps Spacey's undoubted star quality just tipping it over into the positive.

A quick reminder: this is the one in which King Richard banishes his cousin Henry and seizes his lands. Henry returns with an army to get his own back, but somehow (Shakespeare is deliberately vague about this) winds up seizing the throne as well, becoming Henry IV.

Kevin Spacey's programme biography doesn't list any previous experience with Shakespeare, so it is worth noting that he handles the verse remarkably well. He does tend to orate and speechify rather than converse, but then so does his character, so the not-quite-naturalistic style doesn't rankle too much.

Unfortunately almost everyone else in the cast also tends to recite rather than talk. When everybody in a play does anything the same way, it's a directorial choice, and I'm inclined to think Trevor Nunn has erred here.

For better or worse, British audiences have come to expect their Shakespeare to sound more conversational and natural - that revolution in his days as head of the RSC may prove Peter Hall's greatest legacy - and recitation, however well done, inevitably becomes meaningless gabble.

The biggest weakness of this production is a dispassionate lifelessness, and the fact that for too much of its three hour length everyone is just statically reciting at each other is a big part of that problem.

Despite a modern dress design in which all the more public scenes are turned into TV soundbites on large screens, the production is not visually interesting either. And so, with little to look at and characters whose public masks and oratorical styles we aren't invited past, we remain too separate from the story and people for the play to come alive.

Of course there are moments that work. Spacey's Richard comes very much alive in the grief of his forced abdication. The intense passion comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere, but for the moment we see a real person in real pain.

While Ben Miles' Henry remains an enigma throughout, Oliver Cotton's cold-blooded power politician Northumberland is chillingly real and Peter Eyre's out-of-his-depth nice-old-guy York generates some sympathy.

Given the artificial and oratorical style Trevor Nunn has chosen, it is striking that the most successful scenes are two comic ones that Shakespeare clearly intended as stylistic contrasts to the rest. The one in which the York family trip over each other trying to get to Henry with their conflicting petitions is played as pure farce, while the brief encounter between the imprisoned Richard and a loyal servant has a lightly comic warmth sorely lacking elsewhere.

(Oh, and just because nobody else has mentioned it, can I assure Trevor Nunn that I got his musical joke?  The usurper's coronation is accompanied ironically with Aaron Copeland's Fanfare For The Common Man.)

Everyone in this play (The supporting cast is full of RSC and NT veterans) has been better elsewhere, and the play itself has been done better.

Still, you could do worse, so if you're a dedicated Kevin Spacey fan or can't wait around for another Richard II to come along, here this is.

Gerald Berkowitz

Richard II
Roundhouse Spring 2008

Michael Boyd's production serves as an adequate introduction to the RSC's complete cycle of Shakespeare's eight Richard-Henries-Richard history plays. But director and cast are somewhat less successful in finding depth or interest within this first play.

The story - weak and unpopular King Richard banishes his cousin Henry and seizes his lands. When Henry returns for what is his, he gathers so much support that he ends up taking the crown as Henry IV. In Shakespeare's eyes this crime generates the next 150 years of tumultuous English history until peace and order are restored with the Tudor Henry VII (not incidentally, grandfather of the reigning Queen).

(Actually, there is an earlier crime - before the opening of this play, Richard ordered or at least allowed the murder of his uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, and director Boyd underlines all references to that event as the generator of all that follows.)

This production tells the story clearly enough, but does little to make it come alive by developing believable and emotionally involving personalities for the principal characters, in one case going too far, in the other not far enough.

Shakespeare says that Richard is self-indulgent and makes him somewhat self-dramatising. But Jonathan Slinger has been directed (or allowed) to play him as a flaming queen. He enters looking and acting like Julian Clary in a Harpo Marx wig, and his only evolution (once the wig disappears) is to resemble the over-the-top mime artist Lindsay Kemp.

Just about every opportunity the play offers for Richard to grow, show some depth or attract our sympathy is missed or immediately undercut by camping it up. The one exception is the abdication scene, where Slinger's Richard does manage to hold the moral high ground, and our sympathy, for more than a few moments.

Clive Wood's Henry, on the other hand, is underplayed and under-characterised to the point of near-invisibility. A central question of the play is how early Henry has his eye on the crown, and differing decisions on that point can colour whole scenes differently. But Wood's Henry never actually seems to make the decision.

The most that can be said of him is that he is intelligent enough to realise that, once virtually everyone in England has rallied around him, a de facto revolution has already happened and he would be foolish not to ride along with it. (Jonathan Slinger makes Richard equally aware of the realpolitik, one of the strengths that makes his abdication scene work.)

But while that is a legitimate interpretation, it is not a particularly dramatic one, making Henry an entirely passive figure. We may have to wait for the next plays in the cycle to see if that sense of Henry falling into kingship almost by accident is developed further.

There are nice performances by Roger Watkins as John of Gaunt and Richard Cordery as York, both playing the older men with more energy and anger than they usually get.

No one else in the cast registers, and there are a couple of very silly staging effects - a duel on imaginary flying horses and a piano that descends from the flies, complete with pianist, only to rise up again moments later.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - Richard II - RSC Pit 2001
Review - Richard II - Old Vic 2005
Review - Richard II - RSC Roundhouse 2008